Game Systems & Mechanics

The device manuals cover individual hardware. This page covers everything that happens ACROSS the rack -- the live dashboards, the economy, the threats, and the simulation rules that tie every device together. Same content is searchable live in-game via any terminal's man <topic> command; the topic name to use in-game is noted at the start of each section below.

Watching the Rack

Device Inspectors

Click any device to open its Inspector -- the single source of truth for that one unit's live state: power, thermals, wear, network, and whatever's device-specific (mining rate, hosted-player count, NAS shares). Every other dashboard on this page (the Active Services Monitor, Rack Status) derives its numbers the same way the Inspector does, live, not a cached or simplified copy.

man services -- Active Services Monitor

A live dashboard docked directly under Rack Status, listing every real workload currently running on the rack without opening each device's Inspector one at a time: crypto mining rigs, hosted game server slots, AI compute rentals, NAS backup-mirror sync health, terminal cron jobs, and an in-progress Security Audit contract's countdown. Rows only appear for things genuinely running right now -- a freshly-placed, unconfigured device shows nothing, by design; this dashboard reflects actual simulation state, never a placeholder value.

Click any row to expand it: a short live history sparkline for its headline metric, plus uptime, power draw, temperature, estimated operating cost (derived from the real current grid rate -- see Utility Billing below), estimated revenue, and a rough efficiency figure (revenue minus cost). A warning line explains itself whenever something isn't fully healthy -- a mining rig missing NAS capacity, a stale backup mirror, and so on. Minimize collapses it to a small pill showing running/warning counts, and that choice is remembered across reloads.

Every Number Here Is Live -- Nothing Is a Placeholder

man logs -- Event Log & Log Server

A real, unified log across 5 categories -- Power, Security, Financial, Network, Contracts -- covering real events like a device powering on/off, a fault or intrusion, a ransom paid, an ISP uplink connecting, or a contract accepted/completed/expired. Open it from the "Logs" tab in the bottom panel dock. Choose which categories you actually want tracked -- always free, no hardware required; turning a category off simply stops it filling the log, it doesn't change the underlying event. Software-only retention caps at the most recent 50 entries; racking a Log Server (1U, $180) and getting it powered and networked raises that cap to 400 -- it only changes how much history you keep, never what gets logged.

man leds -- LEDs & Activity Indicators

Every device row carries small status dots reflecting real state, not decoration: a Power dot lit only when the device is actually receiving power (a switched-on device with no powered PDU/UPS upstream still reads unpowered), a Fault dot lit red the instant any real fault is active, network-port dots that flicker with a live animation only on a connected, healthy, enabled link, and a NAS disk-activity dot that flashes for a short window right after a real terminal read/write against a share on that device, then decays back to idle. If a dot is lit, something real is actually true about that device right now.

Contracts, Rewards & Progression

man contracts -- Client Contracts

The Contracts board offers 3 open slots at a time, drawn from a pool of 60+ unique contracts spanning startups, crypto influencers, AI companies, retro LAN party organizers, hosting resellers, meme corporations, data hoarders, government agencies, research labs, streamers, angry gamers, tiny indie developers, corporate IT nightmares, shady clients, hacker groups, eccentric billionaires, small businesses, ridiculous emergencies, hardware collectors, and internet celebrities -- each with its own client, backstory, flavor text, and reward, not a generic "do X for money" objective.

Accept one and its objective is checked continuously against real rack state. Some pay out the instant the condition is true; others need it held continuously for a while, shown as a progress bar -- dropping the condition resets the timer rather than failing the contract outright. Some contracts also carry an optional bonus objective (a stretch goal paying separate cash + reputation the first time it's true) or a real time limit (accept it and it silently expires with no payout if you don't satisfy the main objective before the deadline shown on the card). Completing your very first contract also unlocks a certain terminal easter egg.

