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.

Rather learn by poking a live setup? The ⚡ Quick Start button — floating right over your empty rack, and offered again in the welcome tour — builds a small working rack in one click: a PDU on the grid, a server and router wired, powered and online, and your first contract accepted, all at real catalogue prices from that same $1,000. Nothing about it is special-cased; it's exactly the rack you'd have built by hand. Your very first session also opens with the side panels tucked away so the rack itself has the stage — one click on a panel's edge brings it back, and the game remembers your choice.

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.

Everything is a click

The rest of this guide explains what the machines do. This chapter explains how to operate them, because none of it is discoverable by guessing and one player has already spent an evening clicking every pixel of a PDU looking for a port.

Nothing in the rack is dragged

There is no drag-and-drop in the rack. Not for cables, not for moving a device between slots. If you press and drag across the chassis, you are doing something the rack has no meaning for. Every rack interaction is a click, or a click followed by a second click.

The one genuine drag in the whole game is inside the Upgrade Console, where you drag an upgrade card onto an open slot — and even there, the console is desktop-only for exactly that reason.

Where the ports are

A device's ports are the small coloured blocks in a row across its face in the rack, immediately under its name. Amber blocks are power; green blocks are network. They are small — a 1U device is about thirty pixels tall and a PDU carries nine of them — so hover one and the tooltip tells you exactly which port it is: Input, Outlet 3, WAN, eth0.

Dim blocks are ports with nothing plugged into them. A block you have just clicked is outlined in white, so you can always tell whether a click landed.

Running a cable: click, then click

1. Click the first port. A banner appears above the rack saying what you are wiring and from where. Your cursor becomes a crosshair and a line follows it.
2. Click the port at the other end. The cable is made.

Click the same port a second time, press Esc, or press Cancel on the banner to abandon it. Power ports only connect to power ports, network only to network — clicking a mismatched port does not make a bad cable, it just does not complete.

Connecting the grid and the internet: a two-step, from the other end

The Residential Grid's four slots and the ISP uplink are not in the rack, so they are wired from their own panels and finished in the rack:

• Grid: in the Grid panel, select a slot and press Connect, then click a PDU or UPS's Input port — the leftmost amber block on its face.
• Internet: in the Internet panel, press the uplink connector, then click a router or firewall's WAN port.

The same banner above the rack shows what is armed and lets you cancel, which matters most here: you have changed panels since you started, and there is otherwise nothing on screen to remind you.

The three columns

Either side column collapses to a thin rail with the arrow in its header, and comes back the same way.

On a phone

The mobile build at /m/ is the same game with a tab bar instead of three columns. Everything above still holds, with tap for click: tap a device to open its sheet, tap a port, tap the second port. The wiring banner is there too, and on a phone it is the only cue — there is no cursor to turn into a crosshair.

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

Before any of them: your servers hold what they earn until you collect it. Hosted games, application tenants and AI compute keep their takings on the machine that made them, the same way a mining rig pays into a NAS vault. Open the Wallet and you will see it as waiting on your servers, with a Collect button.

Nothing decays and nothing is lost by leaving it there — collecting is one tap and is never refused, and pulling a device out banks its takings rather than destroying them. But uncollected money is the only money another player can steal from you. Your wallet balance, your Chips and everything you bought with them are never reachable. A rack that has been earning quietly for a day is a rich target; a rack you collect from regularly is a poor one.

Client Contracts

The Contracts board (Operations → Contracts in the top menu bar) 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. A payout banks as much as the share's free space holds; anything that doesn't fit is held — never lost — and the rig's Inspector says “NAS share is full” until you transfer coins out of the vault or grow the share.

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 Tools → Upgrades in the top menu bar, which opens the 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 board (Operations → Missions) 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.

Streak freezes

A freeze covers one missed day and keeps your streak alive. Every completed 7-day streak banks one free; a spare costs 30 Chips, and you can hold three at most.

Two honest limits. A freeze only covers a single gap — miss two days running and the streak breaks whatever you are holding — and it protects your mission streak only, never your rack's uptime streak. Uptime is a real gameplay outcome that contracts and milestones read, and nothing in this game sells you an outcome.

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.

Collections

The cosmetics you own group into named sets — Neon Ops, Vintage Iron, Cold Room, Blackout — each with a meter showing how far along you are. Complete a set and its capstone item is added free. No set changes the price of anything, nothing is time-limited, and no item costs a penny more for belonging to one. The meter is there to show you how close you already are, which is the truth either way.

Gifts

You can buy a cosmetic for somebody else. Pick a registered player by username, choose the item, add a line if you want one, and it arrives at their rack as a sealed courier crate they open by hand.

• Chips never change hands. You pay; they receive the item. Nothing lands on their balance, and there is no way to send Chips to another player in this game — by design, not by omission.
• A gift can always be declined, and you can block a sender outright.
• You can send without your name attached if you would rather.
• Everything giftable is also earnable free through the mission track — by either of you.

