Gus Guidry

RimWorld 2 Is Coming (Probably)

2026-10-15T12:25:00-05:00

A Confession, and a Credential

I have a regret to report. When Odyssey launched, I had a hunch that it might be the last RimWorld DLC. I told no one, and I wrote nothing down. Now Ludeon has announced update 1.7, and I am left to make my case after the fact, like a man insisting he called the coin toss after it landed.

So let me establish standing before I start predicting. I have a little under 2,000 hours in RimWorld. I started around the Royalty DLC and played off and on until Odyssey, which ate roughly 1,000 hours on its own. I play on Losing Is Fun with No Pause, a mod that removes the pause button and makes an already cruel game crueler. My mod list otherwise runs to P-Music, a mod that silences the clunk when you change game speed, and Harmony, the library No Pause needs to run. I am as vanilla as a man with No Pause installed can be.

I am a devoted fan, but not a daily speculator. I don’t comb patch notes for runes. That said, I think I see where this is going.

What 1.7 Actually Is

On October 12, Ludeon announced update 1.7. Its headline is that RimWorld is leaving Unity for the Waylith Engine, a game engine Ludeon built in-house. By their account, the game looks and plays exactly the same but runs two to four times faster. It’s on Steam’s unstable beta branch now.

The announcement itself, October 12. Via Ludeon Studios

That is the whole update. There are no new creatures, genes, biomes, or tweaks to any DLC. Ludeon swapped out the game’s foundation and nothing else.

The choice makes sense. RimWorld is an unusual game, a simulation where every pawn, bullet, and duck wants processor time. General-purpose engines like Unity are sledgehammers built for every kind of game at once. A studio making something this specific eventually wants a tool shaped for the job.

The results show. Shambler Assault was the one raid that reliably brought my modest PC to its knees, with so many bodies on the map that the game crawled. In footage of 1.7 testing, I saw ten times the usual raiders running cleanly at 3x speed, and at No Pause’s 4x speed too. For the record, that’s really 16 times normal speed, though everyone calls it 4x.

Why an Update With No DLC Is a Signal

RimWorld’s version numbers have a rhythm. A new number usually arrives alongside a DLC, plus a pile of free features for everyone. Update 1.6 came with Odyssey, and it brought fishing, new tasks, and multithreading that cut lag considerably. The one past exception was 1.2, which shipped without a DLC.

That rhythm matters because Ludeon’s whole business runs on it. You buy the base game at a modest price, then buy each DLC when it arrives. There’s no subscription, no battle pass, and no store full of hats. You own what you paid for, forever, like the good old days. It’s an honest model, and it rewards the studio for making each expansion worth buying.

So when a studio built on DLCs ships a major update with no DLC, no content, and no hint of either, it’s worth noticing. It has been well over a year since Odyssey. Fans have been waiting for the next hit like it’s Go-Juice. What we got instead was a new engine and one parting sentence: RimWorld isn’t the only game that will run on Waylith, and Ludeon is working on something new.

The Odyssey Ceiling

Here is the hunch I should have published. After Odyssey, how do you expand RimWorld further?

Odyssey gave us gravships, shuttles, and fast travel across the whole planet. Biomes that were once a punishing caravan trek became a short flight away. The map got smaller in the best way, and the game got enormous. Short of interplanetary travel, there isn’t much frontier left.

What remains is connective tissue, small additions that make the DLCs fit together better. Anomaly is the obvious case. It plays nicely with Ideology and largely ignores the rest. Ludeon left a perfect idea on the table: derelict space stations, abandoned and dark, with shamblers in the corridors and a revenant somewhere in the vents. That’s worth doing, but it’s a patch, not a new chapter.

I think Ludeon reached the same conclusion I did. You can’t add much more to RimWorld without rewriting RimWorld. Waylith is what rewriting it looks like.

The Part Everyone Forgets

There’s a piece of RimWorld history I think the community has lost track of. Tynan Sylvester’s original idea wasn’t a crash-landing survival story. It was a colony sim set in space, where your ship was your home. Early on, the concept also leaned toward a mercenary theme.

