The Eggware Social Club

Hi I don't play SS13 much these days but the thread remains open for it in case any other users play it and want to talk about it. I primarily play SS14!

What is Space Station 13 and 14

Space Station 13 (and its successor, Space Station 14) is a multiplayer roleplay / job simulation / disaster survival game. It's a little hard to describe! Everything takes place as a round that generally lasts 1-3 hours, though you can join or exit the round at any time in the shift. Almost all servers have some level of roleplay to it, with some servers being on the lower end (more wacky gameplay hijinks) and some being on the higher end (establishing characters and relationships and arcs across many rounds).

The gist is that you are one crew member on board a space station, alongside all the other players in the game, spread across multiple departments. For the most part, your only goals are to do your job and keep the station running. You might be an engineer, a doctor, a chef, a security officer, a scientist... there's a lot of roles you can take up. However, due to ramping events and enemy activity, inevitably the station will become uninhabitable, prompting an evacuation (which ends the round).

SS13 is quite well-known for its mechanical complexity and dynamic systems, but each player is only going to interact with a small slice of these mechanics. For example, say you are an engineer, so your job is to set up an engine to generate power, and fix structural damage to the station when it arises.

• You might need to talk to the Cargo department to acquire materials or extra power generators (like solar panels).
• The Science department can research upgraded tools that you can ask for, or they might call Engineering over the radio to provide them with atmospheric gases.
• Maybe you get attacked while repairing cable networks, and you have to get wheeled over to the Medical department for revival.

It's also open-source, and each server of the game is a self-contained copy of the game's entire code. This means, between different servers, you might play the same game with different mechanics and content. In fact, some people have done crazy total conversion work for SS13/14, turning the game from a space station survival simulator to, among other things: a "marines vs. xenomorphs" team PVP gamemode, a dark fantasy kingdom roleplaying game, an MMO-esque space exploration game where everyone's split into dozens of small crews on little spaceships, and a recreation of Lobotomy Corporation using SS13 mechanics.

Space Station 13 is hosted on the BYOND game engine, and the SS13 server browser is found in the BYOND launcher. It's been going strong since 2003. BYOND is notable for how fucking old and kinda shitty it is (the launcher is NOT malware despite how it looks), but SS13 is also quite iconic and mechanically rich. Mind the learning curve, however.

Me personally, I started playing Space Station 13 all the way back in 2016, and started playing SS14 mid-last year. I can well and truly describe it as a Major Special Interest of mine. I nolife the shit out of SS14 here check this out.

Seriously, I recommend it!! It can sound daunting for people because it's very much a Social Multiplayer game, and it's got a lot of mechanics to it, but a vast majority of the people I've met on these games are happy to teach new players. They're all very much aware that their favorite game is crazy complicated, and the fact most servers are updating nearly daily means they're also in a continuous process of learning more about the game.

Space Station 13's servers are a real mixed bag, but Goonstation was the one I started with and from what it sounds like, they're just as light-hearted, newbie-friendly, and not-bigoted as ever. I used to be an active regular there.

On Space Station 14, most people start with the Wizard's Den servers, the officially-hosted SS14 servers. They very much expect a lot of newbie players coming into the game through them, so they're happy to teach. If you can't get in, or you want something a little more RP-ish / less gameplay-ish, I would recommend the Delta-V servers, which have some fun mechanics like psionics and more species. I've also heard people recommend Funky Station or Goobstation.

I will use this thread to discuss the game and post stories of funny round happenings

Long Egg is my channel where I do caption-commentated longplays.

I've been lagging behind in everything because of life circumstances but I just queued up the rest of Piglet's Big Game (finally moving that over from my main channel) and I thought I might make a thread for posting about it as I go.

Playthroughs I have to edit right now:

• Corn Kidz 64

• Look Outside
  
• Cattails 1
  

Reposts in the queue:

• Piglet's Big Game

• The dinosaur games I played during the Summer of Dinosaurs
  
• Some Sonic Adventure videos
  

I was hoping to have a bit more ready for October/spookyseason but that ship might be sailed unless I take a hard pivot now. Idk. At least Look Outside counts.

I wanted to revive this monstrosity in some capacity...

Just post two or three lines pushing along the action. Emphasis on making it funny and bizarre. You do not have to keep it FreeSpace related. I just wanted it to start like the classic. 

