§ 02 — Gaming
We mod the games we live in
The studio was born in a game. It still treats a game engine as somewhere to build, not somewhere to spend the evening.
Safehouse Lab
The studio was born in a game. It still treats a game engine as somewhere to build, not somewhere to spend the evening.
LODESTAR is our free, open-source mod for X4: Foundations: an AI officer that sees what is happening in your game and tells you what to do next — in the game’s own chat, out loud, and with a guidance line to wherever it sends you.
It runs on the player’s own Grok API key, on their machine. It is in development and not released, and it is where the lab’s agent work and its gaming work meet.
World state, open-world cycles, market data, fashion builds and a community — running on two computation engines we wrote ourselves rather than on somebody else’s feed.
That choice has already paid. The API everyone else depends on went down for nine hours and the site did not notice, because the cycles are arithmetic, not a request.
Safehouse Lab is named after a safe room in The Division. The crew ran servers, held the Dark Zone and built a community there long before any of this was a studio.
We still think that is what gaming is for, and we still stream.
A small Windows app for the Razer Naga V2 HyperSpeed that does the one job we needed: write the side buttons onto the mouse itself, keep profiles, and switch them when a game starts.
It writes to the hardware and keeps a backup of what was there before, so the old layout goes back with one press. In development, running on one desk — ours.
Before the studio there was a channel. Some of it was paid for by the people who made the games; the rest was the crew, live, most nights.
Pixel slept on Stephan’s lap through most of the hours that went into Warframe. The Kubrow on the right is the avatar he made of him — same markings, same ears.
He is not here any more. The Kubrow is still in the loadout, and a run out on the Plains is still the first thing loaded on a quiet night. It is less a session than a walk the two of them used to take.
One of them is a game. Neither of them is pretend.
Pixel is becoming an agent here. A small one — bug hunting, with a report of his own. That build does not run yet; the roster card says so too.