Okay, so what's actually in it?

That's an extremely good question. Once supplied with the material from the asset pack, the reader supports a lot of material. Here's a by-no-means exhaustive list:

archive contents

• Homestuck
• Homestuck Music
• Homestuck Beta
• Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff
• The Blog of Dave Strider
• Namco High
• Paradox Space
• Snapchats
• Skaianet Systems
• Homestuck Epilogues
• Jailbreak
• Bard Quest
• Problem Sleuth
• Problem Sleuth Science FAQ
• Donation Commands
• The Baby Is You
• The Vigil Prince
• Whistles: The Starlight Calliope
• And It Don't Stop
• Neon Ice Cream Headache
• Steep Price For Pie
• Inappropriate Time For Ham
• Riddler's Gammon
• Humanimals
• Zoosmells
• An Offer You Can't Refuse
• A Magical Journey Through the Internet
• Cheerfulbear - PLAY ME
• The Man-On-Man Suckoff Challenge
• MSPA Newspost archive
• Blogspot, Formspring, and Tumblr
• Desktop Wallpapers
• Ryanquest
• Morse code translator
• Alternian cipher

And that's not even all of it? How big is this thing?

Can you port this to Chromebooks or smartphones?

Yes! Though only the desktop version supports native flash, we have had a fully-featured port of The Unofficial Homestuck Collection that runs fully in the browser, which means it works on any modern web browser. The web port has been available at homestuck.giovanh.com since the release at the 2023 SAHCon panel.
GIO NOTE: Unfortunately, for reasons beyond our control, it is currently unavailable. I am working on getting it back up as soon as possible because: I love you.

Help! I'm already far into Homestuck on the official website, but the application won't let me past the beginning!

When you start up the program for the first time, "new reader mode" is enabled and set by default – this is a toggle that will hide certain spoilery content until it's safe. This does also prevent you from skipping ahead – but you can manually set your progress through the story on the settings page.

Enter your current page number and hit "Adjust" - this should catch everything up to where you currently are.

Why are there two different downloads?

The collection is composed of two parts: the main app, and the Asset Pack. The main app handles the code and logic and processing, and the asset pack stores the data. For a couple of different reasons (namely, the Asset Pack is very large and also not GPL licensed) we distribute the Asset Pack and the collection separately.

The good news is the collection can be updated with bugfixes and features without requiring a new Asset Pack! We use semantic versioning, so if you were on 1.0.0, an update to 1.0.X would be a bugfix, and an update to 1.X.X would mean bugfixes and new features. Only an update to a new major version like 3.0.X would require re-downloading a new asset pack/patch.

TROUBLESHOOTING

I can't extract the Asset Pack, my [unusual environment] says it's corrupted!

It's not corrupted, you're using a ZIP unarchiver in compatibility mode for the previous millennium. Use a modern zip extractor like 7-zip, or at least one that isn't choosing to actively sabotage you.

Some panels/images/media aren't loading at all!

This is usually caused by a faulty asset pack. Try running the built-in Asset Pack Validator to check if the problem can be automatically identified. If you still have trouble try re-downloading and re-extracting the asset pack, then try again.

Images load as expected, but flash pages just show a grey box with the words "Couldn't load plugin."

This means the native Adobe Flash player is failing to run. The most common cause of this is downloading the wrong version of the app for your computer's architecture. If you're using Windows, try using the new universal version labeled "The-Unofficial-Homestuck-Collection-<VERSION>-win.exe" under releases with no -x64 or -ia32 in the name.