Unfortunately, I also did not meet projects where you could earn coins by playing from scratch, all the projects that I saw require initial investments and write like a lottery without the ability to grind, farm coins by playing the games themselves. If there is information about such projects where you can raise money from scratch without investments, write)
As I write this post, the
Galactic Milieu still has
one "rabbit hole" into it that is still "free as in beer": you can right now use a
Crossfire RPG client to enter the Milieu free.
How long that can remain the case is unknown, because at any time some griefer(s) could abuse the ability to do that, which could eventually lead to having to close new player registration entirely or put it behind some kind of abuse-discouragement "wall".
Note that for unknown reasons the Crossfire RPG metaserver the clients contact to get a list of currently-online servers available to connect to often fails to list the Milieu's server(s); so you might need to manually tell your client to connect to CrossCiv.knotwork.com
Even the Crossfire RPG interface to the Milieu has the game-economy problem of creating something out of nothing; the characters themselves spring into existence without any parents having been "bred", their starting gear has no provenance other than being a "gift of the gods" given to them out of nothing and so on.
Thus obviously larger scale interfaces, such as FreeCiv or even CoffeeMUD (in which a player account can run five 24/7 scripted artisans producing stuff by mining, farming, foraging, smithing, shipbuilding etc etc etc) would be even more problematic to the game economy if people could just create them free on demand.
Even as you read this post, ,some griefer could also be reading it and jump on over to trash this last remaining opportunity to get in for free, so act accordingly, which of course if you happen yourself to be the griefer in question kind of makes me wonder whether posting this is even a good idea...
-MarkM-