60+ Contracts, Real Clients, Real Personality

Difficulty, Reputation & Progression

Every contract has a difficulty tier (trivial / easy / medium / hard / extreme) shown on its card. Higher tiers carry a minimum Reputation requirement -- they simply won't appear on the board, or from a chip-paid instant refresh, until your Reputation qualifies, so the pool you actually see genuinely grows as your rack's Reputation grows. Reputation itself rises from revenue-producing activity and honest contract completions, and it's what separately gates the Darknet market and offensive Hacking tab -- see Hacker System below. A dedicated Reputation readout sits in the persistent top bar next to your balance, color-coded by tier, so progression is visible at a glance without opening a panel. That same tier badge isn't just a HUD element -- it shows next to your name everywhere another player can see it, including your listings on the Marketplace tab (see Player Trading below), so a rank earned honestly is visible identity, not a private stat.

Reward System

Rewards come from three independent sources, all real and immediate rather than cosmetic points: Client Contracts (cash + reputation, plus any bonus objective's separate payout), Achievements (run achievements on any terminal for a live checklist -- state-derived ones reflect whatever's true right now, event-based ones mark a specific real moment like surviving a brownout on a charged UPS or passing a Security Audit clean; every achievement pays a real one-time cash + reputation bonus the moment it's first earned, deliberately smaller than contract rewards and never clawed back), and the Security Audit contract's pass/fail branch (full payout if you isolate the scripted fault in time, a reduced payout plus a reputation cost if you don't).

Contracts Retire When You Finish Them

A contract you complete is gone for good. It will not come back on the board, a paid refresh will not return it, and the record is kept per account — not per rack, and not just for the current session. Work through the catalogue and the board legitimately gets shorter rather than handing you jobs you have already done.

The exception is contracts written as recurring work: standing retainers and routine sweeps, the kind of client who keeps paying for the same shelf space every month. Those come round again — 20 of the 96 templates are marked that way. The big one-off jobs, and every four-figure payout, are strictly once.

Economy & Marketplace

Two Currencies, Two Very Different Things

Lab Credits (shown with a $ sign) are earned entirely by playing -- hosting games, mining, contracts, Marketplace sales. This is NOT real money and never touches a real payment method; it's what you buy devices, pay power bills, and price Marketplace listings with. Spend it freely, it's genuinely just the in-game economy.

Chips (shown with a diamond) are the only currency in the whole game tied to real money, bought via Stripe (Wallet → Chips). They buy cosmetics and pure time-savers only -- device/rack skins, a custom rack nameplate, trinkets, a Hacker Ward, an Insurance Policy -- never anything that outperforms what free play already reaches.

Short version: a $ next to something means Lab Credits, all free, all earned. A diamond means Chips, the one place real money can enter the game, and it only ever buys looks and convenience.

Marketplace

Three separate markets, each with a different risk/reward shape:

• Shop -- new hardware at fixed prices, plus Chips (the premium currency): device/rack skins, full-UI accent themes, a custom rack nameplate, a Hacker Ward (temporary intrusion/ransomware immunity), an Insurance Policy (auto-repairs your next fault), a Device Insurance charge (a 20% deductible instead of full price to replace a permanently destroyed device), and Cable-Tie Auto-Organize -- cosmetic and convenience only, never a strictly-better outcome than free play reaches. (A same-value chips option also exists for active ransomware -- see that section -- but it only ever appears on the lock popup itself, not stocked here.)
• Used Market (Wallet → Used) -- listing prices float between 35% and 85% of new, and every purchase rolls a real condition on the spot (55% arrives like-new, 30% arrives pre-worn, 15% arrives already degraded and needing repair) with no way to preview the roll before buying.
• Darknet Market -- unlocks once Reputation is high enough; grey-market repair parts and exploit kits (a Heat Scrubber, a False-Log Kit) that are cheaper or faster than the honest route but carry a real chance of backfiring worse than paying straight would have.

Separately, the Wallet's Markets tab is a live crypto exchange (buy/sell at the real fluctuating market price, independent of mining) plus the Pump Predictor mini-game -- stake held coin on a 15-second up/down price call, 1.8x payout if right, stake lost if wrong.

