With StoryNexus shutting down on January 27th 2026, this thread is intended to build on the discussion from this thread and serve as a central location for discussion of resources & preservation efforts for any of the StoryNexus worlds. Please note that the IP rights for various StoryNexus worlds is an active area of inquiry; this thread is intended simply to be a location for links and to discuss preservation efforts.
Please use this thread to continue any discussion related to StoryNexus Worlds preservation efforts; I will update the list of links as needed.
Preservation of StoryNexus worlds – particularly The Night Circus, The Silver Tree, Winterstrike, and the other Polished stories – is something I feel passionately about and I hope that we can work together to keep these games available in one form or another. With StoryNexus shutting down soon, I believe the most important thing at present is to see if we can get FBG to release game assets for the major StoryNexus Worlds to the public (if IP rights permit it) and upload them to GitHub or another repository, so that they can be made available for future adaption if anyone is interested.
I agree with you. I think that, from a software engineering point of view, replicating the relevant parts of Storynexus to make worlds playable again shouldn’t be too much of an issue (even if we don’t have the source code). Maybe I underestimate the complexity (I just played a bit of Silver Tree, Cabinet Noir and Night Circus after the closing announcement, so I’m definitely not an expert in the platform), but as far as I can see everything comes down to some basic principles. There is a state that stores the player’s qualities and items. There are storylets that can have lock/unlock conditions. Storylets are either pinned or drawn from one or more opportunity decks. Storylets have branches that can have lock/unlock conditions. Playing branches may change the player’s state. And that’s probably almost everything that is relevant for us.
So, yes, the main issue is getting the data. We would need the full text of every storylet and its branches, the lock/unlock conditions (including hidden conditions), the quality changes and (optionally) the pictures. For Silver Tree we have this data in the wiki. Sadly, such a wiki does not exist for the other worlds. There might still be enough time to collect the data from the platform itself, but this doesn’t solve potential copyright issues (and I think at least the Night Circus is too complex to collect everything in about six days). And I fear that, if Failbetter would be willing to give us the required assets, they would have already done so.
Quick update: I emailed Failbetter and received a reply today from Adam (the CEO). He wrote that the company cannot legally provide the game files of The Night Circus to a third party. So any preservation efforts would have to take a different approach.
Thank you for taking point on this. And the answer is what I expected, I’m glad we got official confirmation.
I think attempting to obtain original game files is still a valid approach, but a more complicated one requiring contacting the original rights-holders. Night Circus lists Random House, they were also involved in Black Crown, so I wonder if they’re involved in more.
I’m imagining a spreadsheet of known projects, imputed rights-holders, and contact status. I’m busy with IRL work for the next few hours but I can start that if no one else has in the meantime.
Over on the IntFiction forums there are recent Let’s Plays of Winterstrike and Samsara, the game text copy-pasted into the thread with the player adding commentary.
Hello, ChronicleHub’s creator here! I have been actively wanting to preserve StoryNexus games, and have written a basic conversion script to port the StoryNexus data model to ChronicleHub’s. If there is any way in which I could help with the preservation efforts, please let me know. I don’t have the time and spoons to reach out to every single author, but it would hurt to see so much media be lost.
If anyone has permission to port files, and is willing to let me have a crack at it, please let me know!
That’s pretty much it, and while it took a while to implement it all, and make sure it worked, it does. It even functions with quality-based variant text.
That’s the big one. Based on other preservation efforts, we are effectively getting the rendered text, where qualities introducing text variation have already been accounted for. The big thing is getting the raw data, where text variations are still dynamically called in-line with the [q:quality] commands.
Hi, I’ve been reaching out to various authors on behalf of the StoryNexus wiki, and so far we’ve obtained direct permission from the authors of Locked Code, Rat Sending Simulator 2kXX, Samsara and Zero Summer. One author of Lethopobia has replied but intends to ask her co-author as well before granting permission. Winterstrike is the only one with a less positive response at the moment, with the author intending to rework and release the game elsewhere at some point in the future.
For the moment we haven’t received responses from the authors of The Annwn Simulation 1985, Below, Cabinet Noir (I’ve yet to ascertain if it belongs to FBG or Nigel Evans, and the latter I’ve yet to track down) and The Night Circus (who knows what the expected response times from Random House are).
We haven’t had any success with the files. The authors of Rat Sending Simulator 2kXX, Samsara and Zero Summer don’t possess them, and I’ve reached out to FBG about the possibility of them providing them on the behalf of the authors who’ve given their permission. The manual efforts on that front are promising but are far from finished yet.
Should anyone who’s played a greater number of StoryNexus games want any other title to be included, I guess now’s the time to discuss it.
Excellent work! I’ve been trying to compile contact info for the authors but it’s actually rather a lot of work, as I’m sure you’ve seen.
Note that several authors wrote more than 1 StoryNexus game. The author of Locked Code also wrote Bachelorette Detective, and the author of The Annwn Simulation 1985 also wrote The Gillingham Problem.
I’ve compiled a spreadsheet of names & alleged contact info from any of the worlds labelled “Playable” or “Polished,” which is 44 of them. I’ve only managed to find contact info for a few, but a few have socials with recent activity so fingers crossed. Here’s a dump:
Just as a request, with FBG still somewhat willing to share the data with the authors (as mentioned in a Discord post), could we try and reach out to these authors to inform them of it? Before everything ends up lost. I’d even be willing to convert and host it on ChronicleHub if that is the desire.
Would you be fine if I transferred this information to a Google sheet, so multiple people could swarm the problem and share insights and and the state of contact. That could also help with not bombarding creators with the same message multiple times.
I noticed the lack of an about page. Authors might be more willing to pass on their work to ChronicleHub if they had more of an idea who the people behind it are.
I finally found the time to boot the notebook and set up the Google Sheet here. When I find the time I’ll try do dig up some contacts and write messages. If anyone feels like information is missing from the sheet, feel free to add anything.