The Razor Viper only weighs around two ounces, but it still has a class-leading response time of only 0.2 milliseconds. It measures 4.7 by 2.1 by 1.5 inches, so it’s comfortable to hold.

Over the weekend, it emerged that Valve’s Anti-Cheat software (VAC) was scanning your computer’s internet history and reporting a list of visited websites back to Valve. Obviously, the internet immediately entered a state of privileged outrage, spitting apoplectically and claiming that Valve was spying on our porn-surfing habits. According to Valve CEO Gabe Newell, though, who took to Reddit to officially respond to the claims, VAC does nothing of the sort — it does search your internet history, but it only looks for very specific markers left behind by certain cheats. Your surfing history is never sent to Valve, and they don’t care about which porn sites you visit.

The Steam Winter Sale is on now! Find great deals on thousands of games! Plus, vote for your favorite games in the 2020 Steam Awards. Unfortunately as cheating is not allowed in the game, there's always a risk of getting banned for using cheats. Any cheat that claims to be undetectable is misleading you as it's impossible to make software that cannot be detected when the game is running.

The original furore stems from a VAC module (DLL file) that was reverse engineered by an enterprising code monkey. The code appeared to go through your local DNS cache (ipconfig /displaydns), and then reporting its findings to Valve. The DNS cache, without turning this into a story about networking, basically has a list of every domain name (and the associated IP address) that your computer’s network adapter has requested. This includes the websites you visit in a browser, but also any domains that you might connect to when gaming, BitTorrenting, etc. The DNS cache essentially has a complete record of every internet service that you’ve touched in some way. Any program running on your PC has access to your DNS cache.

A snippet of the VAC DLL that reads your DNS cache [See the full code dump]

You can see why, at first blush, there was a lot of outrage about VAC’s (apparent) behavior. Just 24 hours later, however, Gabe Newell himself emerged and assuaged all of our fears. In short, VAC does read your DNS cache, but it’s explicitly searching for entries that correlate with specific cheats. Basically, most of the best cheats (i.e. cheats that get around VAC) are commercial — and to prevent the cheats from being pirated (oh the irony) most of them contain DRM. The cheat connects to a remote server to see if the user’s license is valid — thus leaving an entry in the DNS cache. VAC catches that entry, and thus bans the user. Gaben says that, in this case, “Less than a tenth of one percent of clients” were caught out by VAC’s DNS cache parsing. “570 cheaters are being banned as a result.”

Furthermore, Newell notes that this particular feature of VAC no longer works. “New cheats are created all the time, detected, banned, and tweaked. This specific VAC test for this specific round of cheats was effective for 13 days, which is fairly typical. It is now no longer active as the cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers’ client machines.”

All this is actually fairly normal fare for developers of online games. There is always a cat-and-mouse game between cheat makers (which stand to make a large amount of money), and the developer, which stands to lose a lot of trust and money if cheats go unchecked. Unfortunately, this necessitates that anti-cheating solutions like VAC must themselves be mysterious, include questionable functionality such as reading your DNS cache, and be hard for cheat makers to reverse engineer. As always with any software that we run on our computer, we must ultimately trust that the developer won’t do anything nefarious — and in the case of Valve, it has a pretty faultless record when it comes to being trustworthy. I mean, Gabe frickin’ Newell responded directly on Reddit! What more do you want?

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Frequently Asked Questions

Technical

How can I delete a save?

On windows, your save files can be found at “%LOCALAPPDATA%/Cattails”, where you can manually delete or move your saves.

I’m lagging at night time or in certain areas in the game, how can I fix this?

If your game is lagging, try heading into the video settings and turning “FancyLight” OFF.

What is Cattails made with?

GameMaker: Studio 1.4 is used to make Cattails.

I have the music soundtrack, where can I find it?

On Steam, hover over “Library” in the top left, and a drop-down menu should appear, with “Music” being one of the options. If Cattails is not in the list, in the very top left, go to Steam >> Settings >> Music >> Scan now. This should scan the folder with your steam music in it, and update your music tab with the Cattails soundtrack. If you still can not see it, and had purchased alpha or beta access of the game, make sure you have redeemed your “Deluxe content + OST” Steam key.

Gameplay

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How do I get into a different colony?

In order for a rival colony to let you explore their town, use their services, or invite you to join them, they have to first trust you. The main way to raise your reputation with a colony is gifting the colony’s guard, and telling them the gift is for the colony. You are allowed into a colony’s town at 25% reputation, may use their services at 50%, and receive an offer to join at 75%.

Are there kittens in the game? Can I have more than one litter?

Yes, you are able to have one litter of up to four kittens if your cat is married and has the “nursery” den upgrade.

Can I change my cat’s name without restarting?

Head to the temple on the third day of any month to change your cat’s name for a fee.

How can I date a cat?

Gift a cat who you have 5 friendship stars with a red rose. The rose can be found at the temple only after Coco tells you about it on Autumn 5, Year 1.

How can I marry a cat?

Similar to dating, you can buy a shiny trinket from your colony’s shopkeeper after Coco tells you about it on Spring 1, Year 2. The cat will only accept the proposal if your cat is dating them, and if the heart at the bottom of their text boxes is red.

How can I move, place, or remove den decor, or get new rooms?

Molby the construction mole will introduce themselves to you at the earliest on Winter 1, Year 1. After they do, you can ring the bell in your den to call them for construction or to edit decorations.

What happens to my spouse and kittens if I switch colonies?

Everything in your den, including your family, will move colonies with you.

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Coco/Molby isn’t showing up to tell me about an item and it is past the earliest possible day!

These characters show up at your den when you leave it in the morning; try sleeping in your den if you haven’t in a few nights.

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Steam Do Games Scan Mice For Cheats Windows 10

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