For me the evidence was the server logs, filtering by user agent. my main page is basically a canvas game, so the html has almost nothing for a crawler, and I was surprised to see googlebot not only rendering it but opening the SSE stream like a real player (I noticed because bots were showing up as online players lol). what actually got indexed were the plain server rendered pages I made for each thing worth sharing, with title, og image and json-ld, listed in the sitemap. so I didn’t change the app rendering, I just gave crawlers simpler pages to read.

8gb with 70+ mods is way less than I expected, nice. capping it in docker is smart too if it leaks at least it can’t take the rest of the box down with it

What I do for that is turn it around, instead of checking for a failure I alert on the absence of a success. backrest has hooks, so on snapshot success it pings a push monitor in uptime kuma (healthchecks.io works the same), and if no ping arrives in ~26h it alerts. That way it catches the backup that never ran, which is the one that scares me the most I guess

hey Tower, late follow up but you were right and it’s done. the ? button now has a SEE THE RULES button right under the welcome, it’s a plain manual with 8 short questions and the real numbers, and those numbers come straight from the game code so they can’t go stale when I change something. thanks for actually playing and saying you had no idea what was happening, that one comment changed more than any stat I was looking at

thanks, it’s the first number I look at every morning lol. one thing I learned this week is that you have to clean it before trusting it, a crawler from some chinese cloud providers was keeping the cookie and coming back, it was 6 of the 7 “visitors” one day. so the real number is smaller than it looked, but at least now it’s honest

Day 818 is wild, congrats on keeping it going. and the part about making cool stuff for your friends and not caring if it’s profitable is so true, I host a few little things nobody pays for and it’s the best part of the hobby I guess. Does the cobblemon server need a lot of ram or does it run fine on modest hardware?

Most of my stuff lives on a cheap hetzner vps so that power is someone else’s problem lol. at home it’s a raspberry pi that’s always on (a few watts) and a bitaxe miner doing about 19W, that’s around 14 kWh a month, like 3 euros here. the gaming pc is the only hungry thing and it stays off, the pi wakes it with wake-on-lan when I actually need it. took me a while to get the bios settings right (erp off, power on by pci-e) but it was worth it.

thanks, means a lot after how the last thread went lol. honestly it’s still early to say if it worked, the number I’m watching now is how many people who paint on their first day come back another day, if that one moves I’ll know the card and the siege clock did something.

I’d add backup age and size, not just status, like alert if the newest dump is older than ~26h or smaller than 1MB, a job can say success and still leave you a useless file. and disk fill with a threshold, not only the graph. learned that one the hard way, a table on my vps was getting a row every minute with no cleanup and one day the disk hit 100% and postgres just died for like 40 min, obviously nobody was looking at the dashboard right then lol. now 80% warns and 90% sends me an email, and uptime kuma checks the cert expiry from outside. I guess the dashboard is nice to look at but the stuff that matters should ping you

both, kind of. the part that actually erases stuff is plain game AI, rules and a budget: it finds groups of 25+ connected pixels, announces a siege on one, closes a ring around it, and if people don’t keep the ring lit it eats the work. all deterministic code. on top of that, every 15 min a small LLM (gemini flash lite through openrouter) gets the state of the board and picks which of the legal moves to make, which work to siege and when, and the code clamps whatever it answers, it can’t break the rules. it also writes a one line reason that goes in a war log on the site, that’s the only generated text players see. everything she says in the game and on the stream comes from a bank of lines I wrote by hand, and nothing on the canvas is generated, it’s all people painting. if the LLM is off, a fixed set of rules plays instead

thanks, this is pretty much where it went after that post. the end of a visit now shows a small card with what you lit, what she took back and how much of it is still standing, and the siege got a visible clock, the ring closes first and the assault comes 30 min later so you can see it coming while you’re still there. and whatever you paint in your first two hours she can’t touch for 24h, so when you come back there’s still something of yours. too early to know if it works, the numbers are still tiny, but “reads as a challenge instead” is exactly what I was trying to get to

Hello Tower, I will try to create a page where the mechanics of it, the machine, are clearly explained. Now I try to explain it here: She thinks every 10 seconds. She is reconquering based on a budget, but it is enhanced if people draw more. Every 15m the LLM chooses a larger target to turn off its lights. She advances along her border but if a player reconquers she can go after him with more determination. It must be taken into account that a painted light has a protection of 72 hours, only a declared fence can with it. I hope I have explained a little more to you. Anyway, I’m going to try to implement that more clearly in the game. If you have any more questions, tell me and I’ll answer you.