One day Admiral Bosch woke up on the NTF Iceni to the sight of King St Bee!  Who suddenly began to...

This is my thread compiling my ongoing efforts to amuse King Skarl and King Hagan.

King Skarl when he sees me walking into the room

Jokes

Q: "What do you get a loyal Selket unlike paying a visit with The Esophagor?"
A: "A wand of striped Krawkadon scarab diaries!"
923/1000 and a Bowl of Yuck

Q: " will you call Dr Sloth?"
A: "You shouldn't !"
154/1000

Q: "How can you stop ?"
A: "You can't a !"
612/1000

Q: "How do you call upon Cheat!?"
A: "By offering him a pile of green green burger s!"
696/1000 and a Chicken Leg Surprise

Q: "When shouldn't you trust a blueberry ?"
A: "When it's a bag of blueberry Cherryberry berry berries!"
408/1000

Q: "What should you call an Aisha that has eaten too much streaky bacon?"
A: "A streaky meatball !"
I forgot to save the score but I did not get a laugh.

Q: "What is another name for a friendly ?"
A: "A happiness sweetie !"
261/1000

Q: "What are you do if you're a Poogle in the Poogle Races?"
A: " a furry car !"
390/1000

Q: "What would you get a a bad case of Floppy Tongue?"
A: " the ultimate lollypop !"
213/1000

Q: "What does the Kiko say to Cheat!?"
A: "You a green ball !"
571/1000

Wisdom

"You can do a lot worse than an avocado"
931/1000 and a Mote Encyclopedia

"A wise friend once told me that a friend is like a friendly"
852/1000

"It's a sad day when you can no longer trust the Rock"
161/1000

"I've always said that a friend is like a green Abominable Snowball"
358/1000

The time is upon us that I must play the spooky scary video games. Leave me suggestions and you may see them eventually.

post ideas

post your dreams here

There's never really not something taking hobbyist collectors by storm these days, and it's certainly not a new phenomenon; we all remember the Beanie Babies craze. But right now the current thing (though honestly it's probably already losing steam) is the Labubu.

"Labubu" actually refers to a lot of different toys and artwork, being the name of a fictional species of little rabbit-eared monsters designed by Hong Kong storybook illustrator Kasing Lung. Of course, the actual Labubu craze pretty much always refers to a specific toy version by Pop Mart, which is pictured above as being fuzzy little plush figurines with plastic faces, feet, hands and ears. These toys are all very similar because, you guessed it, they're figurines from blind boxes!! Yay!!!!!! Blind boxes!!! Yay!!!!!!!!!!!

Lung first partnered with Pop Mart in 2019 and seems to have been making Lababu toys for the past 5 or so years with much success, but it seems like now in 2025 the line has hit a sweet spot of #Trending to an extent that news outlets like NPR are covering the spike in popularity. Another point of comparison, the subreddit r/labubu has 140K members and is in the top 2% largest reddit communities. It's very interesting how reddit has recently if not always become a space where people come together on trends; the Gamestop stock frenzy being a famous example, but on the less financially exciting side, there's a lot of subreddits dedicated to a kind of toy or plush where people, naturally as fans of the items, will hype each other up about their purchases and talk excitedly about what they're hoping to snag in the future.

The NPR article ends on this note:

Quote:The concept of blind boxes isn't new. It taps into a long-standing fascination with mystery and chance, according to Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, a curator at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y.
Think back to cereal box prizes, capsule toys from vending machines, or Japan's lucky bags, which are sealed bags filled with random items as a way for retailers to get rid of leftover stock, Parnett-Dwyer said. Even trading cards, such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh, offer a similar thrill.
" I think there's a lot of things where the popularity among adults or young adults stems from childhood nostalgia," Parnett-Dwyer said.
She added that reconnecting with your inner child is ultimately a positive thing.
" I think play is crucial for everybody at all ages. It helps us to engage with each other. It helps us in a way — it's a cliché — but it helps us to stay young," she said.

