Boston Unlocked
A community-driven Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown Server Reimplementation
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BostonUnlocked
BostonUnlocked is a fully community-driven Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown Server Reimplementation. It aims to provide an experience which as close as possible to the original (aka vanilla) final version of Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown game server when it was last officially online (client version 23.3.28073.265425).
This free server has been reverse engineered from the official game client as well as the original server binaries (the latter with the permission and collaboration of our friends at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE)). A clean-room reverse engineering approach was used. The reimplemented server contains no proprietary code or assets and requires official game client files to work.
The BostonUnlockedServer GitHub repository contains tooling and a C# local service that lets the Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown client talk to the reimplemented server (BostonUnlocked).
In short, you can run your own server to play the game and optionally set it up to invite friends to play with you.
Join our Discord Server!
The Server is a Work-In-Progress
This server is currently a Work-In-Progress (WIP). There are therefore bugs and potential issues. Help us revive the game! See how you can help and report bugs. For help, reach out to us in the Community Discord in the #support channel
Announcements
2026-04-04 Infrastructure Improvements, Custom Discord Emoji and Site Improvements
Hoi Chummers, some news this way comes!
Infrastructure Improvement and New Server Status Page
As we deepen our collaboration with the MADE, we've been focused on backend changes to support deploying, monitoring and maintaining BostonUnlocked more sustainably on the MADE's Azure infrastructure. As a result, the repository now has automatic CI builds, an automated patching system was implemented (triggered by a maintainer command) and the server also has a monitoring service in addition to the core backend service. The monitoring service has led to a cool new feature: we have a live server status page!
This is currently a basic version which refreshes at most once every 10 seconds and is served via HTTP only (so HTTPS warnings when accessing it are normal). To view it, simply open the community server's IP in a browser (how to find it is mentioned in Quick Start).
Non-critical bugfixes were temporarily paused during this important enhancement.
Custom Discord Emoji
ShadowAid also took the time to add some custom emoji to our Discord server, access them from the emoji button:
Site Improvements
General improvements have also been made to this website:
- The site navigation was improved so Quick Start and the pages related to it are concentrated together and Advanced Installation pages such as self-hosting instructions are in their own new sub-section.
- Various general improvements were also made including to the Interesting Game Behaviour page (which was added in the previous update) and Features and Limitations.
Have fun!