The space version was too complex to build, so he started smaller. Three people crash on a rimworld and try not to die. That scenario became the game we know, and everything since has been built on top of it.

Viewed that way, Odyssey isn’t just another expansion. It’s the original vision, finally achieved, a decade later and five DLCs deep. Once you’ve built the thing you set out to build, you’re done with that blueprint. Then the question becomes what to build next.

If you want the full story, this documentary on RimWorld’s development covers it.

The Prediction: RimWorld 2

I’ll say it plainly. Ludeon’s next game is RimWorld 2.

Ludeon has kept its description vague, saying only that something new is coming. Ludeon has always kept its cards close, and I read the vagueness as expectation management, not a sign that this is unrelated. A studio doesn’t sit on a franchise this beloved and walk away from it. It rebuilds it.

The closest precedent is The Binding of Isaac. The original was built in Flash, got a DLC, and hit the limits of its engine. Edmund McMillen rebuilt it on a new engine as Rebirth and folded the old content into one larger game. I expect the same here: the base game plus Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly, and Odyssey, merged into one foundation on Waylith.

My second and bolder call is that your ship will be the default base. Odyssey will be the core of the sequel, not an add-on. You’ll build and fly your own vessel. Planetside colonies and the classic crash-landing start will still exist, but as options. RimWorld 2 is where Tynan’s original vision becomes the main event.

The Waylith announcement and the hiring support this. Ludeon has posted programming jobs this year, and according to Adam vs Everything, a streamer with over 10,000 hours in the game, it has brought on three new developers. A studio doesn’t staff up to maintain a finished game.

What a Rewrite Gets to Fix

A clean slate lets Ludeon finally address the complaints players have had for years. These are the fixes I expect.

Raiders with some variety. By late game, raids feel stale. It’s the same mix of pirates and tribals, scaled up and sent at the walls. A sequel can give us more factions, more raid types, and enemies that behave differently.
Relationships that make sense. Everyone complains about RimWorld’s romance and social systems, and with reason. A rewrite is the chance to fix them properly instead of patching around them.
Raider bases that look lived in. Attack a pirate outpost today and you’ll find 25 raiders sharing five beds in conditions a mole would reject. Faction bases should feel like places where people actually live.
Diplomacy with some depth. Right now, a faction gives you two things: small gifts and goodwill. Goodwill is trivially farmed by shipping a faction a heap of valuables, and human leather does the job nicely. In return, a friendly faction might send troops or answer a call for military aid. That’s the entire relationship. Hostile factions are worse. A pirate band is hostile to everyone, forever, with no alliances or rivalries of its own, until you spend a few hundred hours wiping it off the map. I want factions that ally with each other, feud with each other, and can be bribed, persuaded, or infiltrated. Players have been asking for stealth, sneaking into enemy bases, and the ability to pay a faction to do your dirty work.
An economy that moves. RimWorld has no supply and demand. Prices are set, and traders don’t care if you’ve dumped 4,000 silver of wool on them. A world where your trading actually shifts markets would make the planet feel inhabited instead of staged.

The last two run straight into Tynan. He has said he doesn’t want RimWorld to become a 4X game, the Civilization genre of empires and economies. I can’t speak for the man. But I can point out that he has changed his mind before. He once said children wouldn’t be in RimWorld, and then Biotech arrived with children, including child raiders, which is cruel in the way only RimWorld can make funny. A clean rebuild is exactly when a designer revisits his old “no” decisions. RimWorld 1’s foundation was never built for a living, scheming world. RimWorld 2’s can be, and that would push the simulation further than it has ever gone.

None of these are small tweaks. Each one touches systems so deeply embedded in the current code that fixing them means rebuilding. That’s my point.

In Case I’m Wrong

I’ll concede the obvious: the new game might not be RimWorld 2. Ludeon has given us one sentence, and I’ve built a whole house on it.

