DEV Community: Derek Chen

Helldivers 2 Storage Crisis Solved

Derek Chen — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:23:39 +0000

Announced in Arrowhead Studio’s “Tech Blog 2”, the PC version of the videogame Helldivers 2 has undergone a significant transformation in how it handles storage. What began as a technically driven approach to support older hard drives eventually resulted in a much larger installation footprint than most players expected. As the community dug into the game’s file structure and shared their findings, Arrowhead evaluated the situation and began reworking the underlying system, resulting in early public betas being released, successfully cutting down the game install size by over 100 GB.

Here’s a timeline detailing the issue, and how the developers listened to the community and implemented a standard of optimization we can only hope for more AAA studios to adopt.

Background

When Helldivers 2 launched on PC in 2024, its install size was large but not unusual for a modern game. With how much fun it was during those first months in Spring of 2024, it was easy to overlook the weight of the game’s installation files. Over the following updates, however, the game grew steadily, eventually surpassing 150 GB, far larger than the console versions even though maps, features, and gameplay remained the same. Players began to wonder why the game needed so much space, especially compared with other titles of similar size and scope.
Community members who looked into the game’s files found that a significant portion of the data consisted of duplicated assets, originally designed to help players using older mechanical hard drives (HDDs) by placing frequently used files in multiple locations, reducing load times on slower drives. By late 2025, what had started as a technical optimization for legacy hardware had become a widely noticed storage issue, especially for players with limited SSD space.

Date / Period	Event / Discovery / Action
Launch 2024	Helldivers 2 releases on PC. The base install size is already sizable, with some users citing over 100 GB for early builds according to player discussions.
2024 to Early 2025	Gradual growth with each content update or patch, the installed size increases. Players begin to notice that updates feel large and the install footprint keeps growing even when content additions seem modest according to community posts.
June 2025	On community forums and Reddit, several players report that after a recent update the game’s file size jumped to approximately 120 GB. Some express concern that repeated patches are compounding storage demands. Users draw comparisons with the smaller installation size on consoles, which used Sony’s Kraken compression according to forum discussions.
Mid / Late 2025 pre-October	Through player-driven file audits and aggregated reports, the community begins to understand the root cause as massive asset duplication within the PC build. Some reports claim that while total install size exceeds 130–150 GB, the unique content is much smaller meaning the rest is duplicated data according to community research and statements on data duplication.
Early October 2025	Official acknowledgement: Arrowhead Game Studios published a “Tech Blog #1 – Install Size” explaining that the PC version’s 150 GB+ install size is largely due to duplicated data originally intended to optimize HDD loading. They note that this makes the PC install around three times larger than the console version. Arrowhead begins exploring long-term solutions such as removing HDD-specific duplication, optimizing data architecture, and preparing a revised build aimed at reducing storage demands according to reporting on developer plans.
December 2, 2025	Major update, “slim version” beta released on PC. With the help of porting-specialist Nixxes Software, Arrowhead optimizes a vast portion of the game’s data. The official PC Installation Size entry for the patch notes reports a reduction from approximately 154 GB down to 23 GB saving roughly 131 GB or 85 percent. They note this is more optimistic than previously anticipated, with much less negative impact on HDD users according to Steam patch notes.
December 2–3, 2025	Community reaction: many players test the slim build and report success. On Reddit and other forums, players express surprise and relief at how much space is freed. Some note they can reinstall Helldivers 2 without sacrificing other large games according to player testimonials on the beta release.
Post-beta / December 2025 onward	The developers confirm there are no content or gameplay changes. The slim build retains full parity with the legacy version including the same maps, progression, and multiplayer compatibility. They plan to roll out the slim version as the default for all PC users once testing completes according to developer statements and media coverage.

Conclusion

The release of the slim build for Helldivers 2 is proof of how much modern games can be optimized. That the PC version is now roughly the same size as Portal 2, a game released over a decade ago, highlights just how much unnecessary data had accumulated and suggests that many other large titles could benefit from similar efficiency improvements. While this is still a beta, the fact that Arrowhead has delivered a tangible result after months of smaller updates is encouraging. It shows a commitment to performance and player experience, particularly for those who had been advocating for a focus on optimization over constant content releases.

