Silicon Pirates
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Beta 3 is live

What's new in Silicon Pirates Beta 3

Beta 3 rebuilds the homelab simulator in 3D. The flat rack screen is now a lab you run: racks on the floor, cables along the walls, a desk you sit at and a workbench where machines come apart.

It replaced Beta 2 at the same address. Beta 2 logins still work, and every lab starts fresh.

Play Beta 3 free See the screenshots
Beta 3 promo, 50 seconds. Watch it full size.

What changed from Beta 2

A room, not a rack screen

Your lab is a 3D room. The rack stands in it, cables run along the floor, the paper lands on the rug and the desk terminal is a monitor you sit down at. Finish 10 work orders and the Back Room opens next door.

Machines you can open

Every device is a chassis full of parts: processors, memory, drives, power supplies, fans and hash boards. Power it off, open it on the workbench and swap them. Parts wear and fail, and the used market sells them worn.

Power that can burn

A breaker box on the wall with a main breaker sized by your grid service, two real 15 A or 20 A circuits a room, plus PDUs, power strips, a floor UPS and rack batteries. Overload something for long enough and the breaker trips, and it stays off until you reset it. Keep pushing and it catches fire.

An internet you pay for

The internet comes in at an ISP box on the wall. Pick a plan, pay the monthly invoice, and ride out the outages. A powered router alone is offline until it is cabled to a line.

An account, and a fresh start

Every lab runs on the server, not in your browser, so playing needs a free account. Beta 2 players sign in with their Beta 2 email or username and the same password. Nothing else carries over.

What stayed with Beta 2

Raids on other players, live hacking between players, the player marketplace, the school, the house games, the rack gallery and the separate phone version. Hacking in Beta 3 is against companies on the net.

Latest updates

Beta 3 changes most weeks. The newest first. Everything since launch in one post.

  • The Audio Rack. Audio interfaces, amplifiers and speakers in three tiers. Upload your own MP3s, build a playlist and press play: the sound comes from the speakers, visitors hear it too, and better gear sounds better. The audio and climate update.
  • Room climate. Every room has a temperature and a humidity now. What runs in it heats it, plants wet it, and a hot or damp room hurts your machines. A portable AC, a mini-split or the Glacier CR-12 precision unit bring it back, and a vent ducts one cooler into another room.
  • The World Update is next. v0.5 expands the game beyond the homelab into a much larger, connected world, and moves Silicon Pirates out of Beta and into Early Access. Watch the trailer and see the road to v1.0.
  • The firewall in the path. The internet verdict in FINANCE now says ONE FIREWALL when every line comes in through one box, and names it. The firewall's own SETUP has a REDUNDANCY line that says what goes dark if it dies and how to cover it. REPORT A BUG shows the game version.
  • Wolfenstein 3D on the cabinet. The Wolfenstein Uplink Module joins the DOOM one. How to run it from the game files on your own PC. DOOM no longer binds anything to a modifier key: Space fires, E opens, Shift runs.
  • The photo album. Take a Polaroid of the room you are in, up to 20 a room, download it, and post it to the player gallery on this site.
  • The mouse and the cat. After a while a small mouse explores the rooms. Click it and you can adopt a cat for $250. The cat hunts the mouse, and when it finally catches it the two become friends.
  • The print farm. Three tiers of 3D printer on shelves in any room, from the $450 Hobby Printer to the $4,200 Production Printer. Take PRINT ORDERS, load filament in eight colours, fix failed prints by hand, or feed a hopper and automate it.
  • The repair shop. Work orders to fix other people's machines: diagnose, buy the part, open the chassis and repair it. Tools are cheap and required, for your own machines too. The shop grows from home repairs to data-centre RMA batches.
  • The Basement. A third room, cinder block and steel grating, with two more wall circuits. Earn it with 30 work orders and buy it for $12,000.
  • Racks you pick. A 6U Low Rack ($280), a 12U Half Rack ($450), a 20U Rack ($700) and a 42U Full Rack ($1,400). Put it down in any room you own.
  • The 24-port switch. Twenty-four jacks in 2U. An 8-port switch upgrades to it where it sits and keeps every cable.
  • Dual WAN. The Edge Router takes two lines. When the one in use drops, it fails over to the other in 6 seconds and goes back once the first has been up for 30.
  • The ISP. HomeLine, BizFibre, ProLink and Carrier Grade, from 98% to 99.99% promised uptime. The first month is free. LINE 2 comes from another carrier.
  • Four arcade games, and two classics. RACK ATTACK plays PACKET PING out of the box. The RA-4 motherboard takes four ROMs: add RULE BREAKER, CABLE RUN and BOT SWARM. An uplink module plays DOOM or Wolfenstein 3D from the game files on your own PC.

The new promo shows most of it: the October cut, 54 seconds.

Beta 3 screenshots

Select a screenshot to enlarge it.

