Because all of the people who complain about player counts, lrp, erp servers and spinoff servers are too busy typing essays about it on here.

None of them actually want to play and "save" the game they just want live in their nostalgia and blame furries or whatever for the reason why their isn't a perfect server they like.

None of them want to hop on a low pop server. None of them want to learn to code and make updates and new content. None of them want to host a server or atleast contribute funds to do so.

The only way to get a sever to 100 pop is to be okay hopping on it when it’s <20 pop.

If you think that your server type is the best, build it and players will come. If every single person whose complained on this reddit started a discord together then maybe you could actually fill a server.

It's frankly pathetic. Especially u/Amaskingrey who apparently is the authority on what is and is not SS13 (And it apparently ends on Monke and Paradise station period). Not gonna happen tho cause people love to engage with those posts and comment mostly actually reasonable takes. But the OP's who keep bringing it up week after week are cringe, sorry.

It looks like the game undergo some player loose and whatever. I assume most of the servers are private right (since I see none of the normal servers expect paradise which looking really weird) now and I want to know how to get recruited. This is not the game I remember from four years ago.

please

When people say they want lrp, what does that actually mean?
What does lrp mean to you in your own words?

A lot of people here say they can't enjoy ss14 because it's pixel based instead of tile based. What is the reason for this? I've played ss14 and while it not being tile based is a noticeable change I don't really see how it makes the game worse. I prefer ss13 because it still has way more content and features. Ss14 has a better engine and actually lets you fly ships which is awesome but not enough to overcome the content deficit.

When/if the content gap is closed it would be hard to justify staying on ss13 but for some people the pixel based system is a no go. Why is that?

Balance, nerfs, removals... I really want to play a version where these words are nothing more than a memory

I think SS13 suffers most from its antagonist design, not because the concept itself is bad, but because the game doesn't fully commit to what an antagonist needs to be.

Dancing needs a lead and a follower. In SS13, admins are mostly absent, the HoS is purely reactionary, and antagonists are crammed into the shift just to give Security a reason to exist. But the system fails to make antagonists a true force of nature or something that can still be impactful even if played by a toddler. And it should work like that, especially since you can't practice the roles anywhere and they simply require too much skill.

The narrative of the entire shift must be created by the antagonist's overarching agenda, with regular players running their own mini agendas inside that huge bubble. The station is meant to fall, yet the shuttle gets called long before it possibly can. This creates a massive power vacuum: jobs start feeling meaningless, the crew has zero reason to unite against a common threat, and the shift slowly fades out into just another mundane RP simulator.

For those who haven't seen the announcement yet, forest2001 is officially stepping down as host of CMSS13 after an 8 year run. Anyone know why? It's understandable if they just wanted out, but the lack of clarity has me and others wondering, anyone know any details on what led to the decision or what this means for the future of CMSS13?

I understand that _RP labels are subjective and useless in group conversation.
Baystation has around five players per day.
Paradise, TG Manuel and Monke all claim to be medium-roleplay but consist of excessive clownery across all roles (OOC-humor both held up by players in-game and implemented as emotes, exploiting game mechanics in hallways every shift, every antag is called out by exact name, etc. I can't remember exactly what examples I've seen recently) where everyone does everything but play a believable character. I understand that this behavior has been bred by the game's culture and is now treated as normal, but it gets annoying when you're essentially shut down for wanting to roleplay by the majority who all equally want to be the funny guy, are only playing because LRP servers are dead, or any other reason for them to be there...
Is there a server based on a vessel where people take their positions at least as seriously as the server's documentation dictates, that isn't at a level requiring you to write in-depth emotes for every action?

It's me again, the "captain ahab" of trying to make SS13 like games. So the curse got me with ION, and we sort of avoided the curse with the followup Stationeers by pivoting it. I'm back here now with something I've been working on for a long time. Back before stationeers we actually ran "rocket station" which is immortalized as the executable name for stationeers.

What I've done is create a CM13-style game mode in my studios custom framework called BRUTAL. It takes native C# with a heavy focus on a high-performance custom interop, providing very, very efficient links with APIs like Vulkan, RakNet, Dear IMGUI, etc... The project heavily leverages unmanaged types and the "stack" (abusing the heck out of 'stackalloc' to provide steady-state garbage collection (no memory churn stutters) as well as a whole bunch of microoptimizations around collection handling. This is paired with an unusual approach to networking, one that takes a very different path from the more traditional "Quake" style networking which SS14 chose. This project is closer in line to byond itself than it is the more traditional quake-style networking.

This is going to be a bit of an essay, or even more of a manifesto - so the tldr is: If this kind of thing might be you or you know someone who would like it please check it out. I want to see how it performs with hundreds of players. So far the maximum concurrent was 50, with no issues or adverse load. The server was under less strain than stationeers dedicated servers with 5 players.

Trying it out

I own the studio (RocketWerkz) and another company for distributing (Ahwoo) and both of those I am using for this project. It works on Windows and Linux currently, have tested on mac.

