Probably a good idea to get a thread on this going since it's just 3 weeks away.
I have one important thing to note: the event should be from June 11 (day the first servers were made) to June 18 (day the Steam group was made), not June 12 to June 19. (Source for dates: Old Castaway website)
I say the following from last year's event need to stay:
Birthday mode (obviously)
mario_kart (ctf or not, but please God not the version we played for April Fools, that one sucked)
pl_minepit (why not)
Quake announcer
Other possible ideas (some mine, some suggested last year):
24-hour session(s?)
Bring back ctf_mandrillmaze and wacky_races from the April Fools event
Karaoke plugin (if a good one can be found)
Old voice codec (sv_voicecodec vaudio_speex - not sure if it works)
Valve Rocket Launcher
Any other suggestions/ideas?
Last edited by Scout on Thu May 21, 2026 12:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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The version of mario kart we played for april fools is the base version of it, that's just how the map works normally
Not a big fan of mandrillmaze, though wacky races is fine. Have to remember that we'd need to suffer through mandrillmaze for a whole week instead of a day or two
I recall the voice codec not working though we could always try it, because why not
I wanted to host a movie night during the birthday, which is perfect because both the 12th and 19th are Fridays so it could either be there to start off the week or end off the week (or both). Could do it on the 20th too if people are too tired to play post birthday as to not interfere with any sessions, but I would really like to do one.
I had an idea for a voting plugin that was more of an april fools shitpost but since I didn't get around to it, could try it on the birthday (has yet to be created) where basically instead of voting for maps you vote for a "president," a player who gets to control what maps are chosen. !rtv would be replaced with !impeach where you can vote for someone else to control the rotation
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
achievement_turbov14. It's a classic achievement map that I rarely see today and if we're having mario kart it should fit
A caveat is that it requires a fuckton of +use key
I tried using sv_voicecodec vaudio_speex on a test srcds and I wasn't able to get it working, same thing happened when I tried it on gmod although there it just made everyone sound like demons. there might be a sourcemod plugin to fix it or maybe another convar is needed, but I really really hope we can get it working it would be awesome to have. I haven't heard it in so long
and finally running alternative gamemodes on a set day could be fun? I'll literally take the day off work for it. a couple rounds of deathrun, vsh, slender etc.
For any of these alt gamemodes we'd have to agree on how they would work. For example would it just be randomizer for the entire week? Only on certain servers? Only on certain maps?
x10 in particular might be a little on the difficult side since it'd require a whole custom plugin I think, @huutti we'd probably need to mod the x10 plugin with all our custom reverts which could be a pain. Not sure if randomizer would be the same and require modding, my hunch is that one would work fine
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
For any of these alt gamemodes we'd have to agree on how they would work. For example would it just be randomizer for the entire week? Only on certain servers? Only on certain maps?
x10 in particular might be a little on the difficult side since it'd require a whole custom plugin I think, @huutti we'd probably need to mod the x10 plugin with all our custom reverts which could be a pain. Not sure if randomizer would be the same and require modding, my hunch is that one would work fine
From what I can tell, randomizer doesn't modify weapon attributes unlike x10 so it should work
Here's a suggestion though, so it doesn't get convoluted:
For each different kind of plugin/big change/custom gamemode, separate them by day so we dont get them all at once.
Make a schedule, so monday is saxton hale/freak fortress day, tuesday is randomizer, wednesday is 10x, etc.
Post the schedule on the steam group, make in-game announcement, post on website
Let VA2 stay normal, so if people want a normal sesh they can play there
If we're going to try multiple custom gamemodes, a daily schedule is probably the best way to do so. Maybe something like this:
June 11: Regular session
June 12: Movie night
June 13: Randomizer
June 14: Regular session
June 15: Freak Fortress
June 16: something else, idk (32 players? that would be funny)
June 17: x10 (if possible)
June 18: Regular session, 24-hour attempt during NA (also i demand that i get to play ctf_well during NA, the 18th marks 2 years since i found castaway and it was the first map i played on it)
President plugin and birthday maps active on all days
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June 16: something else, idk (32 players? that would be funny)
June 17: x10 (if possible)
June 18: Regular session, 24-hour attempt during NA
Sounds good to me. 32 players for a day sound like a fun one, x10 is maybe out of scope since the amount of work it would take versus the amount of time it would be used is questionable. I'd throw in another randomizer day instead
I figure doing this on the 19th or 20th would work, depending if we do a 24hr sesh. Could work as a "too tired for a session so we can watch a movie instead." I also envisioned some people just dicking around in the server on ctf or something while the movie is on and chatting about it on voice
If x10 doesn't work/isn't ready then I suggest april fools (powerful) reverts in lieu of it. Maybe have it regardless
A day of this maybe but a whole week I would be against
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
Sounds good to me. 32 players for a day sound like a fun one, x10 is maybe out of scope since the amount of work it would take versus the amount of time it would be used is questionable. I'd throw in another randomizer day instead
I figure doing this on the 19th or 20th would work, depending if we do a 24hr sesh. Could work as a "too tired for a session so we can watch a movie instead." I also envisioned some people just dicking around in the server on ctf or something while the movie is on and chatting about it on voice
I don't think people would be that up for a whole day of freak fortress imo, especially people expecting to play regular gamemodes
If I get around to it, maybe
All sounds fair, how about this?