I think it’s funny how people are drawing comparisons to notoriously large titles like Call of Duty, which shows just how significant these optimizations are in today’s gaming landscape and how big studios probably have the capacity to do so.

Sources / More Reading

UT Registration Plus: An Overview

Derek Chen — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 22:46:27 +0000

Background

Around 2023/2024, my friends and I began working on an overhaul of the UT Registration Plus extension, which had already been in the university ecosystem for years prior thanks to Sriram Hariharan, and today it has over 60,000 active users on campus!

Check it out here: https://github.com/Longhorn-Developers/UT-Registration-Plus

Course Registration...

A biannual event students know all to well.
At UT each semester you go through a standard registration process: meet with your academic adviser (if required), check the course schedule for each class’s unique number and prereqs, clear any registration holds, then log in at your assigned access time and enter unique numbers one by one to try and secure the classes you want.

It’s a process everyone knows, waking up early to catch your access window, refreshing the page again and again, rushing to copy/paste unique numbers, hoping your gen-ed or major-req courses don’t get snatched by hundreds (or thousands) of other Longhorns before you even blink. Students describe registration as chaotic, time-consuming, and often “a free-for-all” where missing a second can cost you a seat.

Because of that pressure, many of us (myself included) fell back on spreadsheets or Google Docs, pasting dozens of possible classes and backups, juggling unique numbers and alternate schedules, crossing our fingers. But that method was messy, fragile, and not unified; there was no official supported way to manage all that.

What UT Registration Plus does

Jeez this is beginning to sound like an ad

Build and save multiple schedule options ahead of time so you’re not stuck with just one plan when registration opens.
Instantly view time conflicts or overlaps, so you don’t end up with back-to-back classes or impossible gaps.
See class & professor data (grade distributions, syllabi, prerequisites, past course history) no need to flip through a dozen tabs or edit long spreadsheets.
Easily share your schedules with friends, or import/export them helpful if you’re coordinating group projects, roommate classes, or backup options.
Color-code and organize your classes visually (not as bland rows of numbers) makes planning way simpler than a messy spreadsheet.
Minimize stress during registration windows; you go in prepared, know your options, and react fast when courses fill up.

(I'm probably forgetting a ton of additional cool features later devs have added lol)

Shoutout to the team at the time, Dhruv Arora, Derek Chen (me!), Som Gupta, Samuel Gunter, Diego Perez, Isaiah David Rodriguez, Elie Soloveichik, Vinson Zheng.

The PaperMC Hard Fork

Derek Chen — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 22:55:15 +0000

Pictured: A herobrine statue built on the UT Austin Minecraft server because I thought it looked cool

On December 13, 2024, PaperMC officially announced a major restructuring of its project infrastructure, initiating a hard fork from Spigot, the upstream server software it had previously built upon. This brief essay hopes to inform on the recent news.

Context (Minecraft server software lore)

Visiting the Bukkit repository today nets you this takedown notice.

Minecraft multiplayer spans a wide range of experiences from massive public servers like Hypixel to small survival worlds shared among a few school friends. All of these multiplayer environments are powered by server software, which runs the game logic, manages player connections, and supports customizations through plugins or mods. Server software such as Bukkit, Spigot, and PaperMC allows administrators to extend Minecraft’s core functionality , adding commands, mini-games, permissions systems, and performance optimizations .

PaperMC originated as a fork of Spigot, which itself forked from Bukkit. Around 2014, Bukkit was eventually removed from GitHub due to a complex series of legal tensions involving the developers, Mojang, and the Minecraft plugin community, though that’s a simplified explanation (another paper on that soon!). Since then, Paper and Spigot have existed as two of the primary options for hosting a Minecraft server, with Paper introducing many features, most notably performance optimizations.

