Hello everyone!

The beginning of September marked the anniversary for the two Community Managers: ElluFB and VenlaFB, who have now been working at Frozenbyte for one year.

Oh, all the things that happened in those 12 months! There were many, we can tell you that. During this time both of us have been getting familiar with the support/community role for all the Frozenbyte titles, but the Starbase community on Discord with over 32k members has definitely played the biggest part in our daily lives.

For this special occasion, we decided to gather some of our favourite Starbase community events and phenomena in one post. Hope you all enjoy!

The 16

The original picture

A never ending mystery for the community, the suspicious number that nobody knows the true meaning of  (except for the original poster). The number 16.

It all started on the 28th day of October when Ellu posted the weekly progress notes on the Starbase Forum. A mysterious picture in the gallery forming a crystal clear number – 16.

The community was confused. What did it mean? What was the purpose of the number? What was it indicating? No answer was given.

It was time for the community to roll up their sleeves. They founded a group called The Night Squad, that aimed to discover all the secrets hidden by the devs. The Night Squad worked hard night and day (mostly night) to discover the true meaning of the number, but it turned out to be a harder task than they had ever imagined.

The board of mystery

A few months later Venla decided to join in and put an end to this eternal mystery, but to no avail – the mystery of number 16 couldn’t be solved.

The Night Squad never gave up, and is still on the lookout for more mysteries to solve – most recently being busy finding secrets in PipFB’s videos. Perhaps one year of the release of the forum post will give more answers to them and Ellu will finally let them know what exactly number 16 means.

(There is also a full blog post about the el(l)usive 16, you can read that here.)

The Olive Civil War

The olive-grape war visualized

The day 21st of April 2020 will always be remembered as the start of the war between Olives and Grapes.

The war started on the official Starbase Discord server, when a member claimed that olives and mushrooms are the best pizza toppings. Another member disagreed – and after that the chat spiraled into a point of no return. Many joined the conversation: moderators, developers and even the quiet server members who had been silent for months – either siding with olives, or against. The channel couldn’t go on like this, so a slowmode was introduced to lessen the damages of the war. This did not stop all the brave warriors, though, and the war continued on other server channels as well. All of this eventually lead to founding of a party ULAO (United League Against Olives).

The war reached its second phase after Grape lovers joined the party, expressing their dislike for olives. This resulted in some of the Frozenbyte employees such as AuraFB to join the fray and change the server’s outlook to boost the morale of all the Anti-Olive members.

Such a bold movement led to lots of spam and grape emojis until another Frozenbyte employee raised their head – PipFB, who asked where the opposing force of olive emojis was. It took many hours for the war to calm down. No one knows when the next outbreak between Pro-Olives and Anti-Olives will happen, but we will be on the lookout for that.

(Have you noticed, that once drawn, olives and grapes look pretty similar?)

Church of Pip and Pipocalypse

The church of Pip was formed on the 25th of April 2020, revolving around the dev PipFB. The church recognizes Pip a planet and their original icon of faith (aka pipture) looks like this:

After a short while Church of Pip sparked an event in the general chat, which involved multiple members saying Pip’s name in the chat and copying PipFB’s avatar (Eos planet) and making their own versions of it.

This went on for quite some time, and the community even made a Wiki page about it. You can find all the piptures here.

This is but a small handful of all the weird and interesting stuff that has come from the Starbase community, as new things seem to happen almost at a weekly basis. There’s been secrets hidden in videos,  puzzles that eventually lead to the start of the Starbase Closed Alpha and overall chaos that is the Starbase Discord #general-chat.

And speaking of #general-chat, on Sunday 13th of September, we celebrated one year of #general-chat. The day was decided as #general-chat’s birthday, since that was the day the channel was moved near the top of the server channel list, and renamed as general-chat. Happy birthday precious (and terrifying) #general-chat!

Last and least, here’s the promised ‘Rules ASMR’ by VenlaFB:

Thank you for the Starbase community for the past year, we can’t wait to spend many more with you! You all truly are out of this world.