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Thronebutt is a website that is officially integrated within Nuclear Throne. While server hosting is done by Vlambeer the site is run by Team Thronebutt who are mainly volunteers and work largely independently. The website hosts active leaderboard tracking for the current daily and weekly challenges but also includes an archive for every past challenge, all-time leaderboards for cumulative kill counts, and user profiles to see various run stats all automatically added for anyone who participates in the Steam version of the game.
Thronebutt Features - Leaderboards
Thronebutt actively tracks Daily and Weekly leaderboards, scores are added pretty much automatically upon a run being submitted. Rank is determined by the player's score which is based on kills, distance does not factor into ranking. The data shown for each player is as follows:
- The player's steam picture & name.
- What mutant they were playing as and what skin they were using.
- Loop and Area that they died or ended a run on.
- Kills upon death, post-mortem kills are not counted.
From here any individual run can be expanded to view additional stats.
- Mutations, which will list ultra mutation first then mutations in the same default order of the mutations' ID, NOT the order they took the mutations.
- Weapons, which will show what weapons they were carrying upon death.
- Crown, if applicable, will show what crown was being carried upon death.
- Killed By, will show the death cause of the player unless if the run results in a victory. A full list of death IDs can be found here (link to specific part later)
Each page will display 30 entries. Sometimes the last page will not display any scores, but the URL can be edited to simply go back a page from there to see the actual last place runs. Some entire pages will lead to an error page, which is most likely due to some profiles causing an error for the entire page. This makes some scores unviewable outside of individual profiles.
After rollover the daily/weekly will display the top 5 runs from the previous daily/weekly, and the leaderboard will start with a blank slate. If playing a daily or weekly challenge and it is not finished by rollover there is a chance that the run will get disconnected from Thronebutt and end as a normal run and not submit to the leaderboards. Dailies that successfully submit after rollover will be applied to the proper daily from the previous day; weeklies after rollover will instead be added to the leaderboard of the next week - however high scoring runs submitted to the following weekly are likely to get purged from the leaderboard.
Next is the All-Time Stats which adds the total kill count of every daily & weekly combined from a player. The total kill count should update right away as well after a run is submitted to reflect the player's overall score. As current rank is broken on profiles, the only way to see true rank is through these pages. One can simply edit the url and jump around pages wildly until they match it up with their total killcount as seen from their personal Thronebutt profile.
Last is the archives, which is a useful tool to show any daily/weekly as far back as February 21st, 2016 when this iteration of Thronebutt started to track the leaderboards. The menu for dates can be annoying to navigate especially on mobile, the URL can simply be edited to jump around dates faster as well. Dailies use archive/DDMMYYYY in their url while Weeklies use archive/WWYYYY, with WW being the week starting from 01 all the way up to 52.
(If viewing an error page sometimes /about will appear in the header page, which similarly just leads to another error. This was used on the old Thronebutt website and is now just a useless function.)
Thronebutt Features - Syncing Account
Everyone who plays a daily or weekly has a profile on Thronebutt by default. Each Thronebutt profile has a unique ID assigned to them upon playing their first daily/weekly challenge. Additionally, any player can optionally sync their steam account with the website which gives a few features, as follows:
- 'Your Profile' will replace the log in box upon syncing. That offers quick linking to one's own Thronebutt profile at any time. The rank provided underneath the name has been broken for years.
- On the mini-profile there is also a Twitch button that lets one enter their Twitch username for others to see that also use the website. To remove it, simply just erase the name and enter a blank box.
- Customization, which lets one pick a profile background for their specific Thronebutt profile that everyone will see upon viewing it.
- Aside from the default background there are 5 options. 3 backgrounds are taken from the sidebars in game(Rogue's theme, YV's theme, and Crown Vault theme), while 2 backgrounds are taken from promo art being Crystal with a sledgehammer and Fish fighting a Snowbot.
- An easy to find 'compare' button on other player's Thronebutt profiles to compare your stats against theirs.
- If not wanting to sync compare option can still be used - just add /compare/ID1/ID2 on to the end of a url. ID1 and ID2
- Being able to see the Run Tracker, further details below.
Thronebutt Features - Profile
The profile overview starts with name and avatar at the top, as well as a link to the steam account. If applicable, there will be a Twitch link if the player set one and a Compare button if logged in and viewing another profile. The All-time rank has been broken for years, the only way to accurately view current placement is through the all-time stats page and manually finding what page your kill count puts you at.
The right top will display a Badges section. There are a total of 3 badges with 2 normally attainable.
- Wins Badge appears upon winning at least 1 daily or weekly challenge and serves as an active tracker for the total amount of challenges won.
- Experience Badge is given to anyone who participates in a daily or weekly challenge. The exact number doesn't mean too much - you get 5 XP per. daily/weekly played, 2 XP per. 100 kills, and XP based on in-game level multiplied by 5.
- Thronebutt Staff is not normally attainable, and is reserved to developers or moderators of the website as a recognition of their contributions.
Records features the player's best achievements.
- Total Kills is the total kill count across all dailies/weeklies played.
- Below that is the most runs done with a specific character; broke years ago and just shows 1 instead of the mutant name.
- Highest score simply pulls the best kill count from the highscores listed below anyways.
- Below that is the most runs died with a specific weapon, which also just shows 1 instead of the weapon name.