Buy Low, Sell High, or Gamble on the Pump Predictor

Hardware Upgrades & the Upgrade Console

Real, Lab-Credit-priced upgrades installed onto a device you've already placed -- not a whole new purchase, an install onto the one you own. Every stat these upgrades price used to be freely editable for $0 on that device's own panel; now it's locked read-only and only moves by buying the matching upgrade.

• AI Server -- GPU Riser (repeatable, +1 GPU up to the real hardware ceiling) and Faster GPUs (one-time, maxes TFLOPS per GPU).
• NAS -- Extra Disk (repeatable, +20TB each) and a RAID Controller (one-time, raises built-in redundancy toward a real floor, never regresses an already-better stock value).
• Router -- a VPN Module (one-time), required for rack-to-rack terminal access.
• Crypto Rig -- a Hash Board, a different shape from the other three: 3 sequential tiers (must own tier N-1 before tier N), each a straight multiplier on mining rate.

Buy from that device's own Inspector panel, or from the top bar's "Upgrades" button, which opens a dedicated console: zoom from the whole rack down to the one device you want to work on, then drag an upgrade card onto an open slot to install it.

Every installed upgrade also gets a real jumper switch -- flip it off to suspend its effect (cut an AI Server's power draw, say) without losing the purchase, flip it back on for the exact same numbers as before. It's a genuine toggle, not a re-buy.

Cable-Tie Auto-Organize (100 Chips, One-Time)

By default, cable runs hang free between ports with real physics -- exactly how a real rack looks mid-build, but it can get visually busy once a rack fills up. Cable-Tie Auto-Organize is a one-time, 100-Chip purchase that replaces free-hanging cable physics with routed cable management: every power cable is automatically bundled down a left-side vertical rail, and every data/network cable down a right-side rail, the way a tidy real rack gets dressed. It's purely visual -- a routed cable carries exactly the same power or link it did free-hanging, nothing about capacity, power delivery, or network behavior changes -- and it applies automatically to cables you add afterward too, not just the ones present at purchase time.

Device Provenance

Every device carries a real acquisition history rather than being an anonymous blank slate: a green NEW badge shows for a few minutes right after you place a freshly-bought unit, and an amber USED badge shows instead over that same window for a unit bought pre-worn from the Used Market, matching whatever condition it actually rolled (see Used Market above). Selling a device back consumes that specific unit and its condition outright; removing one instead returns it to your Palette, placeable again for free as the same physical unit.

Player Trading (the Marketplace tab)

Separate from the Shop/Used/Darknet markets above, the Wallet → Marketplace tab is real cross-session trading with other actual players — the first system in the game where two different players' economies genuinely interact. Registering a real username unlocks it (browsing and managing your own balance work fine unregistered; buying and selling need a registered account) — and that username is yours for life the moment you register it, permanently tied to your session rather than something you re-claim or risk losing later. Trades run through a separate, server-verified Marketplace Balance — deposit from your regular Lab Credits wallet, withdraw back any time — so a trade can be trusted server-side rather than taken on faith from either player's browser. Buying debits the buyer and credits the seller atomically: if two players try to buy the same listing at once, exactly one succeeds, never both, never neither.

• List a device — any unplaced inventory unit, at a price you set. It keeps its real, unbroken ownership history across the trade, including its condition/wear.
• List a trinket — the cosmetic collectibles bought with Chips (bears, skulls, robots) trade on this exact same Marketplace once unsocketed from a Display Tray, same price rules and ownership history as a device.
• Sell a whole rack — everything installed in it, wiring and all, as one listing, instead of tearing it down device by device. You always keep at least one rack; selling your active one switches you onto whichever you have left. A rack's cosmetic nameplate (if you've set one) is cleared before listing and stays cleared for the buyer, since it's free-form text that could contain anything, including your own name.
• Sale price history — the Browse tab shows a live sparkline of recent real sale prices per device type, drawn from actual completed trades.
• Seller identity — every listing shows the seller's registered username and their current Reputation rank badge, so a listing has a real identity behind it instead of showing up anonymously.