Supporting the game

There is a tip jar in Wallet → Shops, and a donate command in any terminal that explains it. It is genuinely a donation: it grants you nothing in the game — no Chips, no advantage, nothing another player cannot have for free. What it gives you is a Supporter badge and, if you want it, your name on the Founders' Wall (founders reads it; it lists names only, never amounts).

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. And since the 2026-08-21 update they are worn in public: a raider walking your rack sees your rack skin and device skins in their raid view.
• 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.

Real people, real racks

“Going on the Offensive” and “The Hacker Collective” are you against the game. This one is you against other operators — real accounts, real racks, real money moving between them. It is the only system in Silicon Pirates where another human being can take something of yours, and for that reason it is the only one you have to switch on yourself.

Nobody is in this by accident

Live hacking is opt-in, and it stays off until you go and turn it on. Open the glowing terminal to the left of your racks, find Live Hacking, and read the page — it lists every consequence before it lets you agree. You need a free registered account, because consent should belong to a person and not to a browser tab somebody can clear.

Corp drills are the practice half, and they are separate. If you are registered but not opted in, a Corp operator will occasionally run a practice intrusion on your rack — in their words, keeping their own skills sharp. It is the full alarm-and-defence experience with the stakes removed: nothing can ever be taken, however it ends, and tracing the intruder out pays 300 credits. Drills happen at most once a day, only while you are at your rack, and have their own off-switch on the same Live Hacking page. Players who opt into the real thing are never drilled — you get real visitors instead.

Opting out is one button, always available, effective immediately, no confirmation and no waiting. Opting in makes you attackable straight away but you cannot attack anybody for six hours. That gap is deliberate: without it the switch would be a weapon — hit someone, then hide behind protection before they could answer. The risk lands on you before the advantage does.

The four rounds

An attack is not a dice roll. It is four rounds played in order, each a different puzzle drawn from a pool of sixteen, and losing any one of them ends the run:

Because the games are drawn from a pool, you will not play the same run twice. Everything works by tapping, so it plays identically on a phone and a desktop.

Every round is on a clock. A bar runs across the top of the puzzle showing the time you have left, and how long you get depends on how much work the puzzle actually is — 25 seconds to pick one thing out of a list, 30 for a grid, 45 to put a sequence in order or dial in a range, 50 for the ones that want several answers. Let it reach zero and the round is lost exactly as if you had answered wrongly. A hesitant run is a failed run.

What a breach is worth

Winning the four phases does not pay you. It gets you inside. You land on the machine facing the internet and walk the rack one cable at a time, seeing every device and what each one is holding — and you have about eight minutes before the way out closes.

To take anything you must hold still on a device for thirty seconds. That is the whole game: you are pinned and noisy for the entire countdown, and it is exactly the window the defender is watching for.

You can take up to half of what a rack is holding: uncollected server takings, uncollected crypto, and up to half the owner’s Lab Credits — those last only from the internet-facing box, the most exposed place in the rack to be standing.

That figure is fixed the moment your attack opens, before you play a single puzzle. Whatever the rack was holding when the alarm went off is what is on the table for the whole run. The defender cannot shrink the prize by collecting their servers once they see you coming, and it cannot swell either — what you saw when you picked the target is what you are playing for.

They are not helpless while you are in there, and you cannot see what they are doing. Every move you make is noise, and the louder you have been the more precisely they can find you.

Collect your servers, or somebody else will

Only uncollected money can be stolen. Your wallet balance, your Chips and anything you bought with them are never reachable. Hosted games, application tenants and AI compute keep their takings on the machine that earned them until you press Collect in the Wallet — and a rack full of uncollected money is precisely what makes you worth robbing. Collecting costs nothing and takes one tap.

Corporate racks

Ten generated corporate data centres sit in the directory at any time, marked CORP, and they are always open. They are run by the house, not by players, and the directory says so. Bigger ones are richer, sit deeper behind more switches, and their security notices you faster — a megacorp can be isolating your best boxes forty seconds after you walk in, deepest first.

A Corp goes dark for an hour once it has been raided, and what you take is gone from it for good. Raiding the same rack twice does not pay twice.

Being on the receiving end

You are never robbed silently. The moment somebody breaks in you are alerted anywhere in the game, not just on the terminal screen, and told to open it. What the scanner can tell you depends on how much noise they have made: first that somebody is in there, then roughly where, and finally the exact machine with a countdown on what they are taking.

• Cut a machine off. The cheapest thing you can do and usually the right one — any extraction running on it dies instantly.
• Fight them off. You both get the same puzzle and the first correct answer wins. Beat them and they are thrown out with nothing and forfeit a quarter of their Lab Credits to you. Losing costs you nothing but the moment — trying is always worth it.
• Kill the rack. Always works, always hurts. They leave with nothing, and your whole rack goes down with your uptime streak.

