One of the many things I've been looking forward to doing once Maids & Masters hit v1.0 is updating a bunch of my assets and tools so that I'd be able to move entirely away from using things that are 10+ years out of date. However, now that I've done so, my first business expense of 2026 needs to be storage space.
See, while I already have 2TB of storage to work with in the form of two separate 1TB drives, I'm far from some giant game studio, so that 2TB is on my one and only PC. I don't have a separate workstation with another 2TB of storage. I don't have a storage rack to keep backups and archives of renders and game files. I don't have the income to pay for premium accounts large enough to store it all online. I definitely don't have a ton of space left over to install games, whether they're for research or just for fun.
This hasn't been a problem before now because my work files have only been about 300GB. That leaves more than enough space for me to create redundant backups on one drive and keep the rest of it for personal use, and keep the other drive as a "work drive." Updating HS2 so I could improve my visuals and familiarize myself with GraphicsMod along the way for the remaining development of Precious Kouhai, however, was another 400GB. And not 400GB of updates - 400GB of new files and assets. HS2 alone now measures well over 700GB, meaning there's really no room on my work drive for anything else. Including the game files for my projects. I had to take the majority of my stuff off that drive just to have space to complete the update, and now that it's done, I can't really put all that stuff back, even after pruning a couple hundred GB of old and unused stuff I don't need to retain. Having a drive that close to full isn't great for a number of reasons that I won't get into here, but suffice to say I need to upgrade, and with AI making everything worse for everybody, that's not going to be cheap.
The good news is that - outside of one specific bug that's stopping me from getting any actual rendering done - I'm really happy with the jump in visual quality. I still have a few things to learn and dial in the rest of the way, but I think you'll be happy with the new visuals, too. It makes me that much more excited to dig into the next major project once PK is done.
Speaking of, you're probably sick of me reminding you by now, but if you have an opinion about what I should be doing next, there are polls both public and supporter-only on both Patreon and Subscribestar. I want your opinion, and there's only a few clicks between you and deciding where my time goes.
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