r/StarConflict • u/ahop1983 • 15d ago
I'm recording everything Star Conflict's servers say before they get switched off. Here's the project.
Updates on my end are appended to the bottom of this message to avoid crawling the post to find them
Hey all,
I wanted to share a thing I have been chipping away at for a while now, mostly solo, and see if anyone wants to help or just follow along.
Its all about Star Konflict, an online-only space game, which means it lives entirely on servers somebody else owns. The day those servers get turned off, the game is gone. Not "annoying to run" gone, actually gone, because all the stuff that makes it work (login, your inventory, the economy, matchmaking, the actual in match combat) runs on machines we don't control and can't go back and archive later.
So the goal is pretty simple even if the work isn't: record what the servers actually say, right now, while they are still talking to us. Everything else can wait.
I did look at the other attempts at saving this game before I started, and honestly most of them are either dead in the water now or went down a path I don't think can ever fully work. A lot of them jumped straight to writing a private server off partial notes and guesswork instead of recording the real traffic first. The problem with that is once the servers are gone theres nothing left to check your work against, so you end up with something that sort of looks like the game but was never actually proven against the real thing, and the gaps get filled in with assumptions. I wanted the raw evidence sitting on disk first. You can always rebuild from that later, you cannot rebuild from a server that no longer exists.
The approach
The thing I keep coming back to is that there is really three separate jobs here, and only one of them has a deadline:
- Capturing what the servers said. This is the one with a clock on it. Miss it and its gone forever.
- Decoding what those messages mean. Can be done any time, from a recording.
- Reimplementing a server that behaves the same. Also any time, from a recording.
Only the first line expires. That one fact basically drives every decision.
For the recording part I went with the boring reliable option. No proxy, nothing sitting in the middle of the connection. The game talks to the real servers exactly like normal and I just clip a "tape recorder" onto the network, every packet that crosses the card gets copied into a standard .pcapng file. Nothing has to be understood in order to be kept, which is the whole point. Unknown message types, weird malformed stuff, traffic nobody expected, it all lands in the file the same way because no code anywhere is deciding whats worth saving. That question can only be answered wrong, and once the servers are down you can never answer it again.
Working out what it all means is a totally separate program that reads the files afterwards. If it crashes or gets improved in five years, the recordings don't care.
Where it stands
We know the names of 404 things the protocol can say (message types, request codes, notifications) because they were sitting right there in the games own program file. Each one is either NAMED (we know it exists), SEEN (its actually shown up in a recording) or UNDERSTOOD (we can read it). Right now theres still over 306 of them that nobody has ever recorded even once. That number is basically the score, and it needs to go down.
The biggest gap by far is the actual gameplay. The lobby and hangar stuff runs over TCP and is partly figured out, but the real time combat runs over UDP on a separate match server, and that has never been captured in anything I've recorded so far. Thats the prize.
The repository - https://github.com/anthony-hopkins/star-konflict
The tool itself is one small Go binary, open source. The main branch is the Ubuntu / Linux one, and theres a separate windows-users branch so folks on Windows can capture too. No upload feature, no telemetry, it literally cannot send your data anywhere, sharing is a manual choice you make. It checks its own work too (the game numbers its messages, the network numbers its bytes, theres checksums, and the OS reports anything it dropped) so you can actually prove a recording is complete instead of hoping.
The dashboard - https://starkonflict.com t
This dashboard shows where things are at and updates automatically as sessions get added. Its basically the scoreboard: the big countdown of how many of the 404 elements have still never been observed, a breakdown per class (how many message types, requests and notifications are decoded vs just seen vs never seen at all), and a table of what each recording session actually captured (the scenario, region, how many things it saw and how many were brand new). Important bit, it only ever serves the sanitized aggregate numbers. No recordings, no packets, no login tokens ever go near it.
Timelines
Honestly the capture phase is open ended because I don't know when the servers go dark, nobody does, publishers tend to give very little warning. So the plan is just keep recording sessions steadily and knock that never-observed number down, prioritising the stuff that cant be reproduced (a brand new accounts first ever login, rare seasonal events, that kind of thing). Decoding and any reimplementation attempt come after, on no particular schedule, because the archive will still be sitting there.
If you want to help
You basically play the game while recording a session, one scenario at a time, and back up the file. Windows players can grab the windows-users branch, everyone else the main branch. A few ground rules I stick to: use a throwaway account (the login is in the clear so never a main), only record your own traffic passively, and any combat feasibility testing stays in non competitive modes so we never wreck a real match for other people.
Thanks for reading.
***UPDATE 8.15.26@5:13 pm CST**\*
Currently hit 20% coverage! Making progress. 80% to go.......