Even so, I’m confident about one thing. Whatever they’re making will be a colony management sim. Waylith was built to run heavy simulations, and it wasn’t built to make a platformer.

If it isn’t RimWorld 2, I see two possibilities. One is a sci-fi game set in the same universe, a spin-off that isn’t technically a sequel. The other is fantasy: a Dwarf Fortress that most people can actually play. Dwarf Fortress is a masterpiece, but getting into it is brutally hard. A Ludeon take on that genre, with RimWorld’s readability and storytelling, would be a serious contender.

Here is my confidence ladder, from safest to boldest:

The new game is a colony sim. Near certain.
It’s set in RimWorld’s universe or next to it. Likely.
It’s called RimWorld 2 and includes everything from the five DLCs. My call.
Your ship is your default base. My boldest call.

The Catch

This won’t be free. People already complain about $15 DLCs that give them hundreds or thousands of hours, so a full-price sequel will draw some outrage. But you can’t pour a new foundation on top of the old house. Somebody pays for the excavation.

Mods are the other cost. If RimWorld 2 is a real rebuild, mod authors will have to start over, and players will have to rebuild their setups. I’m the wrong person to judge how painful that will be, since my mod list fits on an index card. But I’ve seen what modders have built for this game, and I don’t think a better engine will slow them down. Ludeon is already pitching Waylith as friendlier to complex mods, and that matters.

The Wait

The bad news is that I don’t expect new RimWorld content anytime soon. My guess is we wait at least a year before we see anything, sequel or spin-off.

The good news is that the studio is profitable, hiring, and has a new engine. Odyssey cost me a thousand hours of productivity. Whatever comes next will probably cost me more, and I’ll be glad to pay it.

This time, my prediction is on the record. RimWorld 2, with your ship as your home. See you in a year.

Sources

Harsh, But Not Fair: On Silksong

2026-10-09T00:00:00Z

Hollow Knight was harsh but fair. Silksong, its long-awaited and long-delayed successor, is harsh and nothing else, and that difference is the whole of my complaint.

Let the record show, before the apologists assemble, that I knew what I was buying. One does not purchase a Team Cherry Metroidvania expecting a gentle stroll through a bug-themed petting zoo. One purchases it expecting to be beaten, repeatedly and with some enthusiasm. I accept the beating. What I do not accept is a beating administered by a referee who has quietly left the building.

I am roughly halfway through the game, pursuing 100% completion before the first DLC arrives, and I have yet to see the credits. Consider this, then, an interim report from the trenches rather than a final verdict from the summit. The trenches, I assure you, are informative.

The Standard Hollow Knight Set

My first Hollow Knight run was entirely blind. No wiki, no guides, no YouTube, no whispered counsel from friends. It felt like an adventure in the old sense of the word: hard, occasionally humiliating, and enormously rewarding to finish.

The difficulty in that game had a particular texture. A boss or a platforming gauntlet would provoke the time-honored reaction of “oh, fuck this,” and yet one kept going, because one could see the path. It sucked, but it was achievable. When I failed, the failure was mine, and the game was careful never to let me believe otherwise. That is what fairness means in a hard game: punishment proportionate to the offense, and a clear route to acquittal.

The Arithmetic of Suffering

The trouble starts with simple math. In Silksong, ordinary enemies hit for two masks of damage. Not bosses, not armored brutes, but creatures that look like mice. Hollow Knight reserved double damage for its heavy hitters, which is how a damage system communicates threat. When a rodent hits as hard as a warlord, the system has stopped communicating anything at all.

The other side of the ledger is no kinder. Early-game mice, frogs and small birds absorb around four needle strikes apiece. In the first game, four hits was what you paid to kill something genuinely dangerous. Meanwhile, the needle upgrade arrives deep into Act One, far later than its equivalent in Hollow Knight, so your damage output stays stunted for hours. You hit like a wet noodle, and the noodle is fighting rodents in plate armor.

A Hoarder’s Economy of Silk

Silk is the resource that fuels both Hornet’s healing and her special moves. On paper, Bind is generous: it works in midair and restores three masks. In practice, when every passing vermin takes two masks off you, three back is a rounding error. You are never fully healed and never able to breathe.

