Build. Break. Defend.

Your first ten minutes

No signup, no login — the moment you open the game, a rack is already waiting for you, saved automatically to this browser.

You start with $1,000 and one free device already sitting in your inventory: a 1U PDU. That's enough to afford a full working setup on day one — power, a router, a NAS, and either a crypto rig or a game server — with room to spare.

What to buy first

Router first ($100) is the fastest payout: wire it to the free ISP uplink and power it on, and its WAN port gets a real internet connection with no other device needed — that alone completes the Get a Device Online contract for +$75. A server bought first will power on fine but earns nothing until a router shows up too.

The Getting Started checklist on the right side of the rack view tracks six real milestones — place a PDU, connect it to the grid, place a device, wire power, get online, earn your first dollar — and a bell in the top nav will nudge you with a tip the first time something new actually becomes relevant, instead of dumping a wall of tutorial on you at once. A Rack Status widget sits right below it with an always-on glance at your rack's health: devices powered, active faults, DHCP leases, your hottest device right now.

Power, network, storage

Every real system in this game rests on the same three-layer chain: Power → Network → Storage. Get all three right and money follows.

Power

Nothing runs without a cable back to a powered PDU or UPS — and a PDU/UPS itself needs to be wired into one of the Residential Grid's 4 slots before it draws any real power at all, the same two-click "connect the uplink" idea you'll use again for your internet connection.

A UPS works like a PDU with a battery attached — it starts completely empty on install and only charges while it's genuinely connected to live power, so don't expect free brownout protection the moment you rack one. Grid power also isn't free: an hourly bill runs off your real wattage draw, cheaper 11pm–6am, pricier 5pm–9pm. Let the bill run past $100 unpaid and you get a 5-minute grace countdown before the grid cuts your whole rack, not just one slot.

Networking

A router holds your internet connection and hands out addresses; switches just extend a segment (no smarts of their own); a firewall — actually wired into the traffic path, not just sitting there powered — measurably calms down Heat (chapter 4). A device needs both a cable link and a working address before it counts as online for anything.

Storage

A NAS carves its capacity into shares for whatever needs somewhere to put data — a hosted game, a crypto rig's payouts, a client's files. Bigger NAS tiers add real built-in odds of surviving a hardware failure entirely on their own; pairing any share with a genuine backup mirror on a second NAS is the only way to protect it completely.

Six real ways to earn

Client Contracts

The Contracts board (bottom dock) is a rotating list of real objectives against real rack state — some pay the instant a condition becomes true, others need it held for a while. Completing your very first one unlocks something special (see chapter 10).

Hosted game servers

Install a title onto a Game Server, set an entry price, and real players start arriving and leaving based on how good a deal you're offering — the fairer the price, the more of them stick around.

Crypto mining

Rates are slow by design: 0.4 / 0.8 / 1.2 coin per hour on Eco / Balanced / Turbo, paid to your NAS vault every 60 seconds.

Mined coin lands in your NAS vault, not your wallet — Transfer it to your Wallet, then Sell/Convert it at the live market price, both manual steps. The Wallet's Markets tab is also a real live exchange, plus a 15-second Pump Predictor mini-game if you want to gamble a little of your holding.

AI compute rental

Set a rental price on an AI Server and watch utilization and revenue respond, same shape as hosted games. Its typical power draw sits unusually close to its max — plan your PDU capacity around the number it actually runs at, not the idle one.

Hardware upgrades

Real, buyable upgrades for a device you already own — a GPU Riser or Faster GPUs for an AI Server, an Extra Disk or RAID Controller for a NAS, a VPN Module for a Router, or a 3-tier Hash Board for a Crypto Rig. Buy from the device's own panel, or from the top bar's dedicated Upgrade Console. Every upgrade gets a real ON/OFF jumper — flip it off to suspend the effect (and its power cost) without losing what you paid for.

The Player Marketplace

Real trading with other actual players — covered in full in chapter 11.