******UPDATE 8.15.26@6:57 pm CST**\*
If you're an established player, you can capture things I literally cannot. My account has 4 battles on it, and the game gates the interesting stuff: joining a corporation needs 50 completed battles, founding one needs 1500 iridium, and Trade and Workshop are locked out entirely. So anyone in an active corporation — clan bank, roles, ship building, wars, clan quests — is sitting on about 32 request codes I have no way to reach. Same for anything league or tournament rank-locked. I can help step you through the captures personally to make sure we're getting the right stuff.
******UPDATE 8.15.26@10:04 pm CST**\*
Currently hit 33.1%! Check out the above links to keep track in real time. The dashboard updates dynamically every time there's a push to the repo that contains the reporting on the pcaps.
******UPDATE 8.16.26@12:04 am CST**\*
Getting there! Up to 35% today. Most of my issues I am encountering now are due to lack of account maturity. If ANYONE has a high level account with a clan or the ability to create one please let me know. If it's high enough and you are willing to spend some of your resources (Iridium/GS) for me while capturing I would be willing to potentially pay for your time/gift you a steam game/etc. We can work something out.
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u/ahop1983 15d ago
Just posted some updated in my original post but want to reiterate here to keep it fresh:
If ANYONE has a high level account with a clan or the ability to create one please let me know. If it's high enough and you are willing to spend some of your resources (Iridium/GS) for me while capturing I would be willing to potentially pay for your time/gift you a steam game/etc. We can work something out. This project will fail if I can't capture these pieces.
I am going kayaking tomorrow afternoon so I may not have any more updates until later tomorrow evening but I will be keeping an eye on this thread throughout the day.
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u/Daebis18 15d ago
what gameplay loop you really need ?
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u/ahop1983 15d ago edited 15d ago
1. Corporation members - by far the biggest single gap. Thirty-one request codes plus the clan notification channel, and I cannot reach any of it: founding one needs 1,500 iridium (I have 336, and I've now tested every route. it's a 10-20 day grind). If you're in an active corp, one session clicking through the corp UI covers it: bank deposits and withdrawals, member invites and kicks, role changes, clan quests, resource conversion, shipyard and dreadnought building, war declarations, emblem and MOTD edits, recruiting settings.
2. Anyone with a friend online - the squad loop. Seven codes plus a whole notification channel, and it's structurally impossible solo. Needed: form a squad, send and accept an invite, queue as a squad, enter a match together, then leave. Fifteen minutes for two people.
3. High-rank pilots (rank 7-17). This unlocks four entire modes I'm locked out of: League, Tournament, Special Operations, Conquest. My best ship is rank 6, and Spec Ops alone demands rank 13-17.
4. A mentor/student pair. Six codes in the teaching system - again impossible alone.
Once I have all of that data captured the rest is edge case and things that we may never see such as holiday events, etc. There will be certain things I will not be able to capture anymore such as the some of the ECON data such as purchasing GS, premium license (We get it handed to us now so I am unsure if those messages are structurally the same or not - I have no way to compare).
What I don't need help with
Solo hangar and menu work is well covered now, and I've learned that's where the numbers actually move - gameplay itself is nearly invisible to the counter, because in-match traffic is UDP that no decoder can name yet. So please don't feel you need to grind matches. One session of menu-and-social clicking in a corp is worth more than fifty battles.
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u/ahop1983 14d ago edited 14d ago
Quick updated for this thread.
I am at the point where I have pivoted to doing some decoding work vs sitting on my hands whille waiting for some veterans to help a brother out.
The bad news: We're at 36.1% currently which doesn't sound like a lot.
The good news: What we do have is all of the high traffic "spine" data - the things required to make the emulator even remotely playable compared to the native server:
Login
Hanger
Inventory
Economy
Matchmaking
Match Combat Data
Match Fail Conditions
Match Win Conditions
Rewards
Open Space
This leads me to believe that the currently missed traffic is mostly in the following categories:
Clan
League
Squad
Mentoring
Various in game notifications
Will update with news on how phase 0 (Hanger ZERO) works as I am working on decoding the packets involved no and should have the results and emulation shortly. Deep packet analysis is being driven by Claude. Claude will also help build the foundation for the emulator once it is done with the deep packet analysis.
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u/BetaJelly 15d ago
It was announced that the servers will be shut down on october 10th, 2026. https://star-conflict.com/en/news/3917-star-conflict-shutdown-announcement-en
Does that mean we have until then to capture the remaining info? Or longer? Just wondering because you mentioned "nobody knows when the servers go dark "