Show My Rack (public gallery)

Wallet → Overview has a "Post Your Rack" button once you're registered — it captures a real snapshot of your actual rack as it looks right now and posts it to a public gallery on silicon-pirates.com/community/show-my-rack.html, alongside your username, Reputation rank, and device count. Posting again replaces your current post rather than stacking up a history — you get one live post at a time. Other registered players can up or downvote any posted rack from the gallery page; voting opens a quick same-tab confirmation on the game itself (silicon-pirates.com can't see your game login, so it never asks for your password directly) rather than a form on the gallery page. Click any posted rack on the gallery page to zoom in and see it full-size.

Rack Uptime Bragging Rights

Keep every device in your active rack genuinely powered, unbroken, for 10+ minutes and a live uptime streak starts counting — shown on your own rack status widget in-game, as a badge next to your name in the Comm Device's who's-online directory, and (once posted) frozen into your Show My Rack gallery snapshot as a permanent brag that doesn't un-count later even if the streak eventually breaks. A single device going down — power, a fault, destroyed, anything — resets the streak to zero with no partial credit; it has to requalify from scratch. A server-wide Top 5 Uptimes leaderboard is viewable in-game from the Comm Device panel.

Power & Environment

man power -- Utility Billing & Dynamic Pricing

Grid power isn't free. An hourly bill accrues automatically from your rack's live wattage draw (Wallet → Overview shows the running outstanding balance and the current $/hour rate). Left unpaid past $100 outstanding, a 5-minute grace countdown starts; if it runs out, the grid cuts off the WHOLE rack, not just one slot. Reconnecting needs the full outstanding balance plus a $25 reconnection fee in one action -- though paying down below $100 before the grace period ends cancels the disconnect entirely, no fee owed.

On top of load-based pricing, the $/hour rate also swings with your real local clock time: 5pm-9pm local is Peak (1.4x), 11pm-6am local is Off-peak (0.7x), everything else is standard. The Residential Grid panel shows a live Peak/ Off-peak badge next to the rate whenever either applies -- scheduling power-hungry mining or AI-compute runs for off-peak hours is a real way to save money, not a cosmetic detail.

Real Time-of-Day Pricing, Not a Flat Rate

Temperature Simulation & Cooling

Every device has its own idle temperature and a safe-temperature ceiling; real load (watts actually drawn) pushes current temperature up from idle toward that ceiling, and it cools back down as load drops. A device's Inspector shows current/idle/safe numbers plus a short live history sparkline; the Active Services Monitor shows the same live temperature and a thermal-load meter for anything it's tracking, without opening that Inspector. Crossing the safe ceiling doesn't instantly break anything -- it's the trigger for wear accruing: running hot raises fault odds over time and, past 100 wear, permanently degrades the device (runs measurably hotter, faults more often, stops recovering on its own) until a real, timed, paid maintenance action repairs it. Running cool lets accrued wear recover on its own instead.

Fire & Smoke Hazards

Overload fire is a distinct hazard from ordinary thermal overheat: a PDU chain sustained at or above capacity for a while has a real chance of catching fire, and it can spread -- every device directly plugged into that PDU's own outlets gets its own real chance to catch fire the instant the PDU ignites, so an overloaded PDU is a genuine risk to everything wired to it, not just itself. Reversed-polarity wiring is a separate, occasional hazard: a miswired power cable trips its device immediately once the upstream side goes live. Either one shows on that device's fault banner, which also tells you which hazard it actually was rather than leaving you to guess. A live overload fire renders as real dynamic flames with sparks, not a static smoke puff, so the instant a chain actually ignites is unmistakable at a glance, not something you have to squint at the fault banner to confirm.

The ordinary fault alarm (isolated or chained) triggers at a genuine 100% of capacity, no hidden pre-fault margin -- a densely, correctly packed rack can sit right at the line without a false alarm. Fire risk itself is a separate, slower trigger on top of that: it only starts building after a chain stays at or above 100% for a sustained stretch (20+ real seconds of a visible red fault LED first, so you always get real warning), so a brief spike alarms without burning anything down.

