Sburb



Sburb is a sandbox-style game that takes place superimposed over the real world, rather than in a virtual space. The Server player is able to manipulate the Client's environment in real time in a manner reminiscent of The Sims. The Client of the game has no need to interact with the computer and can freely roam around completing objectives (except if the client wants to operate GristTorrent). Actions available to the Server player include being able to build rooms, add on to existing rooms, deploy game objects such as the Totem Lathe, and manipulate objects in the Client's environment. However, the Server cannot operate outside of a certain radius of the Client. Furthermore, the Server's actions are limited by the Client's supply of Build Grist. Further applications will likely be revealed over time. John lost his server disk when Rose lost connection and dropped the Car down onto the Land of Wind and Shade. However, John eventually recovers it.

Each new client-server connection generates a unique session of the game that is apparently independent of all other sessions, unless a daisy-chain of connections is formed with existing players. The exact number of connections varies depending on the length of the daisy chain in question, though the minimum number of players is two. Each session has been hard-wired to support its final player count from the start, because Sburb cares nothing for the concept of chronology. GristTorrent supports this, displaying three players online and one offline, though it may have inferred that she will install the Client from the fact that she is already running the Server.

The Sburb Logo
Sburb's distinctive logo on Earth is a neon-green silhouette of a simple house, broken into seven pieces. Animated representations of the logo (see below) have the house disassemble and reassemble, with the smallest part spinning back and forth in between. The Sburb logo made a couple of appearances in the beta version of Homestuck's interface. An animated version of the logo (see above) appears on the preloader for animated pages (and continues to do so for many pages in the game proper). Another version of the logo, also animated but lacking its roof, signified clickable hotspots.

The Spirograph is another logo associated with Sburb, and also appears on page preloaders and in various locations associated with the game or with the Medium. The House logo appears on the Client disc, while the Spirograph appears on the Server disc.

Sburb Discs
The Sburb Discs have been of great importance to the story ever since John started playing Sburb. Initially, there were 8 discs in total, 4 server discs and 4 client discs, 1 of each for each of the four kids, except Jade who uses Dave's discs, while Dave uses the discs belonging to his Bro. Dave eventually alchemized himself another copy of his server disc, using the Intellibeam Laserstation to extract the code, in order to become another server to Jade while John was busy.

Almost all of the Sburb discs have gone through some kind of journey. It took John five acts to get his copy of the server disc.

John's Client and Server copies arrive on the day of release, three days after the Beta was launched. John's Dad gets the client copy from the mail, and leaves the server copy in his Car. John has to Strife with his Dad in order to install the client version. The Server version, however, has gone on a lengthy journey, with the car being dropped down into the Land of Wind and Shade, being picked up by the Authority Regulator, getting tracked down by the Parcel Mistress, and getting put into a Parcel Pyxis. After being dropped of in LOWAS, however, the disk was ejected from the Pyxis, and John finally has the server disc.

Rose is an exception, as both the Client and the Server discs were never lost, and she simply had access to them from the beginning of the story.

Dave also had issues with retrieving his discs. After spilling apple juice upon them, Dave hung them up to dry, only to send them flying out of the window when he threw a sword at an encroaching crow, sending these flying out onto a building below. Instead Dave sourced his copy of the discs from his Bro by battling him in a display of their mad skills. After Dave installs his Bro's copies, Jade retrieved his original copies from his roof and gave them back. They were later stolen by the Draconian Dignitary.

It is these (Dave's) discs that turn up within the Frog Temple. When Jade enters the Frog Temple and the Lotus Time Capsule blooms, it reveals Dave's original discs. It is revealed that the Draconian Dignitary discarded Dave's juice-stained discs, at which point they landed in the Lotus Flower.

So, this means that John is using his Client Disc, and has retrieved the Server. Rose's discs are her own possession. Dave's discs are with Jade after the Draconian Dignitary tossed them into the Lotus Flower, and Jade located them. Dave's Bro's discs are in Dave's possession now.

Purpose
Sburb appears to have no description or instructions regarding its true objective. However, as John and Rose continue to meddle with the game, John discovers a Meteor barreling toward his house after creating the Kernelsprite. The sobering reality hits Rose as she discovers that Sburb is a game that destroys the world. It's able to do this because the players enter The Medium to escape from the meteors it calls down, which it's able to call down because the players entered the Medium.

Jade Harley was the first character to witness this phenomenon, as she heard a loud crash outside her house, but did not or was unable to notify John of what happened.