Missions, and the free road to Chips

5 daily jobs, 3 weekly ones, and a streak. Designed to take about an hour a day of directed play — not an evening, and not a second job.

What a day looks like

The Missions tab hands you 5 jobs each day, drawn one per category — Operations, Economy, Client Work, Security and Build — so a board is never five variations of the same idea. Only Operations jobs need real time to hold, and you are never given two of those at once. That is deliberate: it is what lets the other four run inside the long one instead of queueing behind it, and it is why the whole set fits in an hour.

A full day is worth $4,000 and 100 Shards. The weekly set adds $10,000 and 200 Shards, and holding a 7-day streak pays another 100.

Shards, and why they matter

Cash is the real prize here — missions are the most reliable income in the game — but the Shards are the interesting part. 1,000 Shards is one Chip. Seven full days (100 × 7 = 700), plus the weekly set (200), plus the streak bonus (100), comes to exactly 1,000. A properly played week is a Chip, earned, with no money involved.

That is the whole design. Chips are the game's only revenue and the game is free, so they have to be worth something — but a player who would rather spend time than money has a real, published, entirely legitimate route to the same shelf.

The cosmetic track

Alongside the Shards there is a 10-level track that pays out in cosmetics for turning up: cable colours, a rack nameplate, device skins. None of it costs Chips and none of it is sold anywhere. If you already own something the track was about to give you, it substitutes something else rather than wasting the level.

Playing it honestly

Missions are checked against the server, not your browser. Counters that only ever climb are compared against a baseline taken when the period started, so replaying an old save, changing your clock, or opening the game in five tabs does not produce five days of rewards. A claim can only ever land once. None of that affects normal play in the slightest — it exists so that the free route to Chips stays worth something for the people actually walking it.

Making it yours, and what it costs

Chips are the one currency tied to real money. They buy looks, time, and recovery — never an outcome free play cannot reach.

The line, stated plainly

Chips never buy cash, never buy Reputation, never buy mission progress, and cannot be spent on hardware upgrades at all — that last one is enforced in the code, not just promised here. What they buy is how your rack looks, how much clicking you do, and how badly a bad night hurts. If you never spend a penny you are not playing a worse game; you are playing the same game with more waiting and fewer colours.

Every price in the game that asks for Chips also names the free route to the same outcome, right next to it. If you find one that does not, that is a bug and worth reporting.

Buying them

Bigger packs are better value per Chip, and the shop says so on the card rather than leaving you to divide. Your first purchase, whichever pack it is, is doubled.

The Operator Pass

A monthly subscription at $7.99 rather than a one-off. Each month it grants Chips, Auto-Repair Protocol on every rack you own, a Hacker Ward, and a Pass-only accent theme and rack skin that you keep permanently. It never touches hardware upgrades, cash, mission progress or Marketplace throughput.

If it lapses, nothing is clawed back — the Chips are yours, spent or banked, and the cosmetics stay unlocked exactly like every other unlock. That is structurally true rather than a promise: they live in the same list as everything else you own. Cancel whenever you like through Stripe's own billing portal, reachable from the Wallet, which also handles card changes and invoices.

Looks

This is where most of the catalogue lives, and none of it changes a number anywhere.

• Device and rack skins — re-colour one device or the whole chassis. Equip from the Inspector or the rack view. On a phone the rack is a list rather than a drawn chassis, so a skin shows as a coloured edge on the row and a band across the top of the rack screen.
• Premium cable colours — appear in the cable colour picker once owned.
• Accent themes — ten of them, re-colouring the entire interface. Theme packs bundle a theme with a matching rack skin.
• Custom Accent Colour — bought once, then pick any colour you like, as often as you like. You are buying the freedom, not each colour.
• Terminal typefaces — four of them, affecting the terminal and KVM console only. Classic Mono is the default and always free.
• A rack nameplate — your own text on the rack, with a colour and a size.
• Trinkets and the Display Tray — small collectibles that sit on a shelf in your rack. They also trade on the Marketplace.