...which is kind of dismal if you really think about it, right? Gambling is so normalized in children's entertainment and toys that buying blind boxes can be called "connecting with your inner child" with a straight face. But it's not just puffy journalism to bowtie the article; many labubu fans (and toy fans in general) are in agreement that their purchases are in the name of childhood and self-care. Here's quote made just today by a top 1% commenter on r/labubu:

Quote:Healing our inner child one plushie at a time 

(This is a not completely invalid angle; people making up for lost time during childhood is nothing to sneeze at, and it's not like collectors are nuts for spending money on something that makes them happy. But what happens if the fad dies off and it turns out you didn't care that much about them when there wasn't someone on reddit to talk to about it? Is that still worth it? I'll get back to that in a second.)

Interestingly, if the reddit post I drew this comment from is a reliable sample size, a lot of current Labubu collectors are in the 27-45 year old age range, with many being around the middle at 35. Amusingly a lot of comments remark that the age demographic trends older because younger adults or teens would be too worried about seeming childish by purchasing these, but I actually think that these dolls (at least in appearance) are targeting younger adult audiences who...like cute things. I don't think there's actually that much of a stigma around purchasing these? Maybe they're right, but maybe they're also not acknowledging the fact that younger people might be slightly more concerned with saving for various costs of living over dolls. But still, reddit's userbase is certainly not the whole picture, so we can only speculate.

Now might be a good place to mention the cost of these things; one blind box of a random 6" Labubu figure is $27.99 USD (not including tax and shipping, of course). That's if you can order them though; at time of writing nearly every single Labubu product on Pop Mart's website is sold out, and the ones that aren't must be purchased specifically through Pop Mart's weird app, or through some sort of strange lottery on their site...? Just watch this youtube short and tell me if you can tell what the hell is happening and why this poor girl spent an hour swiping on a blind box page. There are multiple people in the comments on this one saying they spent hours trying to will an available Labubu into existence just so they could throw their money at it, to no avail. So what do you do if you can't get a Labubu? You buy one from a reseller! ....Who are, from some reddit anecdotes and some eBay/Mercari doublechecking, reselling blind boxes at an extra markup of $10 to $50, and selling the actual specific variants for at minimum $100 apiece. Or you could just snag one of the $15 ones, assuming of course that they or even the extremely pricey ones aren't a dreaded Lafufu, the name given to unofficial Labubu knockoffs. Funnily enough, if you aren't dedicated to having a "real" one, even fans agree that the knockoff ones can be pretty nice quality, and some bemoan that true Labubus often have arms too small for the little outfits that fans often like to customize their dolls with.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and act like I don't understand why these are popular. It is, as a matter of fact, fun to gamble. Just looking at the listings for the Labubu dolls I could feel the specter of the hunt claw at my brain. There's a secret toy you can get from this set and its only a 1/72 chance...? That doesn't sound too rare, actually... And I mean, they are kinda cute.........
But the real problem with blind boxes like these is that they often only have substance in the thrill before the reveal. Once you have what's inside and know what it is, that's gone. And you got something...well... I mean you don't hate it, but it probably wasn't what you wanted the most out of that set, right? Good reason to buy a few more, right? Hahahahahahahahahha. Mhm. I know at least from experience that when a blind box figurine is out of the box, it goes on the bedside table and then it falls off the bedside table and then it becomes beautiful fodder for the floor mites under my bed. 
If the reward at the end of this gamble is more stuff you don't have room for and 30 less dollars in your pocket, is that really worth the momentary surprise? I dunno...not for me. But maybe in a couple decades they'll be selling bins of these stuff in the antique toy store for like 5 dollars apiece and I'll pick out one I really like and get it then. I can wait....I can wait. In the meantime, it's always nice to remember that when you can't get what you want, sometimes you can just make it yourself, even when it comes to Labubu.

Though one fad that definitely won't go away anytime soon is card collecting--did you SEE how much those Pokemon Prismatic Evolution cards were reselling for?!? Even the base price? $62 for a 9 card pack set! Those ain't for kid collectors I can tell ya that much...whew!

I've been doing the Vox crossword for a good few years but as soon as I heard of Puzzmo I hopped on. It's been my daily driver ever since.

Puzzmo has crossword, chess, two sudoku variants, and a lot of games I'd be doing a disservice to describe. If you like word-focused games, it's good. And it's not bullshit like the NYT.

Here's my profile:
https://www.puzzmo.com/user/nx/brilokuloj

I also have the Lisa Hanawalt card deck. It's gorgeous.