A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history | Hacker News Reader

A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history

arstechnica.com

388 pointsWithinReason107 comments

Yeah the long forgotten Steam release of League of Legends is also in the files (it was only available for like 5 months)

Might not be the most interesting game in the leak but old versions of live service games are almost impossible to come by

https://steamdb.info/app/20590/

Downloaded it to extract all the old assets but it still needs an encrypted depot key

>error!! -- extract: missing depot key!, pass --key if you know it though

Some people reported that "--key 0000000000000000" or "--key 0" works on some depots... well not here

> the old assets

The old version of LoL has the best aesthetic. The new art style was bad enough to get me to quit the game.

Interestingly they recently brought back the old version (I think from Season 3 or so?) as "League of Legends Classic"

I think the most interesting thing I've seen from these leaks are the Portal 2 beta content videos. The temporary time-slow mechanic and the beta voice acting have been really interesting to see. The time slow mechanic in particular could have made the game a lot more accessible to gamers with slow reflexes and refocused the game on the puzzle elements.

There is no puzzle in Portal 2 that requires fast reflexes.

My teenage self who was pretty good on the controller would disagree. Some of the puzzles required turning around midair or carefully timed shots. Also, they did use the slow-motion mechanic at the end of the game to prompt you to shoot the "killing portal"

What "fast reflexes" is will vary by person but keep in mind the average person (not necessarily the average gamer) struggles with moving the character/camera in the way they want when things are stationary with normal physics. Now try taking that to launching a portal while flying midair, maybe even on controller. I mean I got through it fine but it would have helped make 2 player a lot easier with my dad at the time.

I can't recall exactly which puzzles correspond to which game, but there are absolutely puzzles that require a decent amount of speed and dexterity. To the point where my wife got totally stuck on some because she's slow with a mouse.

Like firing portals while in midair, or catching a cube as you pass it during a jump.

Not reflexes but some do require somewhat precise timing.

I wonder if this will allow for reviving old SRCDS (Source Dedicated Server) versions.

Older versions of popular titles like Counter-Strike: Source would still be playable on their original hardware if the old clients + servers were available. As it is now, these games are no longer playable on original early-mid 2000s hardware because Steam no longer supports Win2k/XP, and even if it did, the games themselves have been heavily patched and updated over the years and have higher system requirements. Old clients still exist (even prior to "teraleak"), but the SRCDS versions are gone as far as I can tell.

I just think it'd be fun to host retro LAN parties using the hardware and software we had back then, or even just to revisit what it was like to be a server OP in those days.

v34 CSS srcds is very easy to find online

Tangential, but it's interesting to me that there are "Valve watchers", people who are big on social media for doing Valve analysis and kremlinology. Humans are so cool.

Sorry what's the link between valve and kremlin?

kremlinology is an old pre-1989 term for people trying to observe and interpret the workings of a tightly sealed institution. Could be used for Vatican rumors and news, too, for example, or North Korea, etc.

Pentagon pizza tracker?

Similar to that idea of trying to derive stuff from an indirect channel, but much more distant. (There is an obvious link between food consumption and building occupancy.)

Stuff like watching the order of names on public lists of attendees for dinner events, etc. If someone disappeared or moved off the top few names, perhaps they're in trouble or have been purged from the party ... or maybe they're just sick this week.

kremlinology is the term for any political intelligence gathering that's all second-order. In the canonical case of the Kremlin it's because it was very difficult to get inside data and even then there were so many moving parts that you needed an expert in just that area who had alot of data like who was having drinks with whom to predict who might be on the out and who might be ascendant.

>In the canonical case of the Kremlin it's because it was very difficult to get inside data

not anymore, apparently. even random ~~grifters~~ geopolitics experts on youtube now have people on the inside.

we mostly live in misinformation age

don't get fooled that only one side does that

There was one analyst reading Pravda who noticed a lot of people were suddenly being promoted into positions held by members of a certain large clique, with no notice about what was happening to the former appointees.

After one of the nuclear treaties was signed, there was a guy whose photo was published in Pravda, shaking hands with Gorbachev; a different fresh photo of him shaking hands with Gorbachev every day for an entire month. He turned out to be the head of the ministry of strategic deception.

I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

hey, no threats, please

- would be nice to see ubisoft game source codes leak for their 20 yr old games which they have completely abandoned at this point

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497110

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498002

@dang - may be combine these discussions although one has no comments yet.

"@dang" doesn't do anything; email the address in the footer if you want to propose something to a mod.

Given how often dang replies to an @dang post, he clearly has a running search for it. Expecting us to go out of band is ridiculous and won't happen.

> Given how often dang replies to an @dang post, he clearly has a running search for it

Huh how do you know somebody didn't email them the hn comment containing the @dang ?

It's not ridiculous, and it happens regularly.

This is one of the craziest "breach" stories I've come across recently, I feel like it's gone a little bit under the radar considering the size and scope.