What other people actually see

Two things, and it is worth knowing which two. A player tag colour changes how your name is drawn next to your Marketplace listings. A Rack Gallery frame draws a border around your post in the public gallery on silicon-pirates.com. Both need a registered account, because both hang off a real username.

Identity

A one-off username change, for anyone who registered under a name they have since gone off. The server applies the same uniqueness and moderation rules registration does, and nothing is charged if the name is taken.

Convenience

Every one of these buys clicks or waiting, and nothing else: Instant Repair, an instant contract-board refresh, Instant Maintenance on one device, a Rack Maintenance Sweep across the whole rack, and a Vault Sweep that pulls mined coin out of every NAS vault at once. Selling the coin stays manual — that is a decision, not a chore.

Recovery and protection

• Insurance Policy — auto-repairs your next fault.
• Device Insurance — a charge you can spend on a destroyed device.
• Hacker Ward — keeps intruders and ransomware away for a set number of days.
• Fire Containment — bought during an overload fire, stops it spreading along the PDU. The device already burning is still lost; this is containment, not a rewind.
• Emergency Rack Restart — clears every recoverable fault at once. Self-loops and reversed polarity are deliberately excluded, because those need a real fix.

Automation

Cable-Tie Auto-Organize, and the Auto-Repair Protocol — available per rack, or across every rack you own, present and future, which is a real discount if you are running an estate. Neither counts toward missions: Chips must never buy grind progress, because grind progress buys Chips, and that loop would turn the premium currency into a machine for printing itself.

Hardware that does nothing until you fill it

Three models, 13 installable services, and the first seat a real player will one day sit in.

What it is

Every other device in the rack arrives knowing its job. An application server does not: it is a host, and what it does depends entirely on what you install on it. Three models — 1U, 2U and 4U — differing only in capacity: 6/6, 14/16 and 32/40 CPU and RAM units. Every service costs some of both, so the model you buy decides how much can run at once.

All three take CPU and Memory modules from the Upgrade Console, so a chassis you outgrow is not automatically a chassis you replace.

Storage first, always

Nothing installs without an attached NAS share. Not "installs badly" — the installer refuses, before it charges you. Attach a share from the device Inspector, then buy software.

This is the family whose disks fill fastest, and that is deliberate. A logging service that never grew, or a mail server whose mailboxes stayed the same size forever, would not be much of a simulation. The Inspector shows how full the share is and roughly how many hours until it is full.

Buy it, install it, go

Rack the server, add a NAS share for it exactly as you would for a game server or crypto rig, then open its Inspector and press Install software. Pick what you want. Anything it depends on is installed with it, and the price on the button covers all of it — you are never sent away to find a prerequisite you have never heard of.

Multi-part installs run one after another, so the progress bar tells you what is actually happening rather than showing three things at once.

Or from a terminal

Everything above is also available from any terminal or KVM console, and is faster once you know the ids. No terminal is required to use an application server.

With more than one application server, add @<deviceId>. Software is bought with Lab Credits; Chips buy none of it and never will.

The directory

Most services need the Base Runtime; some need more. A service whose dependency is stopped is degraded — installed, running, and useless — and the Inspector names exactly what is missing rather than leaving you to work it out.

Power

Draw scales with what is running, not what is installed. A 4U idles near 280W and approaches 900W fully loaded, which is crypto-rig territory. Check PDU headroom before filling one, and remember that stopping a service is a real lever on both power and capacity.

Tenants — and where multiplayer starts

Hosting, analytics and communication services expose seats, and each occupied seat pays by the hour. Today every seat is filled by a bot, because there is no multi-user yet.

