S3ctor’s S3cret St4sh eventually became both a publishing system and an experimentation space for Starwind/TSI work. Its Git history needs careful reading because the repository inherited older template ancestry.
Do not date the St4sh by its oldest commit#
The current St4sh repository contains inherited history from earlier site/template work. Those commits are part of its Git graph but not all of them are evidence that “the St4sh existed” at that date.
The recognizable Dave-driven transformation on the surviving main line begins in May 2024. Two useful markers are:
7a368503— 2024-05-22 —Pls no expl0d3.7167785f— 2024-05-24 — title/content cleanup during the recognizable St4sh conversion.
The exact “birth” of a personal site is less important than avoiding the false claim that every inherited template commit was already St4sh development.
CPP becomes a St4sh product#
By the end of May Starwind material is explicitly part of the site’s build and distribution role:
3e112412— May 27 — adds a build job for Starwind Community Patch Project.d6bb8d9— May 28 — writes up CPP as a project page.
The modern St4sh CPP page remains one of the public historical summaries for that project.
Oral history#
Dave describes Starwind/TSI content hosting as one of the major motivations for building the St4sh, and describes the repository as effectively serving as the Starwind skunkworks for a period.
That interpretation becomes much stronger when the 2025 history is inspected.
January 31, 2025: the first surviving Starwind Lua modernization#
The first surviving OpenMW-Lua Starwind modernization work is not the May 2025 SW4 tree in Starwind-Builder. It is this St4sh commit:
7c85c9ca— 2025-01-31 03:22 -07:00 —Begin migrating Starwind scripts into Lua....
The commit adds an early freighter/player-controller implementation and an
Starwind Modernization Patches.omwscripts registration file. The commit
subject explicitly says the work is replacing freighter handling and
entry/exit-related objects.
The follow-up sequence fills out the behavior within hours:
da9caade— removes the last original door.4ee69d77— implements exiting the ship.89461704— implements the travel timer and SFX.a6b10c21— changes same-record/file sound behavior.f6cb2331— delays ship SFX so they occur before the cell transition.a1c281c1— February 1 — adds freighter-quest progress gating.
The implementation already contains the recognizable design that later grows inside Builder: known ship records, destination/button mapping, dynamic replacement records, Lua-owned activation, freighter entry/exit, travel state, and quest gating.
May: the experiment moves out#
After the expanded modernization work is living in Starwind-Builder, St4sh
commit
8e5845c3
removes the Starwind Lua files with the succinct subject:
CLEANUP: These do not belong here
That is a useful boundary marker. The St4sh was the first surviving lab for the Lua rewrite, but Starwind-Builder became the larger Starwind-specific R&D home.
Why the St4sh remains part of R3mastered history#
The repository was not just a mirror. It served three roles that later projects split apart more cleanly:
- publication/distribution for personal and Starwind-related mods;
- documentation for MPP/CPP and later projects;
- skunkworks where ideas could exist before they had an obvious permanent home.
R3mastered deliberately preserves the useful part of that model—fast experimentation—but moves the resulting project knowledge into a dedicated repository/documentation tree rather than letting it remain archaeological sediment in a personal mod site.