Whatever happens, you get an itemised account of it rather than a number. Both sides see the same receipt at the end of a raid: every device that was touched, by name, and exactly what came off each one — credits, crypto and server takings listed separately, never mixed into one total, because they are not the same thing and a single figure would hide which of them you actually lost. If an attacker left empty-handed the receipt says so plainly, and if they were stopped it says what they had been carrying at the moment you stopped them. And you cannot be raided while you are away. A defender who is not there cannot defend, so an attack on a player who is not at their rack is refused outright — not paid at a lower rate, refused. Being away is immunity rather than a discount, and the same is true of a rack you own but are not currently standing in. If a raid opens while you are here and you then leave, it carries on: closing the tab is not a defence.

Nobody can camp you

The corporations play too

Every rack in the directory that is not a person is labelled CORP — there are no longer any unlabelled house racks salted in among the players. There used to be twelve, and they were retired: a rack you could rob with nobody behind it was padding, and the directory reads more honestly without them. Corps carry real loot and are genuinely worth hitting, though what you extract from them is capped at 40,000 credits a day, so that working the corporations supplements real play rather than replacing it.

They attack back. Corps do not only sit there waiting to be robbed — one will come for you, and its attack arrives looking exactly like a person's, walking recon → breach → persist → payload as it ages so the alert shows real progress and your defence puzzle matches the phase. The differences are all in your favour:

• It gives you 150 seconds before it resolves — that entire window is your chance to answer it.
• Ignored, it succeeds slightly less than half the time. Ignoring the alarm is a real gamble, not an obvious choice either way.
• It will not come back for 12 hours — counted per account, across every rack you own — and it will never touch a rack below 60 Reputation, nor one whose owner has not been seen recently. Nobody gets farmed while they are still finding their feet, or while they are not there.
• Defending against it or pulling the plug works exactly as it does against a person, because on the inside it genuinely is the same thing.

More than one rack

Every limit above is counted per account, not per rack, so owning four racks does not mean being robbed four times as often. The one thing worth knowing: you can only defend a rack you are actually standing in — and because a rack nobody is standing in cannot be raided at all, the ones you are not looking at are not soft targets. They are not targets.

A notebook that's actually yours

Notes (Tools → Notes in the top menu bar) 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 You → School in the top menu bar — the same place on desktop and mobile. You need a free registered account — a certificate is a permanent qualification, not something that disappears when you clear your browser.

Seven 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.
• BIT-302 Raiding and Extraction — the other side of the same coin: what a raid can and cannot take, when to walk away carrying something, and how to answer an alarm. See the raiding chapter.
• BIT-401 Terminal and Scripting — the shell, scheduled jobs, and where a cron table actually lives.

Each course ends in a real exam

Not the same quiz seven 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, handle four security incidents, judge a set of raids on what was really allowed to happen, and drive a terminal through scenarios that only a working command gets you out of. 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 each of the four diplomas, +$5,000 for graduating.
• 10–15% off the hardware that course covers, permanently.

Take every distinction and the institute is worth $17,300 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 You → Profile in the top menu bar, same 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.

Thirty-five commands, and the four questions they ask first

Chapter 9 got you typing. This is the whole surface: every command, what each one needs before it will work, and how to make the rack run without you. Type help at any terminal for the live list — it is complete, and a test keeps it that way.

Read the refusal, not the command

Before a command does anything it checks four things, and each one refuses in its own words. The message is the diagnosis.

What you can type

• Files: ls df cat read stat write append rm. Flat, no folders, and the blocks are real NAS blocks — df tells the truth.
• Network: ping ip netstat who logs devices racks rackscan.
• Services: svc list, svc install <id>, svc status, svc start|stop|rm.
• Scripts: run, run -n, run -v, run -max N, source.
• Automation: cron add <name> every <sec> run <file>, plus list, rm, enable, disable, run.
• Hacking: targets scan exploit steal cash steal crypto disconnect hackback.
• The rest: achievements milestones inbox players slots man help.

Writing a script

A script is just a file, one command per line.

write check.sh "if internet"
append check.sh "svc start web-basic"
append check.sh "else"
append check.sh "exit 1"
append check.sh "endif"
run -n check.sh
run check.sh

run -n is a dry run: it prints what the script would do without doing it. Use it on anything that touches a rack currently earning.

run or source?

run starts a fresh shell and throws it away afterwards. source runs the script in the shell you are already in, so whatever it sets up is still there when it finishes. That single difference is behind most scripts that appear to do nothing.

Conditions, and the one that trips people

if ip, if link, if internet, if ping 1.1.1.1, and if exit == 0. Close with endif, optionally via else.

if exit == 0 tests the previous command and nothing else — put a line between them and you are testing that line instead. Exit codes: 0 worked, 1 refused, 127 no such command.