The predictable result is hoarding. The counter, the needle throw, the area attack and the rest of Hornet’s silk kit sit unused, because spending silk on offense means having none for Bind when the next ambush arrives around the corner. A toolkit you are afraid to use is not a toolkit. It is a display case.

Worse, certain enemy-dense or platforming-heavy stretches practically demand that you cheese for silk: step out of the room, whack an enemy, retreat, repeat, until the meter is full enough to risk going forward. In all my time with Hollow Knight, I never once had to farm enemies for soul. When a game teaches its players to grind like this, it has told on itself.

Benches, Runbacks, and the Long Walk of Shame

In Hollow Knight, bench placement was a language. A bench just ahead meant you were about to be in some deep shit, and the game was kind enough to warn you. Only two or three runbacks were truly atrocious, and even those came with a remedy: the Dreamgate, set with the Dream Nail, let you warp back to the doorstep of fights like Soul Master or the Traitor Lord without the trek.

Silksong has no such mercy. Benches sit far from the places you are most likely to die, and the walk back is long enough to reflect on every choice that brought you there. Areas like Sinner’s Road and Bilewater seem built expressly to troll you, and in Silksong the trolling is no longer the exception. It is the policy.

Then there are the benches that are themselves the joke. In Sinner’s Road, I came upon a bench that had to be repaired, and the only way to repair it was to cross a hyper-dangerous stretch first. Die along the way, and you wake up at the nearest working bench, which is not in Sinner’s Road at all but over in Greymoor. So you walk back through Greymoor, back through Sinner’s Road, back through the gauntlet, all to earn the privilege of a place to sit down.

Once, I found a bench that kills you for sitting on it: a trap bench, which must be disarmed before it will let you rest. There are other trolls besides, which you will avoid only if you have read a guide or been warned in advance. Hollow Knight never once pulled this. The closest thing it had was the paid bench, and paying for one, sometimes with barely enough Geo, felt like a small reward rather than an ambush. A bench in Hollow Knight was a promise of safety. In Silksong it is a punchline.

The Bosses Are Fine. Getting to Them Is Not.

In fairness to Team Cherry, the bosses themselves are not the problem. They are harder than Hollow Knight’s, considerably so. I have died to ordinary Silksong bosses about as many times as I died to Grimm, one of the first game’s genuinely brutal fights. Not even his Nightmare King form, which I also beat, but the original. In Silksong, nearly every boss sits at that altitude. But none of the ones I have faced has been unfair. Hard, yes. Cheap, no.

What spoils them is the runback. Hollow Knight usually kept a bench near the arena, so you could size up a boss, conclude “all right, I can beat this, it’ll just take time,” and get to work. In Silksong, a nearby bench is the rare exception. The usual arrangement is a platforming section between you and the fight, which you must clear without taking a single hit, because one lost mask on the way in can be the difference between victory and another long walk. So the cycle becomes: die, walk, get clipped, die, walk again. By the tenth trip the reaction is no longer “I can do this.” It is “man, fuck this.”

The fights themselves are long, too. Played well, a Silksong boss takes five or six minutes, the cost of a protagonist who still hits like she is underpowered. Five minutes sounds modest until you put it in sequence: the runback, four minutes of fighting, death, the runback, four minutes of fighting, death. That is not a challenge. It is a humiliation ritual.

The defense, inevitably, is that runbacks train you to use Hornet’s abilities. Surely the rest of the game can do that. When I am stuck on a boss, I want to fight the boss. I will gladly sharpen my platforming in a fresh area, where it feels like exploration, rather than on the same stretch of floor for the fortieth time.

Poverty as a Design Pillar

Everything in Silksong costs rosaries, the game’s currency, and you never have enough of them. Being broke in Hollow Knight was a verdict on you: you died carelessly, spent impulsively, or were saving for something. That is the good kind of scarcity, the kind that rewards planning.

