[X] My Assistant

Hello everyone. This is my first time posting here in Forums, so I apologise if I neglected any rule while doing so.

My question is regarding the Source Nexus Hath Perk. I'm a little bit confused on whether Source Nexus as of October 2025, still provides 1:1 original images as they were uploaded by the uploader or there are some hidden limitations on it.

The thing is I'm not online most of the time irl and also some of the galleries that I used to see have been deleted.
Now for this, I want to save several galleries for offline reading on my phone in High Resolution mostly. For this everyone says that Source Nexus is worth it.
I've been researching for past few days and it seems that there have several revisions on how Source Nexus works, like:

Limiting PNGs and JPEGs to 3 or 4 MBs.

Downloading Potrait pages in High Quality but Landscape ones in Less quality than what was originally uploaded.

Resampling PNGs to JPEGs.

^ Idk which of these are true. I'm just truly confused if this Source Nexus is worth $50 or not. I don't want to spend money and then find out this thing doesn't even work (like some posts have mentioned) or I'm getting resampled or original images with some limitations. I just want the original quality which the uploader uploaded it on.
So would this Source Nexus be worth it for me if I'm paranoid about the gallery's quality or should I stick to traditional Archive/Torrent Downloads.

The actual setting it enables is 'Prefer Original Images'. So it won't always give the original file.

I think they're reasonably clear on there being file limits (though it'd be better if the perk page itself linked to a wiki page with the up-to-date specifics, too much ends up getting explained just on the forum instead of the wiki) - otherwise it would be an easy bypass of the 'older archives cost GP to original download' rule since the perk costs the auto-regenerating image-viewing limits instead of GP.

To quote the admin's changelog from 2023-10-27:
> 10 MiB for galleries posted in the last year, and 4 MiB for older galleries.

PNGs have a limit of 3 MB on top of that though.

Landscape pages getting squashed way down is really common on a lot of sites, though from everything I've seen that limit would affect people browing *rescaled* images rather than original ones, since the rescaling is based on horizontal resolution. Many landscape pages are also double spreads so they'd be 2x the size, making it easy for them to hit the cutoff.

Stuff getting converted into a jpg has mostly been replaced with lossy webp, though it might still use them for older galleries.

Provided you're browsing newer galleries, simply hitting 'download original' if you still see it should work (it disappears when you're served the source image). But it's easier on the servers if people use archives/torrents instead. The admin has also floated the idea of retiring the perk entirely (a couple of years ago - so this likely will not happen anytime soon, if at all) in favour of a discount on archives, so I think it's clear it's not a feature they really liked due to the server costs. Which is why there's fairly significant limits on it now.

Personally, it seems like a little bit of a 'trap' in its current form unless you're mostly browsing galleries that are under those age/size limits. And it's still more manual work to download it that way than grabbing the archives (provided the time it takes to unzip them and open them in another image viewer isn't an issue). Torrents are also always free if they're available.

If you're just browsing on a phone the quality differences from the rescaled versions should be hard to make out anyway (unless you're a habitual zoomer-in seeing the difference between any difference in 2400px vs 8000px on a 5" screen is going to be basically unnoticable), and you can set the default image horizontal scale to be higher in settings (on mobile Auto will resize to 780x), which seems to apply regardless of whether you've got the perk (you just can't get images any bigger without hitting the download button). If you've not tried that out first, you might find it solves the quality issue in practice.

So in summary: Files over 4-10MB (3 if they're PNGs) will get resized depending on the age, the simplest way to get full quality is by downloading via archive or torrent. The perk was 'nerfed' to save on server costs and really isn't essential anymore, but it will give you better image quality most of the time. Changing the default scaling without the perk should also improve image size on mobile.

Since you're planning on actually donating, even the $20 bronze star gives you 5 GB a week of free archive downloads plus the equivalent of about 10K GP for your daily bonus in GP/credits, which is a pretty sizable limit that would cover 90% of people's download needs. That also saves on having to individually download each image you want to have a backup of. The $50 star (that comes with Source Nexus) gives you a whole 10 GB a week plus the equivalent of about 25K GP a day in GP/credits/hath (at current exchange rates).

So if you do donate, the easiest way to download offline copies of galleries is via archives even if you still want to use the Source Nexus perk, since it's basically free to do so unless you're downloading a gargantuan amount of galleries.

The actual setting it enables is 'Prefer Original Images'. So it won't always give the original file.

I think they're reasonably clear on there being file limits (though it'd be better if the perk page itself linked to a wiki page with the up-to-date specifics, too much ends up getting explained just on the forum instead of the wiki) - otherwise it would be an easy bypass of the 'older archives cost GP to original download' rule since the perk costs the auto-regenerating image-viewing limits instead of GP.

To quote the admin's changelog from 2023-10-27:
> 10 MiB for galleries posted in the last year, and 4 MiB for older galleries.

PNGs have a limit of 3 MB on top of that though.

Landscape pages getting squashed way down is really common on a lot of sites, though from everything I've seen that limit would affect people browing *rescaled* images rather than original ones, since the rescaling is based on horizontal resolution. Many landscape pages are also double spreads so they'd be 2x the size, making it easy for them to hit the cutoff.

Stuff getting converted into a jpg has mostly been replaced with lossy webp, though it might still use them for older galleries.

Provided you're browsing newer galleries, simply hitting 'download original' if you still see it should work (it disappears when you're served the source image). But it's easier on the servers if people use archives/torrents instead. The admin has also floated the idea of retiring the perk entirely (a couple of years ago - so this likely will not happen anytime soon, if at all) in favour of a discount on archives, so I think it's clear it's not a feature they really liked due to the server costs. Which is why there's fairly significant limits on it now.

Personally, it seems like a little bit of a 'trap' in its current form unless you're mostly browsing galleries that are under those age/size limits. And it's still more manual work to download it that way than grabbing the archives (provided the time it takes to unzip them and open them in another image viewer isn't an issue). Torrents are also always free if they're available.

If you're just browsing on a phone the quality differences from the rescaled versions should be hard to make out anyway (unless you're a habitual zoomer-in seeing the difference between any difference in 2400px vs 8000px on a 5" screen is going to be basically unnoticable), and you can set the default image horizontal scale to be higher in settings (on mobile Auto will resize to 780x), which seems to apply regardless of whether you've got the perk (you just can't get images any bigger without hitting the download button). If you've not tried that out first, you might find it solves the quality issue in practice.

So in summary: Files over 4-10MB (3 if they're PNGs) will get resized depending on the age, the simplest way to get full quality is by downloading via archive or torrent. The perk was 'nerfed' to save on server costs and really isn't essential anymore, but it will give you better image quality most of the time. Changing the default scaling without the perk should also improve image size on mobile.

Since you're planning on actually donating, even the $20 bronze star gives you 5 GB a week of free archive downloads plus the equivalent of about 10K GP for your daily bonus in GP/credits, which is a pretty sizable limit that would cover 90% of people's download needs. That also saves on having to individually download each image you want to have a backup of. The $50 star (that comes with Source Nexus) gives you a whole 10 GB a week plus the equivalent of about 25K GP a day in GP/credits/hath (at current exchange rates).

So if you do donate, the easiest way to download offline copies of galleries is via archives even if you still want to use the Source Nexus perk, since it's basically free to do so unless you're downloading a gargantuan amount of galleries.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. After what you said, seems like it wouldn't make things any easier for me since I still have to "Archive/Torrent download" everything. Source Nexus is nerfed as you said, so it won't be worth it for me anymore. I guess I'll just save what I want little by little.