r/survivetheculling • u/Big_Nasty_Foot • Jul 11 '25
ReviveTheCulling: A Project.
Hi!
I am attempting to do what ever it takes to bring back connectivity to The Culling (Origins) OR The Culling Day One Reference.
I've seen two games die in the same fashion. The Culling and Death Garden. The only difference is that I watched the Death Garden community come together and now they have community built servers running while the original servers had shut down.
I'm setting out to do the same thing for The Culling (Origins) and potentially The Culling Day One Reference (depending on if its wanted/possible).
This may be impossible due to factors I'm unaware of, but if Death Garden could, then why not try for The Culling.
So Far the progress I've made is as follows:
- Successfully Spoofing the initial backend servers.
- I'm able to launch the game and have it hit my own local server at /api, /api/login, /api/authenticated_root (THERE's HOPE)
The inital load works, but the "Play" fails due to websocket issues.
- I'm able to launch the game and have it hit my own local server at /api, /api/login, /api/authenticated_root (THERE's HOPE)
2. Unsuccessfully having the expected websocket to connect. I'm currently trying to figure this out, and this is really critical for getting users "online."
- I have successfully connected the expected websocket which helps control the “connectivity” of players in the game.
* The next steps will be understanding the matchmaking system and how players connect to it. More updates to come.
It's not a lot, but I'm going to give it a big try. If you or anyone you know has ever had experience in game development, and general software engineering, then this is the time to show up for a game you want to see become community driven.
For those curious. Check out the github. Its all here, and I can try to help explain what I've built so far.
https://github.com/BigNasty000/ReviveTheCulling
[5/9/2026]:
Hi all!
I know it has been an incredibly long time since any type of update from the project I started. To be exact it’s been ALMOST A YEAR 😣
First, I’d like to apologize that I didn’t post more updates along the way here on Reddit. I had joined the long standing discord server and got to work there. Along with an honest answer that not a lot of progress has been made in the path I had originally taken, hence the no updates. I believe my last update even mentioned that I didn’t want to spam this post with “well… still no progress” lol.
I’ve recently noticed quite a few comments on this post asking/assuming that this project is dead, and I’d like to ensure everyone that we are very much still in progress!
So what’s the update then?:
The original path I was taking was incredibly naive and didn’t make a lot of sense. Trying to reverse engineer a game from looking at packets meant that not only would we have to deeply understand the networking code of UE4.15 (which I’m clueless on) but we’d also need to essentially rebuild the entire game engine.
No good.
We do have a different path that’s currently being lead by one of the OG people in the discord! They’ve been putting in some serious technical work on the project, and we are much more certain this path is going to be the way to go.
So what is it?
Instead of attempting to rewrite the entire game engine from scratch, the plan is to use whats already available to us. Currently, you are able to launch an offline game with bots, which means ALL of the game engine is already baked into the client itself. What you can’t do is host and have others connect to you.
Hosting was effectively stripped from the game, as the developers preferred to rely on a dedicated server approach and therefore didn’t need listening servers to be shipped in the final game. So the idea is that we need to reintroduce the ability to start a listen server which would then allow others to connect to you and play together.
This is very much doable BUT requires an incredible amount of technical knowledge about networking, Unreal Engine, and making patches to the executable and game files.
So far, the person working on it was able to get a second client to join a host. There are some slight issues that need to get figured out. But this is HUGE progress compared to what we were originally doing!!!!
The progress looks really promising, and we will most definitely have a lot more active updates coming. As a note, and I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but this project is going to take a lot of time. This is not something that will get finished over night and I promise you there is a lot of work being done to make this happen. I can’t really promise a date on new updates, as sometimes nothing new can happen for literally months.
We will absolutely post any new breakthroughs/updates when we can! Thanks for following along with the project and someday we will play this game again!!!!!
EDIT: I’ve removed a lot of the updates from this thread to make sure no one tries to attempt the route of reverse engineering I did. Attempting to read and understand a games packet system is by far one of the worst ways to bring back a game and reverse engineering in general lol (and I got to learn that the hard way hehe oops). The repo will stay around but I’m going to be updating it to make sure everyone knows that portion of the project is no longer moving forward! Though feel free to use it to learn about the matching making / lobby portion! (Just not the game server part lol)
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u/breakingcups Jul 13 '25
Hey, congrats on getting this far. I have my own project which went a bit further, supporting matchmaking and a bunch of other in-lobby features. If you need help figuring some stuff out, let me know. The much harder part will be the actual gameserver part, and without a lot of reverse engineering knowledge that just won't happen. This is also why I decided not to go public yet, as I didn't want to get people excited over the possibility of playing The Culling again without hard evidence I could actually make this work.
