If you've played Noctis IV* and labelled objects in the Starmap and/or written in the Guide, now's your chance to submit an outbox. Your discoveries will be added to the main data files and the next INBOX.ZIP, for future stardrifters to see. You have until some point in early October to do this; outboxes will be accepted indefinitely (as they have always been) but if you miss this one you'll miss getting into the next inbox (and who knows what'll happen after that).
See this post on Noctis IV's website for submission instructions.
*Or Noctis IV+, but not Noctis IV Community Edition: NICE has different procedural generation, so its Starmap and Guide are not compatible. Sorry if you played that one.
Some backstory for this:
Noctis IV is a DOS game from 2000 where you explore a massive, procedurally generated galaxy. It's beautiful and impressive, and in the past year it's become one of my favourite games. I wrote about playing Noctis a while ago - here - and noted that I added some stuff to my copy of the galactic Guide, but that the shared copy hadn't been updated since 2017. The Guide is a major part of Noctis: as you explore, you can label the stars, planets, and moons you visit, and write extensive notes about all of them. The idea is then that you can export what you've added, send it to the record keeper in charge of it all, and they would occasionally send out new data for everybody to import.
More than just leaving notes on points of interest for other players, through the Guide entries you tell this slow and slowly tragic story of being one of the last few explorers in a universe where you're never lost but always so alone. And it's kind of real, too, the game's text about the Stardrifters' dwindling numbers fitting perfectly with the reality of it being a game from 2001 that has naturally become less popular over time. It's a wri†ing game, to me, and I realise that I really like writing games, like Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor or how I played 80 Days in 80 days (maybe I just like writing and this is why I'm on Cohost).
The guide has, of late, been assumed to be effectively closed to new entries by, well, basically every journalist that writes about the game, and also me when I played it. But I found word from the Guide's current record keeper that it was never really closed. Like Wizmud, Noctis never dies. It's just that we went about five years without anybody sending any entries in. This galaxy might be lonely, but the ancient servers orbiting Fenia are still running, and you can always pay them a visit and send in the next bit of the story.
So that's what I did. I wrote quite a bit as I played and eventually (after much procrastination) sent in what I had done. Because it's been a while since the last update, there's now an open call for submissions to add to a bigger Guide update that's sent all at once.