Fun fact about Vanderlin and the history of it’s code while it was used in older servers like Blackstone. All the medieval code was just placed on top of the TG code without removing any of it. The game was constantly trying to land the shuttle when it didn’t exist lol. It’s why the Blackstone server was probably having issues with performance.
Some of the coders for vanderlin were talking about all that yesterday on the MonkeStation discord.
Really can’t wait till the server is up again. Going to definitely post a link to it here later when they have it up again.
I’ve never played but it looked interesting to me so I did some research. All of this is open to fact checks.
It’s a sandbox game where you’re on a space station* an have some specific job to do, to keep the station running (or sometimes, to cause a little chaos for other players to deal with). Some people are security, some are engineers, some are medical officers, some are cooks, all (or most) are trying to keep the station going. Sometimes they’re an additional overarching goal, but usually it’s just “survive the treacherous space climate”.
It’s not really an MMO because it’s pretty small. “Massive” doesn’t really apply. And it doesn’t fit most tropes you’d associate with MMOs. There’s not really a persistent world, the game happens in rounds rather than an always-on server. It seems kind of like Among Us meets Dwarf Fortress.
*The code is “semi open source” (read: got hacked and leaked a couple of times) so there are a many modded servers as vanilla (there seems to be some debate over what “vanilla” even means for this game). So they aren’t always on a space station, but typically about maintaining SOME kind of colony.
That’s a good synopsis of the game. Nothing wrong that I notice. Glad it doesn’t have persistent world as the station is normally destroyed by the end of the round lol.
Players can also be picked to be an antagonist for the round. It’ll be something like a traitor who has to kill other players or steal a specific item. You can also get picked for something else like a cultist that has to secretly/forcibly convert the rest of the station before they get caught. Or you can just straight up be a xenomorph and relive the alien franchise by making more of you out of the stations workers lol.
No two rounds are alike.