The game Sburb is being played by many people, each one of them unknowingly the target of their own meteor, each one of them being oblivious to previous players' experience, each one of them being annihilated individually yet collectively, every one of them victim of destruction on a massive yet undetermined scale, leveling entire cities and towns.

If the player is successful in retrieving and damaging in some way his or her unique Cruxite Artifact (such as John's Cruxite Apple) before the meteor hits, the impacted area is excised from the physical plane - leaving only a deserted wasteland in its place. This is the process that sends the player to their planet within the Incipisphere - where the real game begins.

Electrical power still seems to be available in John's house when it is excised and sent to the Medium, though the source of this power is unclear. Apparently fumbling about in a dark house while trying to complete game objectives would not be within the intended spirit of the game.

Through exposition from their Kernelsprites, the players learn the objective of the game. The player must build using Build Grist to pass through the gates to get to Skaia, where, ultimately, a battle of Good and Evil is being waged, and the players have opened up what was a supposed eternal stalemate now into an all out war that evil always wins. When the villains win, the Black King calls down meteors to destroy Skaia, which protects itself by teleporting them to the host planet, destroying it in the process. The players must stop the meteors before the defense portals fail and Skaia is destroyed.

The game comes in multiple phases: climbing through The Seven Gates, defeating the Denizens, The Ultimate Alchemy, and the Reckoning (up to and including the final confrontation with the Black King and Queen), to name a few. The Trolls' session offers a brief glimpse of the end of a Sburb session (or, in their case, a Sgrub session): A massive upright Sburb logo with a mysterious door, which leads to the reward for their efforts. However, they are interrupted by The Rift before claiming it. This reward was stated to be entry to a new universe which they had created - the Kids' universe.

Thus it is revealed (and explicitly confirmed by Andrew) that the ultimate purpose of Sburb is as a method of procreation for entire universes - a single planet is sacrificed in order to create an entirely new universe (or several are sacrificed for several universes), which may themselves propagate one or more universes, and so on. Therefore, the objective of Sburb is the successful creation of a new universe, which is implied to be the nature of the Ultimate Alchemy.

Sgrub
The Trolls have an equivalent version of Sburb created by Sollux Captor based on technology found in some ruins by Aradia Megido. Sollux HS 3927 (seems to know much about the game already), including the fact that their planet, Alternia, will be destroyed if the trolls don't play it. However, Aradia was just leading him on in order to convince him to create the game. By the time Sollux realized this and deleted his copy, Karkat Vantas and Terezi Pyrope had already begun the troll's session.

Eventually, the Trolls HS 004497 (finished their session). Nevertheless, they couldn't claim their ultimate reward, and enter the Universe they created, because The Scratch (and eventually Jack Noir) stopped them from doing so. After the Trolls escaped in the Veil, Jack Noir proceed to destroy the twelve planets, Prospit and Derse before being locked in time by Aradia Megido. Thus pretty much wrecking the Sgrub session.

The Sgrub Logo
The Sgrub logo is similar to Sburb's but instead of having 4 squares, it has 12 arranged in a cross, mirroring the arrangement of windows on Alternia and the layout of the display screens used during the Midnight Crew Intermission, as well as referencing the number of the Troll kids involved in place of the 4 kids in the human session.

Sgrub Disks
There are no disks for Sgrub since Sollux simply sent the Sgrub copy he made from the Frog Temple to Karkat and Aradia, and they sent it on to the remaining Trolls.

Trivia

 * Sburb is this game that a lot of cats seem hella pumped about. According to John's official Sburb calendar, it was supposed to have gone into beta on April 10th (for reference, Homestuck begins on the same date on which the story was started, April 13th).
 * A list of the phrases that appear on the loading screen for the Sburb installer can be found here.
 * As revealed on Andrew Hussie's Blog, the author had two possible names for Homestuck in mind, "Homestuck" and "Sburb". The latter however was "a sort of deliberately ugly word reminiscent of the name of a Sim game" and also "kind of crude and really awkward to say" while Homestuck "better followed the templates of the previous adventure titles, like Jailbreak". The name Sburb only was left as the name of the game within the game. The word "Sburb" is possibly an abbreviation of the word "suburb", or may have been inspired by a movie called The Burb's starring Tom Hanks.
 * It's possible that a more bigger and complex game created the Troll's Universe and potentially every other universe. It also should be noted that the number of players might change everytime.
 * The ==> commands are infact representations of the four kids, while the ======> command represents the twelve trolls. Each "dash" represents two characters.
 * Alternia appears to have 48 HOROSCOPE SIGNS, implying that the sesson that created their universe consisted of 48 players. This is interesting to note, since 12 (The Troll's session) times 4 (The Kid's session) = 48.