Leak homepage: https://steam2.download/

How can they (host, domain owner) not get sued?

They probably will, that's why it's good to grab the torrent while we can.

The DHT network picked it up already so the magnet link is enough. At this point it will be available forever (as long as there are seeders)

0f3e7a75c0f885dde481054d4bcd8cd14eab51c8

Long live the resistance.

My own gaming days are over, but I am very annoyed that the big corporations killed libgen effectively (it is not entirely gone, but the old content is nowhere near as it used to be, and Anna's archive is also nowhere near as good either, unfortunately).

> but the old content is nowhere near as it used to be, and Anna's archive is also nowhere near as good either

Not sure what you mean, Anna's Archive includes all of Libgen's content

I kind of have mixed feelings about this, because from one point of view we're fighting the corporations, but from another, Valve is a major force in pushing Linux gaming so that more gaming can be done outside of big corpo operating systems.

It seems to me that fighting with Valve is like fighting against what we would want to have.

Mind you Valve has done equal amount of bad as well by inventing the whole battle pass system and thus bringing even more FOMO to games, and making unregulated gambling available to millions which is still going strong and surprisingly no one cares about it. There are some lawsuits here and there but they focus on the lootbox gacha element and not the whole gambling market running on the Steam API

Valve could shut it down any single day just by disabling trading but hey, that doesn't let you buy a 110m long superyacht (; https://www.yachtcharterfleet.com/luxury-charter-yacht-53601...

> fighting against what we would want to have

One giant megacorp with a benevolent dictator? Well, maybe you want that - but I do not. And we have a couple of examples of how it goes.

I guess a comparison would be: a megacorp invests in children in africa (schooling, money) so later they can hire them and make more money. Should we support this or resist?

If a false comparison in the first place but you/we already have a such megacorp! Sure, sure, benevolent dictator is judicially removed from the leadership for 30 years and no longer guides the megacorp in any meaningful way... but he does invest in kids in Africa.

You can have a whole one try to guess who is this.

And if you guess it right (I doubt you can answer wrong, lol) you would know a whole bunch of different reasons - including personal qualities of that "benevolent dictator" too.

NB honestly, if anything it's "his" OS what gave a lot of opportunities to the kids in the developing countries everywhere, not just Africa alone - just by providing the means to run the apps and games on almost anything. OLPC on the other hand provided an example how a specialized device made with the best intentions was a piece of shit.

A benevolent dictator who is already old and whose lifestyle-induced organ damage won't be fully undone by recent drug-assisted body changes. It's anyone's guess how things will go once Gabe passes the buck.

Valve isn't a saint. They are using Linux because it currently fits their goal and not because they are your ally.

The readme from it:

welcome to terarelease - a as-complete-as-possible steam2 content server dump

extractor howto: for the majority of depots you need to download blobs & dats for wanted version *as well as all past versions* as the files are stored as deltas inside the dat files, HOWEVER IF you encounter a depot that has duplicate blobs & dats, that means at some point in time valve did a full reset in which case you need to provide the CRC of the wanted blob (3rd file name component) to the extractor using --blobcrc, source code for the extractor is also left in this folder if you want to have a peek at it

examples: extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 852 0 | for depots w/o reset extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 841 0 --blobcrc 83ced978 | for depots that did reset

win64 build is provided, for linux you have to build it yourself as any kind of binary compatibility is inexistent except for wine (you are using linux, you should know how to build it yourself right? ...right?)

sharing: you are very much encouraged to share and mirror/seed this release as possible SHARING IS CARING

warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection <3

donos (bandwidth [ shit aint cheap :( ]/seedboxes/estrogen :D): bc1qttqxa2vrfnrs3u3tmuj7dne5j7lptxmc2cy9ah

Surely binary compatibility exists for something puny that just shuffles files?

Yeah, a fully statically linked binary that runs on every kernel would work very well for the simple terminal program use case. It's only things like GUI and GPU acceleration where you need to care at all about existing libraries on the system and even there options for binary compatibility exist.

Even for gui you can use gtk2, it's stable. Will it work?

Steam.com was for the longest time unrelated to Valve, which is why you'll find Steam under steampowered.com instead.

It's still unrelated AFAIK. From what I remember, the owner refused to sell the domain, and then eventually asked Valve for a huge fee that they refused to pay. So now the domain is just unused.

That's what happens when you name your project after someone else's domain. A usual part of starting a project now is picking an unused domain name.

Using a dictionary word for your project will never be easy, but what often happens now is to just not get the .com domain (Likely taken), or prefix with "get" and then later hope that you can time it right so that you can afford the clean .com domain...but not be famous enough that the buyer would want to get some crazy amount for it.

I really wish using random dictionary words wouldn't be so popular.

Or if you’re worth a trillion dollars you just literally buy the domain chat.com for over $15 million

Parking domains and not using them is poor taste. Finders keepers is okay compared to pay to win but if someone has a better use for the domain, maybe release it for a reasonable price?

