Become a sponsor to Coldzer0

Hi, I'm Coldzer0

I'm building open-source tools for game preservation.
Right now I'm focused on a server emulator for New World: Aeternum, so the game stays playable after the official servers shut down.

What I'm working on:

When a live-service game shuts down, it usually disappears for good. There's no single-player mode, no offline build - once the servers go dark, every copy people bought becomes unplayable. I'm trying to change that for New World by reverse-engineering its networking and rebuilding a server people can run themselves.
So far this has meant:

Packet capture & analysis tooling - a full layered decoder/encoder for the game's DTLS-over-UDP traffic, with tools for capturing, decoding, diffing, and replaying sessions in my custom analysis tools

Protocol reverse engineering - mapping out the replication system that drives entity state, RPCs, and synchronization between client and server
A from-scratch serializer/deserializer so the emulator speaks the game's wire format natively
World data extraction - collision geometry, heightmaps, and the pieces needed to host an authoritative world

It's deep, low-level work, and all of it is open on GitHub so others can learn from it, build on it, or help push it forward.

Why this matters

Games are culture. Losing them is losing history. Preservation work like this is slow, unglamorous, and almost never funded - but it's the only thing standing between a game and total erasure.

Why sponsor me

Your sponsorship buys me time - time to keep reverse-engineering, documenting, and shipping code instead of doing it in the margins of my week. Every contribution, no matter the size, directly translates into more progress on a server that keeps this game alive. It also signals that this kind of preservation work is worth supporting, which helps the whole community.

Thank you for considering it.