That is worth understanding properly, because the seat is the real mechanic and the occupant is not. A seat costs storage and power to keep available. It pays when somebody is in it. It empties when the host is unhealthy or switched off. Tenants arrive one at a time and leave twice as fast, so an outage costs you something you can actually watch happening. None of that changes on the day a person occupies one instead of a bot.

Heat, faults, and staying alive

Heat & Reputation

Heat rises with your revenue activity and always decays on its own — faster with a live, properly-wired firewall up. Higher Heat raises the odds a random fault lands as a hostile intrusion instead of a plain hardware hiccup. An intrusion never forces a device offline outright — you get a real response window to isolate it, investigate first with who/netstat/logs, or eat a penalty for ignoring it. Let the same named threat land unresolved more than once and it gets bolder next time.

Wear & degradation

Every device carries a wear meter, always visible in its own panel — even a perfectly healthy one sitting at zero. Running hot for a sustained stretch raises it; wiring mistakes (a self-looped cable, reversed polarity) bump it too. Once wear peaks, the device fails outright — a real Maintenance repair ($150, about 30 seconds) is what fixes it, not luck.

Faults you'll actually see

Whatever's actually wrong, the fault banner's Diagnose button always tells you the real cause — you're never left guessing.

Disaster recovery

An unmirrored share holding real data is one hardware fault or landed intrusion away from a genuine, permanent, logged loss. Point a share at another NAS as a backup mirror and it's protected as long as that mirror stays in sync — check its status (Synced / Stale / Never) before assuming you're covered.

Shortcuts, and what they cost

Darknet Market Reputation 60+

Unlocks once your Reputation crosses 60. Everything here is cheaper or faster than doing it the honest way — and every deal has a real chance of backfiring worse than if you'd just done it straight.

Premium Shop (Chips)

Chips have their own chapter — see Making it yours, and what it costs. Nothing they buy is stronger than what honest play already reaches.

The shell is real

A Terminal Server (or a KVM Console's narrower command set) gives you a genuine interactive shell — not a flavor prop.

A script can gate a line on if link or if internet, so a scheduled job skips cleanly instead of erroring when something's disconnected. Press Up in any terminal to recall your last few commands, just like a real shell.

You can hack too

A rotating board of three real remote targets — low, medium, and high difficulty — sitting there waiting to be broken into.

Four tools sharpen your odds: Port Scanner, Exploit Kit, Crypto Siphon, and Ghost Protocol (cuts your detection risk significantly).

More than one rack

The + New Rack button (top nav) buys a second, third, or fourth rack — 6U through 42U, priced by size — each one fully independent with its own devices, cables, and power/network state. Only your active rack actually ticks; the rest sit frozen until you switch back to them.

Running more than one rack unlocks cross-rack cables: arm a link on a port in your current rack, switch racks, click the matching port on the other side. Power or network shared this way behaves exactly like local wiring everywhere — Heat, degradation, disaster recovery, contracts, all of it. One hop only; a cross-rack link doesn't chain through a second one.

Somebody's always watching

A recurring, named threat — distinct from the random intrusions in chapter 4. One of three real collectives gets assigned to your rack the first time it activates, and stays with you for as long as that rack exists. Its actual handle reveals itself the moment it makes contact.

It only starts paying attention once your rack is a genuinely working setup — a real internet connection and some earned money. And no matter how long it's been watching, it can't actually reach you without a live connection right now — go fully offline and you're simply out of range, checked fresh every moment.

Ransomware

Leave your rack unprotected — no live firewall and a properly configured router — and it can get locked at any time: every click stops working until it's resolved. The demand is a real formula based on your rack size and balance, capped at $8,000 — never a number designed to bankrupt you outright.

• Pay it in full.
• Pay what you can afford — the rack unlocks either way, but the shortfall becomes real debt (see below).
• Fight back yourself — owning an Exploit Kit and Ghost Protocol, attempt a real-odds break-out. A failed try costs Heat and a cooldown.
• An Instant Reverse Hack — always works, steals a real amount from them instead. Costs your Heat maxing out immediately and makes them permanently angrier.