Silksong’s scarcity is the other kind. It never feels like strategic rationing. It feels like a toll booth on every road, staffed by someone who has read your bank statement. The defense offered is that Pharloom is a different world with a different economy. Fine. A different world can still have a different economy that isn’t designed to keep the protagonist perpetually skint.

Sadism, Itemized

The platforming frequently asks for near frame-perfect execution. I am not a game journalist who cannot clear the Cuphead tutorial; I am a reasonably competent player. But a casual-to-decent player is plainly not who these sections were built for, and a single slip is punished with all the restraint of a Victorian magistrate.

Then there are the enemies parked squarely in your jump path. Not enemies you bait out of the way, which would be a puzzle, but enemies simply stuck there, so the only way past is to eat the hit. Perhaps there is a clever solution and I am too pea-brained to find it. If so, the game has hidden it very well.

Hidden is the operative word. In Mount Fay, there is a section with falling pillars that you must touch so they topple into the icy water and give you somewhere to stand without freezing to death. Nothing in the game hints at this. You either stumble onto it or you look it up.

And Bilewater. The community’s hatred of Bilewater is not hysteria; it is earned. The area is designed to punish, offers no meaningful reward for the punishment, and stands as the purest distillation of everything wrong with the game’s philosophy.

The cumulative effect is that I, a lifelong refuser of no-clip, god mode and exploits, have had to consult guides and YouTube videos to get through sections of Silksong. I have walked away from the game out of genuine frustration, not the productive kind of “let me think about this boss and come back.” I do not believe that is laziness on my part. I believe it is the design.

Pain Without Payoff

The obvious rebuttal is that Hollow Knight was sadistic too, and that I am remembering the summit while forgetting the climb. I concede part of it. Hollow Knight had the Path of Pain, which I never attempted, and Unbreakable Strength, which costs 15,000 Geo and a great deal of patience. I am also chasing 100% this time, which means walking into the hardest corners of the map on purpose. I do that because in the first game I missed things like Sharp Shadow, an easily missed upgrade that would have made several bosses and platforming sections far easier. I did not want to repeat that mistake.

But look at what Hollow Knight’s sadism paid. The Path of Pain is entirely optional and ends in a lore cutscene. Unbreakable Strength is arguably the best charm in the game. The suffering was rare, it was opt-in, and the reward matched the price. Silksong is full of miniature Paths of Pain, and at the end of them you find a flea, a single rosary, or a bit of craft metal. That is the real difference, and nostalgia does not explain it away: Hollow Knight charged a lot for something great, and Silksong charges a lot for pocket change.

The trolling fails the same test. A trap bench is funny in a YouTube reaction video. It is not funny when you have just finished a long trek on one mask and die to the thing that was supposed to save you. I play games to relieve stress, which I admit is an odd thing to say about a deliberately hard game. Hollow Knight managed it anyway. Silksong mostly adds to the pile.

A Confession, Without Honor

It has come to this. When I sense death approaching, I pause, quit to the menu, and reload my save. I wake up resting at a bench, with no corpse to retrieve and no penance to pay.

In Hollow Knight, dying meant your shade waited where you fell. Sometimes it was badly placed, but you could bait it toward you and deal with it on reasonable terms. I died, it was my fault, I went and got my shade. It sucked, but it was my bad. Silksong’s cocoon, the remains you must strike to recover what you lost, has a talent for settling above lava, icy water or spikes. One hit is all it takes, but landing that hit often means taking damage, and now you face the next stretch with fewer masks, at the end of a runback that was already too long.

So I quit out instead. I am not proud of it. I wanted to play this game with some kind of honor, the way I played the first one. But Silksong has made honor the expensive option, and it has trained me, a player who never touches exploits, into a save-scummer.

I am not alone in this, and the evidence is in the guides. Watch enough Silksong walkthroughs on YouTube and you will hear ordinary players, not speedrunners or professional streamers, advise you to pause, quit and reload once you reach the end of a long section, simply to avoid walking back. Hollow Knight solved the same problem with design: the end of a long trek usually rewarded you with a shortcut, a new traversal ability, or a door that opened back toward civilization. Save-quitting existed, but as a speedrunner’s trick, not as standard advice for a first playthrough. When the community’s best practice is to step outside the game to skip the game, the game is training its players to play it the way it was not meant to be played.

A Word to the Apologists

The standard defense runs as follows: Hornet is not the Knight. She is tactical rather than brute-force, her moveset is different, and the game should be judged on its own terms. I grant the premise. Hornet’s acrobatics are excellent, and I can pull off most of them.

But “tactical” is not a synonym for “underpowered,” and a different moveset does not explain why a frog needs four stabs. Nor does “it’s a different world” explain why that world’s economy is engineered to keep you broke. These are not arguments about identity. They are excuses for tuning, and the tuning is the problem.

The broader community has a shorter answer still: get good. Post a grievance on Reddit or any other forum and the replies arrive on schedule, two words long, and the post gets buried as “controversial.” When I went back to read about Hollow Knight’s bosses after my blind run, that community felt supportive; people explained, encouraged, and shared strategies. Silksong’s feels defensive, perhaps because people are defending their purchase, though at twenty dollars it is hardly a mortgage. But “get good” is not a rebuttal. It is a way of declining to have the argument, and when this many players raise the same complaints, the complaints deserve a hearing.

Credit Where It Is Due

None of this is a complaint about craft. Silksong looks gorgeous, and the soundtrack is incredible. The bosses are memorable, even when the memories are mostly of dying to them. The tools are a genuinely cool idea as a successor to Hollow Knight’s charms and spells, though, like the silk skills, they go underused because every shard spent feels like a shard you will need later.

As a successor to Hollow Knight, as a world and a story, Silksong earns its place. The underlying narrative is good and coherent, and it fits the universe. Pharloom feels deeper and more alive than Hallownest: half the things you whack turn out to be destructible, and the creatures are genuinely funny. There is real humor in this game. If I am honest, that humor, that world and my own stubbornness are the main things keeping me at it.

The art and the music are not the problem. The problem is the machinery underneath them, which turns a beautiful game into a pain in the ass.

Who Was This Built For?

I am not a game designer. I am a guy with a job and responsibilities who likes to play video games. So take this as a theory from the cheap seats.

After Hollow Knight’s release, Team Cherry kept adding harder content, culminating in the Godmaster update, a boss-rush gauntlet of hell built for the most serious and advanced players. Around it grew a spectator culture of people beating every boss without taking a single hit, and audiences watching in awe. My suspicion is that Team Cherry looked at that crowd, along with years of fans begging for a sequel, and concluded that difficulty was the thing people wanted most. So they turned it up, adding hazards and punishments without the careful tuning that made the original fun.

The result is a game calibrated for the hitless crowd. Hollow Knight was something most ordinary players could finish blind, and I did. Silksong seems to have forgotten that ordinary player exists. Difficulty was never the whole appeal of Hollow Knight. Fair difficulty was.

Verdict

Difficulty is a contract. The game agrees to be hard, and in exchange it agrees that the player can win through skill and persistence. Hollow Knight honored that contract to the letter. Silksong keeps the first half and treats the second as optional.

I will finish it. I am stubborn, the DLC is coming, and 100% completion does not achieve itself. But I cannot recommend it the way I recommend its predecessor, without caveats and with enthusiasm.

I felt like a masochist for returning to Hollow Knight too, but it was a different kind of masochism. Hollow Knight was a hike up a mountain: hard, dangerous, beautiful, and when you reached the top and told people about it, they said “wow, I might try that someday.” Silksong is walking barefoot across hot coals with no camera rolling, for no views and no reward, purely to say you did it. And when you tell people, the response is not admiration. It is “why the hell would you do that?”

Hollow Knight I finished out of love. Silksong I am finishing out of spite.

Read the Book First. Read the Manga First. I Don't Make the Rules.

