#manually copied

          Or, my personal WildStar preservation project

In the weeks leading up to the shutdown of the WildStar servers, I went back to the game in no small part on order to finish a project I had begun not long before I stopped playing about a year before. (My playing of the game was mainly fragmental. I played quite intensely for about a month or three, then I dropped off the face of Nexus for a year or more - much like I do with my Tumblr. I think it has something to do with my whole ADHD + Aspergers deal. It makes your brain things weird and inconsistent.) It was a thing mainly for myself and a dear friend of mine, who didn’t play the game much but was in absolute love with the world and its lore, just as I was. 

This project was as simple as it was sizeable: Find and document every single Datacube in the game. This took the form of copying down the text-form content of all datacubes - from both factions - into one single text document, sorting the cubes after author. As one could not mark and copy the text from the game’s lore window, I did this manually.

I could not really look them all up on wikis either, because despite there being a total of three WildStar wikis (to my knowledge), not a single one had much of anything on any content released after the game’s initial release. This meant that quite a few cubes and their content were things that - to my then-current knowledge - I could only find in game.

This ended up being quite an undertaking, as you might imagine. Especially as one of the Arcterra cubes - from the last real story update and therefore the LEAST likely to be found outside of the game - was locked behind a 20-man event that could only trigger about once every two hours or so, within a 10-15 minute window of time. This was an event that no one played anymore.

My inability to get at this particular cube was quite frankly a key factor in why I stopped playing until this last month or so of the game’s lifespan. In hindsight, this makes me even sadder. I missed a lot. But that’s life, isn’t it.

Either way, as luck would have it, on the very first day that I returned, I asked the one person still actively playing at the time in the one circle I was part of if she happened to have it unlocked.

She wasn’t much of a lore hound. She wasn’t by any means disinterested, but it was far from her main interest with the game. But as it happened, she had it. And she was kind enough to take the time to write it down in the chat, so I could add it to my text collection.

It was, frankly, the happiest day of, like, the entire month for me, at the very least. 

And of course, not an hour later, that one event I was talking about was triggered, and people played it, and I actually got to the cube. Just perfect, no?

Still. I absolutely credit her, Aurora Azuray, for allowing me to get that one, seemingly impossibly to get cube, event be damned. 

In the end, I managed to get them all. Every single cube in the entire game, all gathered up into a single 87-page text document. And by that point, I still had about three weeks left, So I decided to go a bit further - gather all of the TALES magazines and the Secret Ops/Enigma Chamber reports as well. And I did.

And right on the very last day of WildStar, on November 28, that was when I learned of the WildStar RP community. A very, very passionate, lore-loving community. Who have already, to my knowledge, compiled all of this and more, and have for years. I gotta say, I felt a bit cheated. And not even mostly because it now felt like all of my work had been pretty much pointless - though that was certainly part of it - but because here was this big, sprawling RP community that I, as a Housing enthusiast, had been living pretty much right next door to, and would have LOVED to be part of, but I had no idea. And that.... That just sucks so much, you know?

But after all that, do you know what was the most difficult part in all of this? The most challenging part of putting together this entire collection of lore that I have now gathered, and aim to upload on AO3 as soon as I just fine-tune a few things? It was the simple fact that WildStar, being an American game, had all its lore written in American English. I’ve always been taught to write in British English. 

Do you? Have ANY IDEA?! HOW MANY TIMES!?! I HAD TO CORRECT MYSELF!?!? HOW MANY WORDS I HAD TO RE-WRITE!?!?!  ALL BECAUSE OF THAT ITTY-BITTY DETAIL!?!?! DoOOoO YooOouUU!?!?!