Community site

The Apparatus community site was a website connected to the game where you could upload and play user created levels, available at apparatusgame.com. It was launched around the game’s release, and was running all the way up to early 2018 when it was shut down alongside the official Principia community site.

Compared to the community site for Principia, the Apparatus community site was extremely basic. Due to user pages not being paginated, regular players would create multiple accounts and chain them together when uploading more than 20 levels. The comment input fields were also initially not sanitised from HTML, leading to an incident sometime in 2013 where a troll defaced the pages of many levels by injecting HTML and CSS through the comments section.

After some time past the 1.1 release, the moderation presence on the community site from Bithack was close to zero. The state of the community site past that point was nothing short of chaotic with trolls and spam running rampant, but somehow ran autonomously all the way up to early 2018 when it was shut down.

Unlike for Principia, there is no archive available for old levels that were uploaded to the official community site and nobody had scraped the levels that were available on the community site was up. However the levels are not completely lost, and may be made available sometime in the future.

apparatus-web

In a similar way to principia-web for Principia, ROllerozxa started apparatus-web as an unofficial community site for Apparatus back in 2021. It was later shut down in 2024 due to inactivity and ROllerozxa wanting to focus more on Principia after the release of its source code.

In total only 5 people registered and 31 levels were uploaded. An archive of the levels uploaded and a database dump with sensitive information stripped can be found on the Internet Archive.

The source code which ran apparatus-web can be found on GitHub, which includes implementations of the internal pages that the game uses to communicate with the server.