- Highscores is listed below which will show the 5 best runs based on kill count, where the stats for each run can be viewed easily.
Next is the graphs section, which features more in-depth stats about a specific player not seen anywhere else.
- Characters will be a pie graph showing the makeup of each daily played by a specific character. There is no way to differentiate between skins used.
- If an obscene amount of dailies are played then characters with very few plays will be almost impossible to see on the graph (usually relegated to Skeleton/Frog). Aside from zooming in, inspect element to find the data also works.
- Weapons tracks the total number of runs that were ended holding a specific weapon, however on the normal Thronebutt website there is no functional way to view these.
- Rank History will display a line graph for each rank for each latest score that is a daily - weeklies are not added to this graph. Numbers are listed as negatives just for graph formatting, the closer a number is to 0 the better the performance that day.
- Score Over Time will show how the overall kill count improved over the last 30 runs played between dailies and weeklies.
Latest Scores section is simple, it will show the last 30 runs played between dailies and weeklies. If a run is submitted while it appears automatically on the leaderboards, it takes a few minutes for latest scores to update. Dailies and weeklies are differentiated between red and blue calendars respectively.
Tracker is a tab only viewable to the player's own self if logged in. It serves as a tracker for vanilla runs, which doesn't effect anything else on the site but is more of a personal tool.
In order to enable the tracker one must go into settings from the Nuclear Throne menu and navigate to the Game tab (or Game -> Mechanics if on the latest beta) and select to enable the stream key.
From here any run above 60 kills will appear on the tracker section, though will be limited to specific data, that being just date with timestamp, character, area and kills. Mutations/weapons/crown/death cause are not stored here. Secret areas will appear as their numbering in the code rather than in-game, for instance dying in pizza sewers would display 102-1 as the area instead of 2-?.
Thronebutt's Bugs
While a useful site Thronebutt is also flawed in terms of a multitude of bugs, here's some common and less common things to be on a lookout for as they may create gaps in data/understanding of the site.
- All-Time Rank: Player's profiles/miniprofiles will incorrectly list the wrong rank. Bug appeared around March of 2020, everyone's rank permanently froze on their profiles. Any new TB profile after that date will just show their rank as #1 by default.
- Broken Pages: Sometimes entire pages will be unviewable because of a broken account.
- Weapon Data: Users profiles will not list the names of most weapons used, nor the most character played on the Overview. Numbers are still added as intended, just not the names of the weapons.
- Some data will not appear correctly for a runs statistics.
- Many lesser known deathflags will appear as broken images, but the death cause can still be deciphered by matching the deathflag to its death ID.
- Cluster Launcher will appear as a broken image for runs that die using it.
- Some data will not appear at all for a runs statistics. Runs that have Heavy Heart mutation or Skeleton's Damnation ultra will not display them properly.
Thronebutt's Origins
Thronebutt's first iteration went live in January 2015 and was a site that took daily information directly from the leaderboard. It was a fan site created by Darwin and ran on donations for maintenance and hosting. While the site was popular in the community, it also was fairly limited in its early stages due what information was shared over steams' servers.
The original TB stayed up for about 9 months, when in October 2015 update 94 released and featured weekly challenges which caused the site to go down; however this was just the nail in the coffin after multiple issues were mounting over time. On the thronebutt site, which was reposted to reddit, a message announcing the shutdown shared all the issues were addressed leading to the shutdown. This including no reliable way to pay for the servers, steam servers giving limited info, and a lack of time and interest. The code for the site and database was left with Darwin's parting words, as this was supposedly the end of Thronebutt's short but well spent life.
This was fortunately not the end, as Vlambeer took notice and offered to officially integrate Thronebutt with Nuclear Throne for server hosting, while Team Thronebutt still operated largely independently based off of volunteer work. The site was ultimately down for just 4 months when on February 21st, 2016, the site officially launched again with daily/weekly challenge tracking. Any data from the 2015 was not carried over to the new website, however all the data since 2016 has been consistently tracked to present time with any past daily/weekly still able to be viewed in the archives back to that date.
Since then Thronebutt itself remained relatively the same over the years. There are some features that do not work properly anymore (list above later), it still works as a functional leaderboard for any player on steam. This remained true for 8 years until March of 2024, where due to hosting issues Thronebutt ran into major hosting issues with weeks of downtime. This was during the time that JW was aquiring all of Vlambeer as the new sole owner, which has now led to Thronebutt being rebuilt and hopefully add many more features on top of that. (edit later with a happier ending?)
At the bottom of Thronebutt it links to various tools and socials, however some links are to pages that are no longer operational. These are as follows;
- ThroneStats was a stats overlay that picked up data during a run (such as weapons using, crowns) primarily used for Twitch streamers. Made by Lietu, the site likely went down in 2016.
- ThroneFeed was a similar stats overlay that displayed data found in the pause screen (area, loop, kill count) that was primarily used for streamers. Made by harrewarre, the site went down sometime after 2018.
- Throne2speech was not directly linked on TB but was on Stats/Feed sites, was another streamer tool made by Lietu that would use text 2 speech in order to actively commentate over a player's actions during a run.
While these sites are no longer operational, they would all link each other as sort of sister sites and are worth remembering, as well as Thronebutt's origins as a whole, where it started as just a fan project and has now become a staple of Throne for the whole community.