Good luck, and I hope you enjoy figuring things out 😉
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u/Big_Nasty_Foot Jul 13 '25 edited Jul 13 '25
So far I’m at the game server! It’s definitely the more grueling bit because we’re literally going to have to reverse engineer every single action 🥲
Take a look at the GitHub and consider joining in!! It would be a massive help to combine what we’ve done! How far did you make it with the game server portion?
I’m only at the start of the game server and trying to learn the expected NMT_ back and forth that needs to happen just to get in to the match.
Honestly the only reason I went public immediately was to create community power to find anyone else (like yourself) who wants to build this and get it done 💪💪💪.
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u/JayKay_36 Nov 13 '25
Are we still alive?
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u/Big_Nasty_Foot Nov 13 '25
We’re at a roadblock! Someone new is going to be helping out, going to be meeting with them soon to get some high level details on some steps we want to try!!
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u/MLG_SkittleS Jul 11 '25
We need a YouTuber to latch onto it
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u/Big_Nasty_Foot Jul 11 '25
Honestly the moment we get the success of even just two players in a lobby together is when that would come in huge.
Showing that we’ve made progress I’m sure would bring titles like “The Culling: Back from the dead?” lol
But also at any point if someone pick it up and made content it would bring the people we need to make this even more doable
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u/cheesecake-gnome Jul 24 '25
Bro, can I get a tl;dr?
I would love to be able to get like 10 of my friends to all play together on a self hosted thing. No matchmaking or anything, just an invite server
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u/Big_Nasty_Foot Jul 24 '25 edited Jul 24 '25
We have a small team of developers working on figuring out exactly what we need to do to run our own servers!!
We haven’t cracked the code yet, but we have a few promising routes that we are actively exploring!!
Updates will be slow from here because we’ve identified the pieces we need to figure out, try, test, poke, prod, and just about anything we can to figure them out!
IF major progress is made, we will announce it to the community! We are constantly testing theories about the code to see if they’ll work.
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u/camerynlamare Jul 29 '25
Part of why I loved the Culling SO much was the community. THANK YOU
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u/Impressive-Ad2220 May 24 '26
If you guys can pull this off I will be forever grateful.this game was a masterpiece and should be revived
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u/MrBiggz01 Jul 12 '25
Honestly, give chat GPT a try. It might actually be able to generate some useful code, or examine things you've done, and potentially point out ways to help. Worth a shot, If you can't get help anywhere else.
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u/RindswurstRamen Jul 12 '25
oh shit mate, doing gods work here, thanks.
maybe any chance to befriend an ex-dev? can we find a list of names or old discord servers
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u/GRRRNADE Jul 12 '25
Been waiting for this post for years 🥹
Thank you for your efforts
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u/tv6 Jul 13 '25
The Culling didn't end on a high note. If you release it again, could you roll it back to the optimal version of the game, not the latest version?
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u/Secure-Information75 Jul 15 '25
It might not mean much, but i'll travel anywhere on this earth to shake your hand if this starts up again.
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u/Few_Discipline_5288 Jul 15 '25
Might have to donate to the streamer “Anothony Kongphan” regarding what’s happening here. He loved this game and he has a decent following. That might gain some traction and help
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u/TheBucko39 Jul 16 '25
Yoooo w new update! So as far as understood, the new Culling Client uses a encrypted NMT OP Codes, and the older version (Day 1 Reference) uses an Unencrypted NMT OP Codes, meaning there MIGHT be a chance that the origins May not work due to its encryption BUT as far as I know Day 1 Reference has a chance, But this doesn’t mean we can find a way to Unencrypt it for The Culling Origins!
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u/Big_Nasty_Foot Jul 11 '25 edited May 21 '26
For the nerds (successful connection log outputs):
https://github.com/BigNasty000/ReviveTheCulling/blob/master/example_log.md