What incentivises the domain holder to do that? Under the UDRP, parking is only not allowed if it's obviously done to screw with someone's trademark, has no other purpose, and their trademark came first.

I’m thinking idealistically, not practically

I really wish reselling would not be allowed at all by ICANN and could result in the domain being reclaimed from either the seller or buyer if discovered.

I have a theory that's what happened to my company's rebrand, they now use a 4 lettered .com domain name. Not even a word, just an abbreviation.

Valve owns s.team now, as well. That’ll bring you to the store page

It also acts as a url shortener for their hardware support pages.

s.team/deck, and s.team/machine take you to the appropriate support pages.

I will never remember that, but I could instantly remember steam.com

Steam used to be steamgames.com, too.

Likely bought with anonymous or stolen payment info.

They could also choose to just get sued - they will lose, but the site will be up until that happens (possibly years) if they don't have trigger-happy hosting provider

An injuction for an obvious infringement like this would not take years. This isn't the first leak for Valve so they probably are just taking their time to plan how to handle this rather than make rash decisions. It's not like this leak will impact their business in any significant way.

in the gaming community there's infinite amounts of cheat devs, mods, leaks like this, etc.

it's not like regular stuff where companies just sue you left and right, this stuff is hard to pursue and usually not worth it

it can get taken down but that's about it

Mods and tools that incorporate parts of games are very different from full leaks which are not as tolerated as you claim. Valve themself even tried to get the guy responsible for the previous big HL2 leak to come to the US so they could prosecute him much more harshly there. Just because they aren't acting rashly doesn't mean that they won't pursue legal options for this.

I did not know what to look for, so I looked at the list to see what is in there and had no idea what I was looking at. I am making a lot of assumptions and don't know how any of this works.

* It appears the dats_dates.txt file is a list of depot item contents string sorted by depo numeric identifier.

* It also appears the depo identifier is the first underscore separated value on a given line

* It seems the more popular artifacts are referenced multiple times in the list due to the quantity of contents and versions associated with a given depo

All of that could be wrong, but nonetheless I wrote a small 2minute Node.js script to analyze the list. It takes about 0.03 seconds to execute, on my machine anyways, and produces as output a list of depo identifiers sorted by the frequency in which those identifiers occur in the dats_date.txt file.

These identifiers do not always resolve to a game title using the steamdb.info site but several do. Because though because steamdb.info applies rate limiting and then a temporary IP address block.

https://gist.github.com/prettydiff/fe1456dbd458b8a376961f4f6...

If it will be really seeded forever that would be a great way of archiving for posterity!

btw interestingly from the leak homepage:

"To the operators of browsers/indexers: please look into caching or mirroring the blobs, as a large volume of requests at this point are coming from these, which seem to be impacting downloads for everyone. It's a 15 GB directory that would save the time of many people. Many people should have them all downloaded by now.

We are facing pretty severe link oversaturation. If you managed to download something please try seeding them on the torrent and/or sharing the original files on third party services to spare us some load. The more torrent seeds the faster and more viable it shall be."

I think there could be a market for distributed cloud storage: the client promises a coin payment for $X, in return for storing Y mb/GB of encrypted data. The way to prove it is still there is by sending periodic hash checks of random segments of the file. If the correct match comes back, a portion (rent) is paid to renew the storage. Upon retrieval, the final sum is paid.

There is Filecoin, which sounds somewhat similar conceptually to what you describe (albeit with the standard blockchain caveats).

How is filecoin looking for surviving IPFS's great decline?

Filecoin was really weird on top of the standard caveats. I couldn't even figure out how to directly use and earn it. And all the straightforward options to touch filecoin were brokers offering free storage based on incentive programs.

Storj is a much more straightforward implementation. So is Sia, I think.

So, Pied Piper?

A torrent is fine. Things will settle out and the torrent with it's seeds, just normal people with normal human motivations to do so, will still exist for a long time. No need to bring in money and ruin things.

Is there a lookup that gives you a title to blob mapping?

> This weapon, seen in a newly revealed Portal 2 prototype, was previously seen in Half-Life 2: Episode 3 footage released by Valve.

Fun fact, you can get all the normal Half-Life 2 weapons in normal Portal using the `impulse 101` cheat command in the console (probably requires enabling `sv_cheats 1` before).

Feels more like a kind of closure to an era than it does a discovery.

My harddisc is only 2TB!

Thanksfully bittorrent clients allow you to only download the files you want in a particular torrent.

Good excuse to become a data hoarder, but bad timing giving the pricing situation.

Well its not as bad as RAM or GPUs. You can still get almost e.g. 28 TB disk for around $1k which makes it a comparatively affordable hobby considering what you can end up spending on many others.

Rehmano

Good question. Probably in a jurisdiction Valve can't touch, or they're just indexing stuff without hosting the actual files. Either way, it's risky. Valve's lawyers are definitely already on it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com