Terminal (3.5)

(NOTE: HEAVY WIP, WILL BE BETTER ORGANIZED LATER)

For the currently released Terminal in 3.0 editions of the game, please see Terminal.

An early development teaser of the 3.5 Terminal posted by MissingTextureMan101 on Bluesky on November 7th, 2024.[1]

The terminal, also referred to as the Vs Dave Developer Console, is a feature that will receive a significant overhaul in the upcoming 3.5 release of Vs. Dave and Bambi. Many of the changes have been teased exclusively on MissingTextureMan101's Bluesky. In addition to refurbished lore, the terminal's design, mechanics, and depth are all expected to change to such a degree that it warrants a separate page on this wiki to delineate from its 3.0 versions.

Due to the fact that 3.5 is still in active development, it is uncertain how many of the teased changes will be present in the release. Please note that the information in this page is heavily subject to change.

Differences from 3.0

While much is uncertain about its exact contents, there are many key things that have been both shown and stated about it across several months:

• The terminal is planned to be redesigned around being a puzzle that behaves "like an actual terminal" by requiring the player to move files, mount and unmount virtual drives to discover content, and path to hard drives to view their contents.[2][3] If implemented as described, 3.5 will completely change how the terminal works.
  • There will be multiple puzzles. One early puzzle has been described (due to being so early on that spoiling it is insignificant) as requiring the player to mount Dave's hard drive and path to it in order to view his logs.[4]
  • The virtual drive system was devised specifically to address the ambiguity of who created the files present in 3.0, as some are clearly authored by Dave while others are not and are nigh impossible to identify.[5] This indicates that, if implemented, the terminal will feature one or more additional drives belonging to characters whose present identities are unknown. A separate post also describes this as intending to clear up "whose terminal you were on"[6], which may or may not be indicating that several terminals will be present.
• The more realistic terminal behavior is based heavily on MS-DOS.[7] In addition to changing the text display from a Fixedsys font to a modifiable bitmap spritesheet containing Code Page 437[8], Turbo C++ was listed as a potential inspiration for the display of text files.[9] This was first stated on November 4th, 2024 and showcased in the Terminal OST video released on March 7th, 2025 on the official Vs. Dave YouTube channel. In the second track, the terminal is a glitchy mess of colors and glyphs (including box-drawing characters typical of TUIs) bearing resemblance to the payload of the MS-DOS virus crash.com.
  • These point to the new terminal having a completely overhauled UI system as well as multiple substates, whereas the 3.0 terminal only has an alternate state for Expunged being granted admin.
• As mentioned, the Terminal's music and sound has been remade. TheAmbience has been replaced by The Terminal, and expungedGrantedAccess + iTrollYou have been replaced by [HAHA! GET HACKED!!!]. It is unknown whether other sounds, such as the keypress sounds, will also be changed.
  • The Terminal is an original composition by MissingTextureMan101 made to replace TheAmbience due to it containing the now-retconned song Recursed, of which it is a heavily slowed version. When sped up, The Terminal can be more clearly heard to contain a variation of the House leitmotif.
  • [HAHA! GET HACKED!!!] samples raw data audio from a debug build of 3.5 with its best segments spliced together.[10]
• The header text and text entry have changed. The title in every image provided thus far has read Vs Dave Developer Console [Version 2.0.0.0] and has removed the "All Rights Reserved." beneath it. The caret symbol has also been replaced with C:\>, further indicative of the changes to the Terminal to feature hard drives.
• The commands themselves have changed. Very few changes have been publicly shown, and they are highly likely to change on release.
  • help has the same syntax, but in the showcased images of the Terminal so far only lists the commands help, clear, admin, and a new command colortest, which displays all possible colors that the system can render. Colortest may or may not be a debug command for development purposes only.
  • The help text itself has changed for some commands. Help has become "Shows this help menu, pass a command name for more information." and admin has become "View the admin list and manage admins." Clear is the same.
• Error handling and display have changed. This difference was first showcased in the Terminal OST video. In the background of track 1, which is a screenshot of presumably another development version of the Terminal, using the help command with an invalid number of arguments now returns an error rendered in red text, the provided text reading "Too many arguments! (Expected 1 or 0; Got: 2!)".[11] It can probably be assumed that this error handling will newly extend to all commands in contrast to 3.0 only having invalid argument number handling for admin. This is additionally the first instance of multicolor text output being shown in the Terminal and the first instance of a blinking text cursor.
• The default color of text has changed from pure white (#ffffff) to light gray (#b9b9b9).

C# prototype Terminal showcasing new files, commands, and UI

• At least some of the changes described thus far are based on a C# prototype of the "new" Terminal created by MissingTextureMan101 several years ago titled VsDaveTerminal.exe, intended to be ported to Haxe and expanded on.[12] One screenshot of this C# Terminal was shown, albeit clarified that none of its contents are canon anymore (specifically the file sizes and file structure). This in mind, this non-canon version of the Terminal still implies significant changes will come to the kinds of files accessible in the 3.5 Terminal and even perhaps new commands that can be - or at least, at one time could've been - used to interact with them more robustly. It also suggests that file sizes and structure have significant enough lore ramifications for them to be important to clarify not to treat in this screenshot as canonical.
  • Ignoring any analysis of the file structure, this screenshot very explicitly confirms that the Vs. Dave universe in itself is digital, and that the 3.5 Terminal potentially will greatly expand its file contents to contain most, if not all important and discrete entities in its universe. It appears to feature locations and the timeline itself.
  • Three potential-or-retconned commands include dir, diag, and send. Dir displays a named list of files in the current directory with their file sizes as well as the total size on the disk. Diag appears to perform a diagnostic check on files for errors and warnings, and skips files if they are determined unnecessary for diagnosis; this command can also output text in blue. Send is described as sending character files to "bookmarked coordinates", in this example being "arbys", rendering its resulting text in green. The behavior of open is also changed, allowing one to navigate to subfolders.
  • madden.dat, bf.dat, and gf.dat have been added as new possible character files.

Possible changes based on external materials

The C# terminal's contents heavily correlate to some Terminal functions described in the alternate universe story of Retaliation also written by MissingTextureMan101 on December 1st, 2022. This being an alternate universe and a years-old one at that, none of its contents should be treated as teasers for actual game content; that being said, the similarities would suggest that Retaliation explores potential ideas for the terminal that may or may not be implemented.

• Both pieces feature the send command with similar text output referring to "bookmarked coordinates", while Retaliation includes error handling for this command ("Unknown object or object alias "Expunged". Did you mean "expunged.dat?" and "WARNING: unknown extra parameter "else""). This command, expectedly, in the story has immediate in-universe ramifications by sending Expunged to Dave's house, which is the bookmarked coordinate corresponding to "house".
• Retaliation further implies that other commands exist allowing Madden to create and manipulate files in other ways. Two additional commands that have not appeared in any official material are shown - delete and exit. Delete immediately throws errors due to Expunged being "referenced in current timeline". By deleting a separate file, goldenone.proph, the system corrects itself by de-referencing and altering various files, including events (stored in .evt namespace) and locations (.loc). "De-referenced" is explained as files that do not exist in the timeline but still exist broadly in the system. Exit appears to serve the same purpose as hitting the escape key, although its behavior is different, prompting Madden to respond whether the timeline changes should be saved and for auto-configuration to "improve the experience", which alters bf-meetdave.evt, bf.dat, and gf.dat.
• Some Terminal commands require multiple inputs for the user to confirm or deny a specific action by simply entering "yes" or (unseen, assumable) "no".