Phishing

A completely separate trick — a popup impersonating the real developer, asking for your account password under a fake pretext. It's deliberately written to feel a little off if you actually stop and read it. Enter your real password and it's the same lock as ransomware; close the popup or type anything wrong, and you get a taunt revealing it was them, plus a real $300 and 10 Reputation for spotting it.

Hacker debt

Underpaying a ransom doesn't erase it — the shortfall becomes debt they keep nagging you about. Pay it off in one shot from your Wallet, or grind it down with "Run a Job" (about a minute's cooldown, 70% chance it knocks debt down and pays a little cash, 30% chance it costs you Heat instead). Debt never blocks you from playing.

Hacking them back

hackback scan → exploit → steal cash / steal crypto — the exact same shape as chapter 7, aimed at this one persistent enemy. A successful hit makes them angrier and slightly tougher next time.

Milestones, and a reward worth finding

Type achievements at any terminal for a live checklist. Some reflect whatever's true right now (own every device category, hit a Reputation bar, rack 10+ devices); others mark one specific real moment permanently (survive a brownout with a charged UPS, pass a Security Audit clean, make a darknet deal). Each pays a real cash-and-Reputation bonus the first time you earn it — never taken back later.

Other real operators

See who's online

Rack a Comm Device ($350) and you get a live directory of other active players — usernames, Reputation, how recently they were around — from the players terminal command or the device's own panel. Needs a free registration to actually use (anyone can buy and rack one, it just won't work until you sign up).

The Player Marketplace

Real cross-player trading — a device you list can genuinely be bought by another real person's session, not an algorithm. A separate escrow balance (Deposit/Withdraw from your regular wallet) keeps every trade trustworthy on both ends. List a spare device from your inventory, or — if you own more than one rack — list an entire rack, wiring and all, as a single sale. Every item keeps a real, permanent Provenance history in its panel: every real owner it's ever passed through.

Rack Uptime

Keep every device in your rack genuinely powered and healthy for 10 straight minutes and a live uptime badge appears next to your name — on the Comm Device directory and on any rack you post to the gallery. One device going down resets it to zero, no partial credit.

Show My Rack

Once registered, "Post Your Rack" (Wallet → Overview) captures a real snapshot of your rack exactly as it's wired and skinned, and posts it to a public gallery anyone can browse and vote on. One live post per account — posting again replaces it with a fresh snapshot and resets the votes.

A notebook that's actually yours

The Notes tab is a fully private notepad, completely separate from the rest of your save — unlimited pages, real rich text (bold/italic/underline/color/headings/lists), and a search box that finds text across every page at once. Insert a live snapshot of your rack or a single device right into a page with the camera button; link selected text to another page and Ctrl/Cmd+Click to follow it. When you want a permanent, off-site copy, "Export to .txt" downloads your whole notebook as a real file to your actual computer.

Blackport pays you to learn

Most games explain themselves with a tooltip. This one has an institute. Blackport Institute of Technology teaches the systems you are already running, and every lesson answers three questions: how the thing works, why you would reach for it, and what it costs you. That last one is never left out.

Open it from the building icon in the top bar, or the School tab on mobile. You need a free registered account — a certificate is a permanent qualification, not something that disappears when you clear your browser.

Five courses

• BIT-101 Power and Redundancy — where the watts come from, and why two of something is not automatically redundancy.
• BIT-102 Thermals and Maintenance — heat is the tax on everything profitable you do.
• BIT-201 Networking and Addressing — cable, link, lease, route: four things that must all be true.
• BIT-202 Storage and Backup — a mirror is not a backup, and a stale mirror looks exactly like a healthy one.
• BIT-301 Security and Defence — heat, intrusions, ransomware, and the attack no firewall stops.

