I've spent a few days looking into this and haven't been able to find anything. There's also a big thing about "algae pools" "stock markets", etc, which didn't seem to be about Screeps.
I tried to find games that had these mechanics, and ended up spending a bunch of time looking through Spacestation 13 forums, but I'm leaning toward these references being about a game that he wanted to invent.
Algae pool, in the context of a list that contains "balanced nutri*nt? foods", is probably a food based in Spirulina. A green algae used in aquaculture. This seems to me like a check list [1] to assure that he didn't forgot anything after leaving a zone.
Is relevant because the man has been most probably poisoned. It was not a fast poison and it was painful but not too alarming. Not a bee, a wasp or a Bothrops. A plant or fungus, yes, could fit.
Is not suicide and terminal illness in my opinion. Nobody dies by starvation in presence of food.
But there is a third category that I was missing. Your own food. A too old Spirulina package can be contaminated and lead to slow poisoning. Emaciated in the context of plenty of food around and plenty of money means that he was deliberately refusing to eat while resting in the tent, this is a common effect of food poisoning.
[1] Speculating "Roach motel" can be an humorous surname for their tent. Nanites could be some kind of "armour", clothes or boots maybe.
Updated. There is a page talking about nutrition, protein and "trying different flavors". Fits perfectly with Spirulina powder that is used in protein shakes as the source of protein.
Updated again, Nanites are described in the context of a game later. This does not support my checklist hypothesis. Strange list. Maybe could be just a list of names for different worlds and items in the game.
You are right, I was unable to understand the last words
And one item of the list is just "screeps". I was wrong, Now It looks much more like a plan of things to think about while hiking. Maybe a plan to develop a startup based in energetic food and/or a videogame. This web shows a resume of his activity.
OP, based on the Screeps thread, we have a purported Steam profile for MH. Did that yield anything?
Edit: I know that folks thought this was a red herring. Checked the steam profile, power player badge was unlocked on 10/23 but Recently Played shows nothing (might be privacy settings) and last review was 3 years ago. Do badges ever auto-unlock, or could this person have shared a steam account?
That specific badge is for game ownership. I believe it's possible for games to be added to your account automatically in some cases (like an HD version given out for free to existing owners) which could unlock the badge without user intervention.
>or could this person have shared a steam account?
That number is way off- the steam client came out well after the website version (they both connect to the same MMO server), and there are a lot of users who just use the website to play the game.
The community- with the admins- put a lot of work into trying to figure this out. I lead a group who does analysis of other people's codebases by scraping data from the game, as a way to identify unique codebases (and players who use open source bots). The admins went through logs and we all poured through the game history looking for anything that might match up.
The problem is that it looks like he may never have played the MMO. Besides having the shared server the game is also open sourced. It's extremely common for players to run either in the simulator or on their own private server while testing out their codebase. Looking at his journals (and a journalist did share copies of everything they had with us) I really feel that he was in the early draft phase thinking about the game but not actually playing yet on the shared server.
I've spent a few days looking into this and haven't been able to find anything. There's also a big thing about "algae pools" "stock markets", etc, which didn't seem to be about Screeps.
I tried to find games that had these mechanics, and ended up spending a bunch of time looking through Spacestation 13 forums, but I'm leaning toward these references being about a game that he wanted to invent.