// the take
This is the server-side glue (Dockerfile, docker-compose, setup scripts) for running a private instance of Pwn Adventure 3, an intentionally-vulnerable MMORPG built by Vector35 (the Binary Ninja people) as a vehicle for teaching game hacking and reverse engineering. It's for people following LiveOverflow's video series who want a local target to practice memory editing, network proxying, and binary exploitation against, not for anyone looking for a real game server.
The docker-compose setup turns what was originally a fiddly manual VPS install into a two-command spin-up/tear-down, which matters a lot for a target you want to reset between exploit attempts. The repo is tightly paired with a ~20-part YouTube series that walks through the exact bugs (integer overflow in Fire and Ice, a hand-rolled RSA keygen, LD_PRELOAD hooking) so you're never debugging blind. The included tools/ directory (proxy scripts, parsers, LD_PRELOAD hack examples) gives working reference code for the techniques rather than just describing them.
The actual game server binaries aren't in this repo at all — you need a separate 2GB+ tarball from pwnadventure.com, so the project's survival depends on a third-party download link outside GitHub's control. Nothing has been touched since October 2021, and the troubleshooting section still references Docker 17.12 and docker-compose 1.19 from 2016-era testing, so getting it running on current Docker likely needs undocumented fixes. The database is explicitly non-persistent (resets on `docker-compose down`), the client only works against hostnames in `/etc/hosts`, not IPs, and the whole thing assumes a Linux host with several GB of free disk and RAM just to stand up — this is a lab appliance, not something you'd keep running unattended.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →