- For the discs John Egbert and his friends spend Acts 1-4 searching for, see Sburb.
The "game" Homestuck comes on two discs, covering Acts 1 to 5 and then the End of Act 5 through to Act 6 Intermission 5, with Act 6 Act 6 onward available as an expansion pack on a supercartridge
.
History[]
Discs 1 and 2[]
The captchalogue cards containing Homestuck's discs fit into a folio resembling the strife portfolio. This folio was stored safely in a chest in the A2 session's Veil at some point during the runtime of disc 1; disc 2, however, was removed and hidden inside the sleeve of Eddie Morton's 'Midnight Crew'.
The first disc of Homestuck, covering years 1 and 2 (4/13/2009 - 4/13/2011), ends after Terezi Pyrope discovers the body of Nepeta Leijon, and heads north through a door in pursuit of the perpetrator, prompting the insertion of disc 2. Thanks to its unconventional nature as a game, Homestuck is thankfully able to continue running without the second disc, but no player input is accepted.
When Terezi does find the second disc, which closely resembles the Land of Heat and Clockwork's scratch construct in miniature, she mistakes it for a record and attempts to play it in the meteor's phonograph. Perhaps predictably, the needle creates a scratch in the disc's surface, complete with a miniature leak of temporal energy.[image?] When disc 2 is entered, the scratch causes problems in its running, and it catches in the middle of Seer: Ascend. Again, the player is prevented from giving input, and as glitches in the game reach a peak, it becomes apparently that the dÎsc is tø€ badly da™aged to play Homeµ&uck at all, and you arñ forzød to quit£² necessitating the services of a scratch doctor.
Scratch teleports the disc within himself and promises to tell the remainder of the story as he repairs it in time for the Critical Event and “The Scratch itself.” When Andrew Hussie wrestles the scratch doctor to the ground and retrieves the disc, however, he observes that Scratch “had the disc repaired for a while already, but didn't tell us.” The insertion of the repaired disc kicks back off the ending of Act 5, beginning with a “rare and highly dangerous 5x SHOWDOWN COMBO.”
Disc 3 and supercartridge[]
The end of Homestuck's fourth year (4/13/2013) signals the end of Act 6 Intermission 5 and the conclusion of disc 2's content, with the disc folio indicating that Act 7 is to follow. This lapse in content, however, allows Caliborn the opportunity to begin his own phony "disc 3" before Act 7 can begin, taking over the narrative completely and beginning the first part of Homosuck.
To counter this, Hussie introduces the Act 6 Act 6 Supercartridge Expansion Pack - resembling a modus cartridge in shape - with the express purpose of delaying Act 7 and forcing Caliborn to "[muddle] through six new sub-sub-acts of infantile "subversive parody targeting the very tale he inhabits", while the reader and protagonists "privately return to the narrative between his miserable tirades".
Though seemingly a sham to distract Caliborn with, it does add various “exciting new gameplay features” to Homestuck, including boundary-breaking Flash animations and slick animated character select screens. Glitches once again become a problem in Homestuck, however, when Caliborn fills the cartridge with special stardust and candy corn, greatly hampering the reader and characters' enjoyment of these new features.[image?] Continuing for a bit under a thousand pages, these glitches are ultimately rectified when John Egbert blows on the cartridge from the inside[image?] and Lil Seb plugs it back in. According to Homestuck's story map, the contents of this cleaned cartridge continue right through to the Credits.
Speculation[]
Temporal energy leaking from a crack in Dave Strider's disc-like scratch construct.
While the resemblance between disc 2 of Homestuck and the device used to scratch Universe A is not literal, it is symbolically significant. Doc Scratch's role as a "scratch doctor" has a dual meaning; while fixing the damaged second disc is just one of his jobs, his primary purpose in Lord English's plan was to rewrite everything in Alternia's history after the scratch. In essence, he "doctors scratches" in more ways than one. It might also be questioned whether Scratch is a person who could be trusted to repair such an important artifact; it could well be, for example, that the whole time he was in possession of the disc, he was papering over the cracks with his “troll fanfiction” just as he did as the author of Alternia's history.
Hussie's plan to trap Caliborn in a spiral of endlessly smaller and smaller sub-acts using the expansion pack while the protagonists escape to better things seemingly foreshadows Lord English's ultimate defeat, being sucked into a black hole to face an ambiguous fate while John Egbert and his friends leave canon entirely to live in their new universe.