The hard fork in December 2024 marked the end of this dependency. PaperMC developers cited the limitations imposed by Spigot’s closed development model as a key reason for the change. because Spigot’s update process remained closed source, with new Minecraft versions and API features developed behind closed doors. This hindered PaperMC’s ability to begin work on snapshots, pre-releases, or experimental builds until Spigot had released their internal updates.

It’s important to note, briefly, the reason behind Spigot’s private state, stemming back to the aforementioned Bukkit DMCA drama. As a legal workaround, Spigot introduced BuildTools, requiring users to locally generate server jars.

PaperMC

Paper currently holds a dominant share of the Minecraft server software ecosystem, particularly for recent versions. Estimates based on plugin statistics (e.g., bStats) suggested Paper accounted for 85–90% of usage on modern Minecraft builds.

Given this disparity, most active plugin developers prioritized Paper compatibility. Some developers formally dropped Spigot support, focusing instead on Paper’s API and transitioning projects, such as hyperdefined’s ToolStats plugin. Others discontinued legacy plugins entirely, citing the reduced relevance of backward compatibility under the new model.

While Spigot continued to offer a more conservative development environment, it was increasingly isolated from the mainstream plugin ecosystem due to slow version updates, leading to PaperMC developers choosing to do a hard fork and become an independent project.

Continued Plugin Compatibility Post-Fork

Following the hard fork, plugins designed for pre-1.21.4 versions of Spigot continued to function on Paper. Compatibility remained intact unless plugins started depending on newly added Spigot API features not included in Paper.

Our Paper server (derex smp) plugins were made for Spigot but remain compatible

The vast majority of plugins that previously worked on Spigot continued to operate on Paper without an issue. This included popular tools such as WorldEdit and WorldGuard.

However, for future plugin work, developers were advised to compile plugins against Paper’s API moving forward to avoid accidental reliance on unsupported Spigot-specific additions. While Paper no longer pulls all upstream Spigot changes, the team retains discretion to cherry-pick useful features or maintain temporary remapping tools to ease the transition.

Implications for Server Administrators and Plugin Developers

Server administrators running Paper saw no immediate disruption. Configuration files (bukkit.yml, spigot.yml) and plugins based on earlier Spigot versions continued to function. However, with each subsequent Minecraft release, plugin compatibility may diverge further, especially for new or experimental features.

Plugin developers using paperweight-userdev tooling were advised to prepare for Mojang-mapped server environments. Paper introduced startup flags (e.g., -Dpaper.disablePluginRemapping=true) to simplify this transition. Obfuscation was expected to be phased out, allowing easier debugging and support for multi-version development.

While abandoned plugins might eventually break due to API divergence, Paper’s community has historically been proactive in forking or replacing such projects. The team also indicated a willingness to support popular plugins or collaborate with their maintainers to ensure continuity.

Conclusion

The hard fork underscores philosophical differences between the two platforms. Paper’s stance prioritizes progress and rapid adoption of new vanilla features, even at the cost of legacy support. In contrast, Spigot maintains a stability-first approach designed to preserve compatibility with older plugin ecosystems.

As Paper continues to evolve independently, older and widely-used Spigot plugins that do not migrate may remain exclusive to Spigot or eventually become abandoned, potentially prompting others to create their own forks to maintain compatibility. This scenario raises the possibility of niche communities gravitating back to Spigot if compatibility breaks in Paper become too severe, mirroring trends seen in version-specific communities within Minecraft’s modding scene.

Sources

Brought to you by derex_, derec4, derexXD, dereXD, derexwq, DereC_, CORRUPT_Greninja, lordnexus123, or whatever iteration of my username we are on at this point.

DEV Community: Derek Chen

Helldivers 2 Storage Crisis Solved

Background

Conclusion

Sources / More Reading

UT Registration Plus: An Overview

Background

Course Registration...

What UT Registration Plus does

The PaperMC Hard Fork

Context (Minecraft server software lore)

PaperMC

Continued Plugin Compatibility Post-Fork

Implications for Server Administrators and Plugin Developers

Conclusion

Sources

Helldivers 2 Storage Crisis Solved