Each course ends in a real exam

Not the same quiz five times. You wire a rack that has to survive a grid slot failing, cool a room to a budget, work out which layer is broken on five machines, pick out the backup that quietly stopped working weeks ago, and handle four security incidents. They are marked by the server: your browser sends the solution you built, never a score, so a certificate is something you earned.

What passing is worth

• $600–$900 in Lab Credits per course, paid once.
• +50% for passing with distinction.
• +$1,200 for completing a diploma, +$5,000 for graduating.
• 10–15% off the hardware that course covers, permanently.

Take every distinction and the institute is worth $13,850 to you. Once — re-sitting an exam you have passed is practice, not income.

A cabinet for the things you earned

A registered player gets a profile: a tagline, a biography, where you are based, one link, a picture, and every certificate and diploma you hold. Open it from the ID icon in the top bar, or the Profile tab on mobile.

Registering is free and keeps your current save exactly as it is. Nothing you have built is lost by doing it.

Pictures are reviewed before anyone else sees them

An uploaded picture is queued for a person to look at. Until it is approved only you can see it; everyone else sees the default. Nudity, hate symbols and offensive imagery are refused, and a refusal comes with a note explaining why so you can upload something else.

Pictures are resized in your own browser before they are sent, which also strips the location data a phone photo would otherwise carry.

Being seen

Certificate holders appear on the Blackport honour roll, in game and on the website. If you would rather not be listed, switch your profile to private — that takes you off the roll as well, because it is the same visibility by another name.

The odds, printed on the machine

Rack a Gambling Server and you get the house slot machine. Play it from any terminal with slots, or from the device's own panel, on desktop and mobile alike. It pays Lab Credits and nothing else — Chips are never involved.

Getting it running

It needs the full chain, in this order: power, then a network address, then a NAS share. The ordering matters — a NAS will only offer a share to a device that already holds an IP, so wire it to a router with DHCP first. The panel shows this as a checklist and names whichever step is missing.

Fair warning on the hardware. At 620W typical against a 900W ceiling it is the heaviest continuous draw in the game, one will eat most of a 1200W PDU on its own, and it runs hot enough that a cooling module is close to mandatory rather than optional.

The odds are published

The paytable shows the exact chance of every symbol and the return to player: 93.5%, with something paying on about 28% of spins. WILD substitutes for any symbol, three of a kind pays the headline multiples, and a pair of the higher symbols pays a small return.

Over a long enough session the machine takes more than it gives. That is what a slot machine is, and the game says so on the panel. Contracts, hosting and mining all pay better; this is for the thrill.

Two jackpots

The hourly pool is yours alone: it starts fresh at the top of every hour, grows with what you wager during it, and caps at 25,000.

The global jackpot is shared by every player in the game. It starts at 100,000, grows with every spin anywhere, and caps at 200,000. Take it and your name appears on every gambling server in the game, and every player is notified.

Both roll with odds proportional to your stake, so a bigger bet is a better chance at either.

The house ledger

Every spin is written down, and each record takes one block of the NAS share backing the device. Read it with slots ledger or the panel's Read ledger button. A full share stops the machine rather than quietly dropping records — slots purge deletes this machine's records and frees exactly those blocks, never anything else on the share.

The long game

Once the basics are running smoothly, the real depth is in stacking systems: a properly upgraded AI Server and Crypto Rig running side by side, a second and third rack cross-linked for shared power, a Comm Device up so other operators can see your uptime streak climb, contracts feeding Reputation into the Darknet Market, and a Hacker Ward bought at exactly the right moment before a big push. Nothing in this manual is the ceiling — every system here is built to be layered with every other one.

Every man topic, at a glance

Everything below is also available in-game — type man <topic> at any terminal for the full page.

All 30, straight from their own service manuals

The exact in-universe documentation each device ships with — also reachable any time via man <device-id>.

hosts up to two concurrent titles. Distinct from a plain server: install a game, start a hosted session, and it starts pulling in real players instead of just sitting there powered on. Draws 10W typical against a 500W ceiling.