June 11: Regular session, birthday maps/plugins begin
June 12: idk, class wars?
June 13: Randomizer
June 14: Regular session
June 15: Powerful reverts
June 16: 32 players
June 17: Randomizer
June 18: Regular session, 24-hour attempt during NA
June 19 or 20: Movie night
Want to help promote Castaway? Make videos showcasing the servers and post them HERE to get them put on our official YouTube channel!
Sounds good to me. 32 players for a day sound like a fun one, x10 is maybe out of scope since the amount of work it would take versus the amount of time it would be used is questionable. I'd throw in another randomizer day instead
I figure doing this on the 19th or 20th would work, depending if we do a 24hr sesh. Could work as a "too tired for a session so we can watch a movie instead." I also envisioned some people just dicking around in the server on ctf or something while the movie is on and chatting about it on voice
I don't think people would be that up for a whole day of freak fortress imo, especially people expecting to play regular gamemodes
If I get around to it, maybe
All sounds fair, how about this?
June 11: Regular session, birthday maps/plugins begin
June 12: idk, class wars?
June 13: Randomizer
June 14: Regular session
June 15: Powerful reverts
June 16: 32 players
June 17: Randomizer
June 18: Regular session, 24-hour attempt during NA
I'm not sure if the daily schedule is a good idea.
I could tolerate an hour or two of freak fortress, an entire session being dedicated to it would be a different story. I imagine the novelty would wear off quite quickly before people started getting bored of one specific gimmick.
I'd say it would be more reasonable to put all the wacky maps/gamemodes into a pool and enable it for the whole week. So you have everything available, but you're not forced to play just one thing the entire day.
Furthermore, i would suggest maybe even going for a system that would let us change between a wacky custom map/gamemode and a traditional one, e.g: First we play x10 on mario kart, then we play a normal game of 5gorge. This way you would get your fill of wacky nonsense and some regular fraggage as well so all the custom things feel fresh the whole week without overstaying their welcome.
We didn't do X GIMMICK ONLY days on the first birthday week, i don't think we should do it now either.
We didn't do X GIMMICK ONLY days on the first birthday week, i don't think we should do it now either.
The rationale behind doing per day stuff is just ease of implementation, since it's not that easy to just disable and re-enable the plugin on a whim. It only works for mge because the plugin itself crashes every time it detects a non mge map, I'm not sure if that can be harnessed to function at-will (maybe). Something like a !voterandomizer could work, which then enables it until the map ends or something
100% crits orange would work on the other hand since crits is just a cvar I can enable for the map config, just to get an idea of what is/isn't possible
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
we HAVE to have 100% crits with homing airblast rockets
PS: i didnt know whether i should put this in the revert thread or here so apologies if this is out of place but if we enable power reverts again then i'd love if you humored some of my wacky neato revert suggestions as a test, if there were any time to do it i think birthday week would be the time
ive always held the belief that charge bashing can be treated as an overall mechanic and therefor separate to the individual shields, in the same way we treat airblast, flames, minigun rampup etc, and going back to my massive post i'd love to try these out
-chargin targe with 65% blast resis and 50% fire resis but no bash damage (or just leave it as we have it honestly)
-spendid screen, vanilla
-tide turner, release
BUT with our current charge bash mechanic, meaning release targe and vanilla screen can get crits at any distance
PPS also turn on old danger shield because i misunderstood what it actually did and im lowkey interested now
PPPs me and huutti agree to try out jan 9th 2014 circuit instead of 2013, and then if thats still too good, febuary 14th
As we approach the birthday I am going to spend the next few days getting things ready. Unfortunately I don't think I can just put everything in this thread in, especially some harder to get working things like freak fortress or x10. x10 in particular is not possible because it is not simply a "x10" plugin as the name suggests, it's actually a complete rebalance overhaul with custom balancing for many weapons including stock.