Silicon Pirates Beta 3: the back room with grow racks under lights, a grow table, an aquarium and a wall screen
The back room. Grow racks, a grow table and an aquarium, all on their own circuits.
The main room: three grow racks under lights, a 42U rack, cable runs along the floor and a power strip on the wall
The main room. Racks, grow beds and cable runs.
Rack focus on a 42U rack: UPS, automation server, router, switch, crypto rig, firewall, NAS, terminal server and two PDUs
Rack focus. Every device, port and cable.
Device view of a 4U mining frame: processor, memory, hash boards, two power supplies and fans, each with wear
Inside a machine. Parts you can swap, each with its own wear.
The contracts panel showing standing and how a client sees your rack: earners online, spare power, battery, protected data
Contracts. Clients judge the rack you built.
A furnished lab with the contracts panel open: a RAID retainer to accept and three hash sprints being held
Quick jobs. Hold a target for a few minutes and get paid.
The vendor panel listing PDUs, servers, an automation server, a terminal server, a router, a switch and a firewall with prices
The vendor. Crates ship to your door.
A vertical grow rack inspector listing plants in flower with water, food, light, health and days to harvest
Plants in flower. Each one counts down to harvest.
A vertical grow rack inspector listing six plant sites with water, food, light, temperature, health and genes
Six sites a rack. Every plant has its own readings.
A grow table inspector: one plant ready to harvest and the feeder dosing
Harvest. Ready plants go to your stash.
A grow rack fed from a rack PDU with a needs box, veg and flower light modes, a fan and the water reservoir
What the bed needs. Light, water, food and air.
The automation server panel: four channels running programs for sprinklers and feeders
Automation. Channels, cables and programs.
An aquarium with seven fish, a shipwreck, a treasure chest and a skull, with the fish list beside it
The aquarium. Seven fish, each with a name and an appetite.
An aquarium close up with a guppy, a neon tetra and a goldfish
Up close. Tap the tank and the camera goes to the glass.
An aquarium close up with three fish swimming after a feed
Feeding time. Too little starves them. Too much is worse.
The RACK ATTACK arcade cabinet with a lit marquee and a game of Packet Ping on its screen
The arcade cabinet. A quarter a game.
The markets panel on the crypto tab: six coins with prices and charts
Markets. One exchange for every player.
The finance panel showing a crypto wallet with an address and a balance
The crypto wallet. Coins stay yours until you sell.
The finance panel listing auto services with their unlock prices
Auto services. Let the lab pay its own bills.
The vendor grow tab: three kinds of grow bed, then strain and vegetable seeds
The grow shelf. Beds, seeds and nutrients.
The lab with the lamps off, empty beds and a purple neon strip glowing on the rack
Lights out. The room between cycles.
The back room in the dark with empty grow racks and a lit aquarium
After harvest. Empty beds and one lit tank.

Everything in Beta 3

  • Power. A breaker box you can open, a grid service you upgrade from 20 A to 100 A, wall outlets on two circuits a room, PDUs in three tiers, rack UPS units that chain, rated power strips and a house battery on the floor. An unpaid bill cuts the grid and only batteries keep things lit.
  • Network. A router cabled to the ISP box is your uplink, and nothing earns offline. Switches with DHCP, name servers with your own domain, and patch panels and trunks that bridge racks and rooms.
  • Money. Lab Credits pay for everything. Machines earn while they run, hosting fills seats, and work orders and contracts pay best.
  • Markets. Crypto, street, town and exotic, each with moving prices and its own news. The six coins trade on one market for the whole game, and now and then the whole market crashes at once.
  • Crypto wallet. Rigs mine the coin you choose. A flush moves the coins into a wallet with an address of your own, and nothing sells until you say so.
  • Heat and wear. Traffic heats network gear, hash boards cook and lit grow beds warm the room. Parts wear with use and fail at the end.
  • Faults. A running machine can hang. You get a minute or two to fix it by hand, reboot it or call a tech before it crashes.
  • Storage. NAS units with RAID levels, shares that rigs and servers write into, and backup mirrors that survive a dead array.
  • The terminal. A shell on the desk computer with files, scripts and cron. Anything the inspector can do, the terminal can do.
  • The net. Companies to scan, break into or report. Eight kinds of lock, each a small puzzle on the terminal, with a trace running while you work.
  • Contracts. Clients read your rack every second: uptime, spare power, battery minutes, backups, a firewall. Miss the target and your standing drops.
  • Customisation. Room themes, lighting down to full dark, framed posters, a paint easel for your own art, neon signs and cable colours. Cosmetics never change a number.
  • The aquarium. Twelve species that swim, beg and hunt. Feed them by hand or cable an auto-feeder to the automation server.
  • The arcade cabinet. A quarter buys a game. Four games, and one high-score board per game for every player.
  • Missions and level. Daily and weekly missions, streaks and milestones pay Shards and Chips. Your level records what you have done and never goes down.
  • Visitors. Visits, guestbooks, gifts and chat with other operators, behind a door you set.

What comes next

The roadmap lists what is live and what is planned.

Questions about Beta 3

Is Silicon Pirates Beta 3 out?

Yes. Beta 3 is live at sp.silicon-pirates.com, the same address Beta 2 used. It is free to play in a browser. Play Beta 3.

Can I still play Beta 2?

No. Beta 3 replaced Beta 2. The 2D version and its phone version are no longer online.

How do I sign in with my Beta 2 account?

Use your Beta 2 email or username and the same password on the Beta 3 sign-in screen. New players register with an operator handle and a passphrase.

Will my Beta 2 lab move to Beta 3?

No. Beta 3 is a separate game built from the ground up, so every lab starts fresh. Only the login carries over. Racks, cash, Chips and purchases from Beta 2 do not.

What does a donation give?

Each tier is a one-time donation to the project that puts Lab Credits and Chips in your wallet and backer colours on your handle. Shell Access is $5 (150,000 Lab Credits and 500 Chips), Root Access is $15 (400,000 and 1,500), Zero Day is $40 (1,000,000 and 5,000), and the $25 Sticker Pack ships four holographic stickers and a hand-written thank-you note free worldwide, with 10,000 Lab Credits and 500 Chips. Nothing in the game is locked behind a rank.