AUTO UPDATER (win only for now) https://neutrino.ahwoo.com/

WIN/LINUX STANDALONE INSTALLER https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TyKh54S8ZdWjXI301vpBzpEz0FiBraUR?usp=drive_link

SERVER IP: 20.69.98.178:50000

The long manifesto for those interested

What is has

• Medical system, surgery, limbs, reagents. Full partity with CM13 + some extra stuff and changes I've added.
• Chemistry complete, all the machines, reagents, recipes.
• Cooking complete, again the machines, reagents etc...
• Weather system (rain, thunder, fog, puddles and pools with reflections)
• Time of day shadows for sprites and building shadows, light going into build windows from sun
• A lot more

Byond & SS14

I'm a hater of neither. Feel I should point out I'm one of the largest donators to byond over the years and I will continue to donate (and encourage to). I think that for some use cases you need to go very optimized and not the more general use case. I have also long not liked the "quake model for everything" multiplayer approach taken by SS14. So I don't feel this "replaces" either of those, it simply builds a more focused option for some communities. If this works then some SS13 communities will have a place in future that secures things with the latest technology.

Networking

Specifically, against named engines:

• Not the Quake/Source/Overwatch lineage (per-client delta against each client's last-acked state) which is what SS14/RobustToolbox does
• Not RTS/Factorio lockstep as despite the deterministic sim clients never run the sim; determinism is used server-side for hash-verified drift detection not synchronization
• Closest real relatives are MMO spatial interest management for the subscription model, and video streaming (RTP-style keyframe + delta + NACK repair) for the wire mechanics.

None of the sync is really necessarily novel in its parts but is in terms of its execution together. Interest management is similar to how an MMO would handle things, with the keyframe+delta+NACK is how video transport works. This has a serialize-once fan-out economy where each chunks event stream is serialized once per tick with a shared sequence number, and every subscriber gets the identical bytes. This means the per-client cost is a pointer append. The mainstream model tailors bytes per client, so cost is O(clients × visible entities) and crowds are the death case; gruntz's cost is O(dirty chunks), so crowds are the cheap case. Hundreds of players in one chunk would be a single serialization. Since crowded scenes are precisely what CM13 rounds are, the model is fitted to the genre in a way I've not seen shipped elsewhere.

Rendering

The render stack is modern Vulkan (1.3, dynamic rendering) through our own C# interop, with the core pulled directly from our work on Kitten Space Agency following the same buffer discipline, same obsession with memory: steady-state zero allocation, every per-frame GPU buffer ringed. The entire visible world renders in a few instanced draw calls; a full frame with lighting, shadows, weather and post is still only a few dozen. KSA is 3D and this is 2D, so the lighting is its own design: around a thousand dynamic lights per view, each with real shadowcasting from wall data, accumulated into an HDR plane and composited over the scene. It is HDR end to end, so fires and muzzle flashes genuinely bloom. Z-levels are stacked in the engine using CM13's own plane compositing recipe, each lower deck lit independently then depth-blurred under the top layer. The particle work (by Max, an outstanding programmer at RocketWerkz) drives the flame, smoke and impact effects and the gore is the fun trick: blood, soot and spent casings are deterministic, derived identically on every client from sim events, so a floor ankle-deep in a round's history costs zero bandwidth and nothing per frame.

What am I planning

I don't entirely know. I have worked at trying to do this kind of networking approach for so long I'd sort of forgotten what I would do with it. When we were making DayZ we moved to the 'network bubble' approach (the quake-like, same as SS14) and while it helped in some ways - it hurt in many others as I outlined above. What I really want to do now is test. I need to get a lot of clients and get metrics for how it holds up under load. So if this is your thing, or you know someone who it is - please send them the details. Post feedback, and let me know how it runs.

The game I have made (called 'gruntz') has two modes currently: Zombie Survival and Xeno Survival. They are both self explainatory. You have time to prep, you can buy gear at ATMS spread through the map. Then you survive the assaults, and try and extract. I created these PvE mode(s) because until there is a steady player pop of >50, PvP just isn't super fun. Once the pop gets there I will do more PvP tests beyond what I have now.

Team

I've been working on this on and off since the rocket station days. I've been very lucky to be able to "borrow" work from colleagues to make it, as well as having access to every sound effect the studio has made (thanks ICARUS and Stationeers). Also INFRARED_BARRON whom many of you will know is, in my opinion, one of (if not the) very best spriter in the community is commissioned to make all the sprites, and you can see some of their work. Also a massive thanks to the CM13 staff and community who have helped and supported - as well as the coderbus discord who helped and the hosters who helped supply bandwidth data during my testing. Zennith (who made the "hybrisa prospera" map) is also on board to help make maps for my game mode.

Open source? Future?

My plan is to work towards this. Currently, I just don't want to have to go through and deal with reviewing pull requests. And I am changing stuff so much, with four or five builds a day, its just too much hassle. There is some licensing work to be resolved (FMOD etc...) but this is not insurmountable. Once I have the high-water mark confirmed, I'll do some closed testing with trusted communities like CM13 and others to try their code bases out on them.

Its also been extremely refreshing for me, personally, to make a free game and one that I just want to play. Its very hardcore and being a free product I can just go "eh, sorry I just want it this way" and not feel this compulsion to change something because we will get no money. We aren't getting any money so I may as well just do things that I want?

Questions

Okay so this is much longer than I even anticipated. There will be a million questions but for now I just really need people to test! I'll try answer any below anyway.

just wanted to share some moments i had on gruntz prototype in a regular zombie survival round, this shit is INSANE

Art by CrimsonKalo, feat : my dumb gnome and john zizo and otavan

I plan on installing CachyOS with GNOME onto my laptop. Is there a confirmed way of playing SS13 on linux? I have seen some topics about it but wasn’t able to succeed when I tried it a few months ago.

We're paraback