Guide to Homestuck for Phone

A guide for new Homestuck fans—how to read the comic, what Homestuck is, a complete reading order, and more.
Everything except the main how to read it part is copied from the homestuck.net guide for convenience.


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What is Homestuck?

(Copy/pasted from homestuck.net)

Homestuck is a very long webcomic with a quirky style of narration and presentation that makes it look like an old text adventure game—but really, it’s just a linear story that you read and watch, barring some of the flash games. People call Homestuck a multimedia masterpiece because it’s got musical segments, playable set pieces, cool animations and everything the World Wide Web will allow an artist to put in it.

The plot of Homestuck is infamously convoluted but boils down to: four kids who know each other online play a video game together, inadvertently causing the apocalypse. To beat the game, they have to interact with the game world’s characters, and with a disgruntled group of internet trolls.


How to read Homestuck

You could just go to homestuck.com and start reading. Do not do that. Until 2020, Homestuck used the now-dead Flash in order to display animations and occasionally games. Now that Flash is dead, nearly all of the animations and some games have been replaced with very low quality YouTube videos. Most of them dont even go up to 720p.

Unofficial Homestuck Collection

Might as well just copy/paste the description. This is an online port of The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, a desktop collection of Homestuck and its related works. TUHC is developed by Bambosh and Gio (and some other great folks), while this port in particular is written, maintained, and hosted as an experiment by Gio.
This is meant as a way to use the offline homestuck collection in a browser, for people on mobile or platforms that don't have a proper version, or as an "on-ramp" if you're just getting into Homestuck and aren't sure if you want to commit yet.

Read Homestuck

A lot of this guide is kind of irrelevant now, since it was written before that was an option and phone users had to compromise.
But the parts about the flash games I believe still are relevant and will continue to be for at least a while. They're games, they were made for computers, and phones don't have keyboards and all that jazz. Also, if it isnt working for whatever reason, probably good to have another option.

I can't use that for some reason!

Don't worry! I had a whole plan for this already, back when the UHC was Computers Only™.

Browser

In order to read Homestuck in the best possible way (that I can think of, excluding the UHC), you will need a browser that supports Chrome extensions. I do not know what one is best for Apple, or if there is one, because I do not use Apple. If you use Android, I reccomend Kiwi Browser as it is the one I use and can explain from the viewpoint of. It will probably be similar for most browsers, though.

Extension

For emulating Flash, you can use Ruffle or Flash Player Enabler. Both are good, but Ruffle is better. If youre using the latter, whenever you see a youtube video embedded in a page you have to put ?fl=1 at the end of the URL after the page number.
Do not do this for [S] Cascade. They broke that, and you will just end up waiting for it to load forever. It is uploaded on Newgrounds, watch it through there. If it doesn't work on your device, there are various YouTube uploads for you to choose from.

Games

There are multiple Flash games embedded into Homestuck. They require a keyboard to do anything, and therefore do not work on phone.
You have 3 options, listed in descending order of how faithful they are to the intended experience/ascending order of how convenient they are:

  • Get one of those apps to bring up the keyboard whenever you want, but in my experience they have been closing immediately if theres not a text field so they may not work for you also
  • Deal with how they ported them on homestuck.com, if they did, in which case you should play the music in a different tab than you do stuff in so that it doesn't cut out
  • Look up a gameplay video

Some of the flash games are actually HTML5. You will not need a flash emulator.
The HTML5 games do not work on phone. Even though it is explicitly stated that "[the HTML5 ports] enable mobile viewing for all pages," that is not true. Why they said that is beyond me.
Good gameplay videos were strikingly hard to find, so page 5263 is here, page 5308 here and page 5398 here.

Commit all of that to memory, or just come back here I guess, and go to homestuck.com to read.

Edit

Pub: 04 Mar 2023 23:57 UTC

Edit: 02 Aug 2023 12:21 UTC

Views: 393