2026-07-08T00:00:00Z

Here’s my whole personality in one sentence: if it started as a book, I’m reading the book. If it started as a manga, I’m reading the manga. I will not be doing the anime “without the fillers.” I will not be doing the Netflix adaptation with the guy from that other show. I am going to sit down with the raw material the creator actually made, and you are not going to talk me out of it.

I know this is not a rare opinion. Everyone says they’d rather read the book. Almost nobody actually does it. That’s the part that gets me — it’s not that the take is original, it’s that it’s one of the easiest ways to not be lazy, and people still skip it.

Let’s talk about the manga thing specifically, because this is where I get religious. You will show me a YouTube thumbnail with the title “LOOK HOW GRUESOME THE MANGA IS COMPARED TO THE ANIME” or “WOW, THEY SAID THIS IN THE BOOK?!” and my reaction is always the same: yeah, no shit. Of course the manga hits different. It’s the actual thing. The anime is what happens after a production committee, a broadcast standards department, and whoever’s writing the FCC compliance memo all take a pass at it. What you’re watching is a photocopy of a photocopy, and then someone made a thumbnail acting shocked that the original ink looks better than the toner.

And don’t even start with me about “just watch One Piece without the fillers.” I’ve heard this argument my whole life. It is still, somehow, more time-consuming and less faithful than just reading the manga. You are not saving time. You are choosing the long way and calling it the short way because it has a soundtrack.

Now — I want to be clear I’m not a snob about this. I like movies. I like TV. There are adaptations I genuinely enjoy on their own terms. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve just found myself reaching for the book first, every time, and I’ve stopped feeling weird about it. Because here’s what I actually think is going on:

Watching an adaptation before the source is like taking a three-star dinner, dumping it in a Vitamix, and eating it as baby food. Somebody spent years getting the seasoning right. You’re drinking it through a straw because chewing felt like effort.

Media consumption in general is already the laziest thing a person can do with their evening — I’m not pretending reading a manga makes you a Rhodes Scholar. But there’s a real difference between sitting there while a screen tells you everything, and reading something where your brain has to build the room, the faces, the pacing, the silence between the lines. One of those is your imagination doing work. The other is a very expensive babysitter.

Now, the pushback I get every time is “the source material is hard to find.” I don’t buy it. If you’re the kind of person reading an opinion piece on the internet, you have more than enough brainpower and willpower to go find a book. The publisher’s own site probably sells it. There are used copies on eBay for a few bucks. There are manga subscription services now — plural. You can sideload an EPUB or a CBZ onto an e-reader in about four minutes. And look, I’m not condoning piracy, I’m just saying it exists and it’s not exactly a locked vault either. Point is: with the amount of legitimate, dirt-cheap, low-effort options available to you in 2026, “I couldn’t find it” isn’t a real obstacle. It’s an excuse dressed up as an obstacle.

And here’s the actual payoff, beyond just “reading is good for you”: once you put in that small bit of effort, you get to actually say you’ve read The Lord of the Rings. Not “I watched the trilogy,” — you read the books. You get to actually say you’ve read the Dune saga. You get to actually say you’ve read Akira, and now you can talk about what the film kept, what it cut, and why both versions are worth having an opinion about, instead of just having watched one of them and nodding along. That’s not nothing. You’ve quietly moved yourself into a smaller, better-informed room. Whatever that’s worth — and I’d argue it’s worth something — you earned it for the price of a used paperback and a little bit of your evening.

So that’s the opinion. It’s not complicated, it’s not new, and I’m sure someone’s going to reply to this with “well actually the anime added scenes that improved on the source” — sure, sometimes, and I’ll die on the hill that those are the exception that proves the rule. Nine times out of ten, you’re better off skipping the middleman and going straight to whoever actually had the idea.

Read the book. Read the manga. Then, if you want, watch the show — you’ll notice everything they cut, and you’ll know exactly why it doesn’t hit as hard.

A Cypherpunk's Manifesto

1993-03-09T00:00:00Z

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems.

Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than rumor.

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.

Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy.

Let us proceed together apace.

Onward.

— Eric Hughes