TF2’s Most Mysterious Prop

For over 15 years, this TF2 prop has lingered in the shadows, waiting to be discovered and take its true form.

0:00 Intro
0:43 Sponsorship
0:59 The Three Boxes
2:38 The Problem
3:48 Interview
4:37 Further Investigation
5:42 A Major Discovery
7:24 The Solution

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Special Thanks:
• ToasterWafflez for helping with some skits
• Sean for his input

#tf2 #teamfortress2

[LEDs]

As many of you know, my videos haven’t included sponsorships up until this point. I only wanted to have a sponsor if I felt it wasn’t a blatant cash grab or ripoff and instead actually provided some benefit to the viewer. Therefore, I’m happy to announce Mannco as my official sponsor! Please, check them out if you’re in the market for TF2 items. I genuinely believe that they’re the best out there. 🫡

[buddyisbored]

So a Valve employee probably picked the wrong texture in devlopment and no one got around to fixing it.
Everyone's just been decorating the maps with clusters 1 and 2. They probably place down 3 once and go "Oh this prop's textures are fucked" and delete it

[hakerananasek]

Damn, this made the game more unplayable than the bots.

[KingMetalMario]

judging by the shape, was it perhaps made to be put *on* the handtruck?

[hlxaweaponanimator]

that barrel was gettin some backshots at the start DAMN

[puzzlepuddles]

valve should've named it box_cluster2_ep1 instead of box_cluster3 for it to work

[NeedyWolf]

it just makes me think that there was another handtruck model that had boxes on it due to how the boxes are stacked in a way for a handtruck...but the two was seperated and while they updated the handtruck they forgot to update the boxes.

[jermasus]

Now I’m afraid to know how many times I passed that box without realizing how unique it is

[solo_va]

bro when the scout threw the mad milk on the demos face lmao

[hronaxe]

2490 days since last major update, this video is what you get

[r.g.thesecond]

Please don't abandon your clean and to-the-point editing style to stimulate the viewer! I consider your channel one of the better ones in all of gamedev youtube even!

[ScrumptiousCockatooSoda]

8:10 Scout took “Go Nuts” to a new level. 💀

[bubblemage]

as a 3d environment artist, I think that those UVs that box cluster 03 has look an awful lot like the result an automatic UV unwrap and/or automatic UV layout. The UVs at the top and bottom of the row at a slight angle, and the thin, spindly ones on either end are very indicative of a common way of automatically creating UVs for a prop, where a cube is projected around the object and UVs are defined based on those 6 sides, which is a common way to get those thin, 1 polygon wide UVs, If this wasn’t the case, it may have been an automatic layout or a combination of both. Cause think about it, why would you want thin uvs that barely take up any pixels with such a big footprint and their own texture in the atlas? or need to manually line them up with the edges they share on the boxes? you’d just attach them to the larger squares and it’d fix your problem. The other indicator is those diagonal UVs, why would you want some UVs on your atlas to be slightly tilted to one side? they’d just take up more room than if their edges were parallel to the x and y.

Those are the things that immediately jump out to me that show the prop doesn’t have a corrupt or misplaced texture file, as you say, as I’ve spent probably hundreds of hours laying out UVs for props exactly like this. Issues like these are great signs and things to look for to identify a prop that somebody forgot to finish texturing! I assume that at some point in the process, the creator of box_cluster03 got distracted, left work, or some other mysterious thing happened and they forgot to finish laying out their UVs, likely on the same atlas as the other box clusters!

This a very cool thing to find! It’s direct evidence of some story of an artist who didn’t finish their work, and it only became visible almost two decades after they finished working on it because ONE person put it in a map, and you made a video on it! I wonder what the reason it never got finished is. Congrats on doing some work for a Valve employee or some 3D artist somewhere that has been overdue for over 15 years! And thanks for sharing the video, this is clearly my jam, I’m a big fan of your breakdowns of stuff like this, it’s super cool to see all the details brought to light! Hope this was interesting to you as well.

[JouvaMoufette]

Holy shit someone at Valve must have seen this video, or someone who saw this video posted a bug about it and they finally fixed it. I saw the changelog for today and IMMEDIATELY thought of this video.

[jackman]

Valve should really fix this game when people are talking about a prop for an entire 8 minutes

[Bupboy]

8:09 yknow, i feel like scout already went nuts on it, so im good

[pumpyronaldrump_]

My guess is that box cluster was originally meant to be a part of the hand truck prop, probably sitting on it, which is why the boxes are stacked like that. So in a beta version they had the textures for both the boxes and the hand truck in the same atlas, but last moment they decides the hand truck is going to be on its own, so they split the models up and changed the atlas without updating that one file.

[jackhumphries]

I just looked into something, apparently there were a couple changes made to junction in the march 5th 2009 patch, fixing a engi teleporter glitch and also fixing some bad overlay assignments, among other minor issues, perhaps this is where box cluster 03’s textures got messed up

[EzekelFalcon]

as someone who was mapping for tf2 as far back as late 2008, i can tell you that this model always had a scuffed texture, at least as far back as when i started. i think everyone in the mapping community knew this, but it wasn't anything anyone ever mentioned as it wasn't the only thing valve broke in TF2 (func_rotating i'm looking at you!). people would usually just work around valve's "decisions" and hope that they didn't change things later on that would break things further (check out the shooting range in pl_moonlit to see an example of that, when they decided to one day refactor the folder structure for a load of props, making all the models for pistols become big ERROR signs instead)

[MothmanOfMichigan]

Next update box cluster 3 will have its textures fixed and be added to every single map.