EDIT: WE FORGOT TO ADJUST THE COLORS TO THE CORRECT PALETTE, PLEASE REDOWNLOAD ANY COPIES YOU MAY HAVE SAVED!!!!

The base canvas, 2000x2000

TL;DR: The Final Clean canvas, plus upscaled, diff, wallpapers, before/after, and popular overlays

Please read the whole post before making judgemental comments!!

It’s been eight days since r/place concluded, and we at The Final Clean are excited to finally reveal our final canvas following four days of cleaning and another four days correcting the little mistakes we made. In total, we received over 2000 submissions/corrections, around four times as many as in 2017. We also gathered a team of over 80 artists, doubling our numbers since the last time. In total, about 10,000 work hours were put into the project.

It was quite the journey, and not without bumps in the road. We’d like to share our experiences with you, and explain our methodology in the process.

Lessons from 2017

From the get-go, we had already learned several things from 2017’s Final Clean project. First of all, better organization and bookkeeping was required. In stark contrast to last time’s “gather corrections from the Reddit comments” approach, we decided to take template submissions right from the start and compile them into a spreadsheet, with statuses to keep track of each submission. With that problem solved, we also needed to deal with possibly controversial pieces of artwork on the final canvas, such as streamer raids, cryptocurrency promotions, extremist imagery, and malicious voiding/griefing. Luckily, we hardly had to deal with the latter two, but streamer raids and crypto turned out to be a massive can of worms that we were at first totally unprepared to handle.

In general, our policy for art restoration was: If the art was present and at least somewhat recognizable on the final canvas, it was eligible for restoration. Art covered up by new art would not be restored, since it wasn’t there at the end, with the exception of if the art was covered in such a way that returning it to how it was would not affect another artwork (i.e. if the art was covered by a flat color).

Streamers

There’s no arguing that streamers were a major point of contention during r/place this year. No one liked seeing their artwork completely overwritten by a streamer purposefully placing down flat colors or random pixels over theirs. However, we had to remain mostly neutral when dealing with situations like this. Our policy for streamers evolved over the course of the project, and was unfortunately unclear to some as a result, but in the end we settled on a satisfactory approach. Generally, we would analyze streamer raids/artwork under the following criteria:

• Did the streamer and their community produce anything of artistic value, or was it just a crude flag, solid colors, or noise?

• Did the streamer overwrite the original art with malicious intent?

• Did the streamer later concede their territory back to artworks that were underneath?

In most cases, the answer to these three questions was art, no, and no, in that order. For these set of circumstances, generally streamer art would be kept, since a visitor who had never seen r/place before would have never known it was created by a streamer. This is why, for example, the Arkeanos logo is still present instead of the AnarchyChess 2 board. There were also cases of malicious streamer art, where streamers or their community would harass and tease the communities they were displacing, in which case we would remove their griefing in favor of the art underneath. All in all, there were many edge cases to deal with, and our contributors handled it well. Additionally, a group of members on our Discord server has created a spin-off project where they plan to create a totally streamerless version of the canvas, so if you’d like to participate, feel free to!

Crypto, Superstonk, and the GameStop logo

This one was a tough nut to crack. At the very start of our project, we had decided that cryptocurrency and NFT promotion would not be permitted in our final work; however, we didn’t just want to leave blank spaces. As a result, we decided to keep the cryptocurrency logos, but remove their text. This would let people familiar with those cryptocurrencies recognize the logo, while others less knowledgeable would just see a piece of artwork. This worked out in most cases.

However, things got tricky when we got to the Superstonk artwork. During r/place, the artwork had a very controversial URL on it that was under constant attack by others, due to its nature as an NFT marketplace promotion. Additionally, several users came to us detailing Superstonk’s connection to cryptocurrency and NFTs, pushing us to attempt to obscure the Superstonk artwork somewhat. We were also concerned about some of the posts in the Superstonk subreddit, that could have been interpreted as extremist in nature.

In between our first and second drafts of the canvas, we replaced basically all of the text, including the GameStop logo, with amogi. After a large amount of community pushback (i.e. Superstonk brigading our subreddit), and a realization that we had been rather overzealous, we restored most of the artwork, barring the subreddit name and the stock symbol for GameStop, since those were more directly linked to the financial side of the operation. It was a massive headache for all involved, and very annoying considering how close we were to releasing our final product at the time, but we managed to get through it in a reasonable way given the circumstances.

For those who still wish for the full GameStop/Superstonk artwork on their copy of our work, please keep reading!

“My artwork was removed/altered, but I think it should have stayed”

We’ve all been there at this point. r/place was incredibly dense this time around, with very little room to move things around in case of conflicts. As a result, we had to say no to a larger proportion of submissions than last time. However, we want to make the following message very clear to those who feel like certain art should have remained/been restored:

You are free to edit whatever you want on our work in whatever way you feel like. Go into an image editor, restore your artwork, remove others, expand/contract the Void. As an unofficial project, we are literally powerless to stop you and will make no attempt to do so. We hold no copyright over r/place or any artwork that’s on the canvas.

All we ask is that you do not then claim that you were responsible for the rest of the cleaning that our contributors did. Give credit where it’s due, and we won’t have any issues.

Again, we offer our sincerest apologies if your art couldn’t be restored, but our goal from the start was to create a version of the canvas as similar to the moments leading up to the Great Whiteout as possible, minus the noise and malicious takeovers.

What did we learn this year?

• We should have dramatically simplified the criteria for an artwork being eligible for restoration. A better solution would have been a simple “if the art was recognizable at the end, it’s coming back”.

• More solid definitions/procedures for certain phenomena are needed, like for streamer raids or controversial artworks

• A more comprehensive guide on template images for submissions would have made things far easier

• Drawpile is great, especially for avoiding conflicts between sections of the canvas

Some thanks

Now that the boring part is out of the way, we’d like to thank some people for their help regarding our project:

• Thank you to all of our contributors, who took time out of their busy schedules to help make our project a reality

• Thank you to everyone who submitted a template or correction

• Thank you to our Discord members, who were there to provide feedback at all times

• Thank you to the team behind PlaceAtlas, whose project made finding artworks easier when cleaning

• And of course thank you to the Reddit staff, for r/place.

All the images:

• The base canvas, 2000x2000

• Folder with popular overlays to go on top of our base, such as Superstonk and AnarchyChess 2

• Before/after

• Image with only the changed pixels (DOES NOT FOLLOW THE CORRECT PALETTE SORRY)

• Upscaled version of base canvas, 8000x8000

• Desktop and phone wallpapers, (16:9, 9:16)

• Everything in one convenient .zip

We hope you like our work, and we’ll see you at the next r/place!

(and remember, if you see something you want to change on your copy, just change it (and give credit if you post it)! We aren't your parents!)

EDIT: WE FORGOT TO ADJUST THE COLORS TO THE CORRECT PALETTE, PLEASE REDOWNLOAD ANY COPIES YOU MAY HAVE SAVED!!!!