Cron belongs to one terminal

cron add nightly every 300 run check.sh
cron list
cron run nightly

A cron table lives on the terminal server it was made on. Build a second rack and its jobs do not follow — and if that terminal loses power or its share, its schedule stops with it.

When the house supply stops being enough

A commercial supply tier for racks that have outgrown domestic power. Bought once and it covers every rack you own — but each rack still chooses whether to use it, and it is genuinely the wrong choice for a small one.

What you get

• No wattage limit. The residential cap on each grid slot simply does not apply.
• No brownouts. Not fewer — none. They cannot happen on this supply.
• Evenings stop hurting. Peak pricing swings far less than it does at home.

The catch, stated plainly

The commercial tariff is a cheaper unit rate plus a $9/h standing charge you pay whether the rack is drawing anything or not. That is deliberate: without it this would be a free upgrade with no decision attached.

The crossover is 500W continuous. Under that, the house supply is cheaper and moving a small rack across will cost you money. Over it, industrial pulls away fast — and keeps pulling away as the rack grows.

What it costs to buy

Between $10,000 and $100,000, scaling with how far along you are — lifetime earnings and how many racks you run, never your current balance. Saving up for it will not make it more expensive.

Switching a rack over

Per rack, from the grid panel. You cannot swap a live grid. Unplug every slot first; the game tells you how many are still connected. This is the one rule with no exceptions — you would not swap a supply under load in a real rack either.

Letting the lab pay its own bills

A one-time 350-chip unlock, managed from Wallet → Auto-Pay. You pick which recurring charges get settled without you clicking, put a ceiling on each, and keep a cash reserve it is never allowed to touch.

Chips buy the automation, not the money

Worth being clear about, because it is the whole design. Chips unlock the feature. They never pay a bill. Everything is settled in its own currency:

Chips can never clear a cash debt, and no fee is ever waived — a disconnected grid is still charged the bill plus the reconnection fee, exactly as if you had paid it yourself. Auto-pay saves you the click, never the money.

It only does what you told it to

• Every rule starts off. Unlocking enables nothing at all.
• Each rule has a limit. Over it, the charge is refused outright rather than part-paid — you will never come back to a surprise partial payment.
• A cash reserve is never spent. Set it to whatever you would hate to lose while you were away.
• Failures are loud. Insufficient funds shows in the history and as a notification. Nothing fails quietly.
• It cannot start a subscription. Renewals only ever renew something you already own.

What gets paid first

Utilities, then a ransom, then debt, then renewals — fixed, and deliberately not something you can reorder. Utilities keep the rack alive, a ransom locks the entire game, debt only nags, and renewals are conveniences. Letting a cosmetic renewal jump ahead of the bill that is about to cut your power would be a trap, not a setting.

The one that asks twice

Automating the ransom takes a second confirmation. Paying is only one of four ways out, and the other three cost no cash at all — so switching this on is genuinely giving something up, and the game says so before it lets you.

Reading the screen

Upcoming charges sit at the top, each showing what it would cost and, if it would not be paid, exactly why: switched off, over your limit, or not enough available. Below that are the per-rule controls, and below those a full payment history — successes and failures together, because a payment log that only shows what worked is hiding the thing you needed.

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 jobs your rack asks for

Once your rack is a real operation, it starts writing its own to-do list — and none of it punishes you for being away.

What a work order is

Each day, a rack with a live uplink, real earnings and at least three configured devices cuts one to three jobs for itself, drawn from what is genuinely wrong with it right now: a unit worn past its service interval, data sitting on a share with no current mirror, takings nobody has collected. They appear on the Contracts board under Today's work orders.

They pay above the rate of the work they ask for, and every card tells you what the work will cost you before you take it.

The named device is a hint, not a handcuff

A card that says NAS-02 is holding data with no current mirror is telling you where to look. The job itself completes when any qualifying share is covered — fix it on a different unit, or sell the named one outright, and the order still pays or quietly withdraws. You are never locked to one box.

Rush jobs

Roughly one day in seven, one of your orders comes in as a rush: double pay, eight hours instead of thirty-six. There is nothing to buy here — a rush cannot be extended, skipped or purchased, and which day it lands on is decided by your own rack, not announced to everybody at once.

A healthy rack gets fewer orders

And a rack with nothing wrong with it gets none at all. That is the reward for running things properly, not a fault. If your board is empty, you have already done the work.

Coming back: the daily brief

Return after a real absence and the game opens with the day rather than a number: what your services earned while you were away, the jobs waiting, how many dailies are left and where your streak stands, and — if you registered in the last three days — exactly when your Shards start turning into Chips. Sections only show up when they have something true to say, so a brief with nothing in it does not appear at all, and a plain tab refresh never triggers one.

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.