As of now, my current implementation plans are:
Quake announcer
32 players for 2 days
Powerful reverts for 2 days (one of these days will overlap with a 32 player day)
Extra maps (100% crits orange, mario kart?, wacky races, pl minepit, tf2ware, lazytown) enabled all days
Votable randomizer plugin, server would vote to enable it for the duration of the map, and it would disable on map change
For mario kart in particular, if you didn't like the one we did on april fools, get me a link to the one you do want to run. Otherwise, I'll go back to the ctf version we did last birthday. I'm also debating running harbl hotel so feedback on that as well, that one is a lot more of a hangout map however
For the randomizer voting plugin since I have yet to make it, how do you think it should function?
Players do something like !voterandomizer, and this creates a global vote (similar to how votescramble works) which if successful will enable it for the duration of the map. This can be called at any time
The server automatically calls the vote 1 minute after the map starts every time, and it can't be called manually after that
Some combination of the above
Any other simple changes/ideas welcome, but anything larger would probably be too late to be considered. I don't think any karaoke plugins exist that still work, but if you find me one I'll add it
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
For the randomizer voting plugin since I have yet to make it, how do you think it should function?
Players do something like !voterandomizer, and this creates a global vote (similar to how votescramble works) which if successful will enable it for the duration of the map. This can be called at any time
The server automatically calls the vote 1 minute after the map starts every time, and it can't be called manually after that
Some combination of the above
I'm leaning towards an automatic vote because I want to have more chances to play it
Want to help promote Castaway? Make videos showcasing the servers and post them HERE to get them put on our official YouTube channel!
As we approach the birthday I am going to spend the next few days getting things ready. Unfortunately I don't think I can just put everything in this thread in, especially some harder to get working things like freak fortress or x10. x10 in particular is not possible because it is not simply a "x10" plugin as the name suggests, it's actually a complete rebalance overhaul with custom balancing for many weapons including stock.
As of now, my current implementation plans are:
Quake announcer
32 players for 2 days
Powerful reverts for 2 days (one of these days will overlap with a 32 player day)
Extra maps (100% crits orange, mario kart?, wacky races, pl minepit, tf2ware, lazytown) enabled all days
Votable randomizer plugin, server would vote to enable it for the duration of the map, and it would disable on map change
For mario kart in particular, if you didn't like the one we did on april fools, get me a link to the one you do want to run. Otherwise, I'll go back to the ctf version we did last birthday. I'm also debating running harbl hotel so feedback on that as well, that one is a lot more of a hangout map however
For the randomizer voting plugin since I have yet to make it, how do you think it should function?
Players do something like !voterandomizer, and this creates a global vote (similar to how votescramble works) which if successful will enable it for the duration of the map. This can be called at any time
The server automatically calls the vote 1 minute after the map starts every time, and it can't be called manually after that
Some combination of the above
Any other simple changes/ideas welcome, but anything larger would probably be too late to be considered. I don't think any karaoke plugins exist that still work, but if you find me one I'll add it
Very solid, shame freak fortress cant get in but im hyped about 100% crits
I like being able to call the randomizer vote at any time, give people time to load into the map so they actually get to vote yes or no on it instead of being stuck with whatever people decided 40 minutes ago.
I'd also argue in favor of making 32 player last all week, it's a celebration and we're going to wind up playing at least one round of 100% crit orange randomizer. We don't need balance where we're going.
I like being able to call the randomizer vote at any time, give people time to load into the map so they actually get to vote yes or no on it instead of being stuck with whatever people decided 40 minutes ago.
Would this also involve voting to turn it off? My vision was to just lock it as enabled if one vote goes through, and allow revotes every 5 minutes or so after that if it was no
I'd also argue in favor of making 32 player last all week
I wouldn't mind this
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
Would this also involve voting to turn it off? My vision was to just lock it as enabled if one vote goes through, and allow revotes every 5 minutes or so after that if it was no
Oh, as long as it isn't just a one time vote at the 60 second mark it should be fine. Turning off the plugin in the middle of the round might be fucky though.
Another idea I forgot to throw around, would it make sense to run the weekend rotation all week? That's what I was planning
I kind of assumed that went along with the birthday maps and was hoping yes.
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
Will the 100% crits orange be the regular flat orange 3, or will it be this more complex orange shown in this vid? Would love to see both, also will it have airblasted homing rockets
I forgot to mention explicitly but I'm doing 12th-19th simply because starting and ending on a Friday seems better to me.
Also an idea I had - if anyone wants to try for a very long session, then I'd propose doing it on the 19th. The deal will be that birthday mode will continue as long as you keep the session alive, so if it goes for 24h it'll stay enabled on the 20th, 48h it'll stay on the 21st, etc.
Everything will be enabled late night NA today after the session assuming I can stay up long enough for that and I'll announce some form of schedule later today
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
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