Catching fire permanently destroys the device, and anything it spreads to -- this isn't a recoverable fault like an ordinary overheat or intrusion. A destroyed device can never be powered back on or sold to the used market, and renders as a charred wreck in the rack (a DESTROYED badge, a dead power button). Its Inspector always offers a Replace Device button: full shop price normally, or just a 20% cash deductible with a banked Device Insurance charge (Wallet -> Chips shop) -- a separate consumable from the older Insurance Policy, which auto-repairs an ordinary recoverable fault free the instant it fires but does nothing for a destroyed device.

Cross-Rack Power

A PDU or UPS chain isn't limited to devices racked alongside it -- cross-rack cabling (see the Advanced Guide) lets a single PDU/UPS feed devices sitting in a second, physically separate rack over a real cable link, the same way its own local outlets do. A device powered this way is treated identically to a locally-powered device in every system that cares whether it's powered: it accrues thermal load and wear the same, participates fully in overload/fire risk on that chain, counts normally toward NAS disaster-recovery and mirror-sync eligibility, and its revenue and Active Services Monitor numbers are tracked exactly like any locally-powered unit. There's no partial or second-class powered state for a cross-rack link -- powered is powered, regardless of which physical rack the supplying PDU or UPS actually sits in.

Owning Multiple Racks

Every account can own up to 4 racks total, including the two starter racks every new account begins with. The "+ New Rack" button next to the rack switcher (top of the screen) buys a new, fully independent rack -- 6U/12U/20U/42U, priced by size -- and shows a clear limit-reached message instead of a purchase form once you're at 4. Every rack keeps its own devices, cables, and power/network state; only the currently active rack actually ticks, the rest sit frozen until you switch back. If you ever need to free up a slot, listing a rack for sale from the Wallet panel's "Sell a rack" section removes it from your account immediately, the moment it's listed -- not just once someone actually buys it.

Rack-to-Rack Terminal Access (VPN Tunnel)

A cross-rack cable (above) is one wired link between two specific ports. A VPN tunnel is different: it gives a terminal in one rack full network reach into an entire other owned rack, no cable required, purely from a router setting. Rack a router with at least 1 "VPN tunnels" provisioned -- a locked stat that starts at 0 on a freshly placed router and only moves via a real VPN Module upgrade (see Hardware Upgrades) -- and keep it powered on. From any terminal in that rack: racks lists every rack you own and whether a working tunnel is currently up; rackscan <rackId> lists every device in another owned rack, the same output shape as the local devices command; and ping <ip|deviceId> also resolves a target in another owned rack once a tunnel is active, exactly as if it were local. With no tunnel configured, rackscan refuses and ping only ever reaches devices in the rack you're actually standing in.

Network Simulation

man network

A device needs an enabled network port with a cable link AND an IP (static or DHCP) before it counts as online for NAS access, contracts, or hosting. Bandwidth on the Internet Provider panel's live Mbps graph reflects real activity -- a small idle baseline, real traffic per connected hosted-game player, real load from AI-compute utilization (the single biggest driver), and a small flat bump while any crypto rig is actively mining -- never a fixed decorative number. DHCP troubleshooting is real too: no lease usually means the port isn't enabled, isn't cabled through to a router with DHCP on, or a switch port between them has DHCP override blocking broadcasts on purpose; static IP addressing on the same subnet is always a reliable fallback while troubleshooting a lease.

Redundancy & Failover

man redundancy -- Designing a Rack That Survives a Failure

Everything above assumes a device dying is a disaster. Once your rack is big enough, it doesn't have to be. Rack Status → Redundancy (and the Inspector's Rack overview, for the full breakdown -- both are on mobile too) answers one question, four times over: if this single component died right now, would the rack still work?

It is not a checklist score. The game genuinely re-runs its own power and network logic with one device forced dark and sees what falls over -- the same code that decides whether your revenue devices are earning. That is why the panel can tell you the specific consequence rather than a percentage: “Loses its only route to the uplink if Top Switch fails.”

• Power: the device survives any one PDU or UPS dying. A UPS helps -- it carries the load when its upstream PDU fails -- but then the UPS itself is the single point, and the panel says so rather than rewarding you for merely owning one.
• Network: the device still reaches your uplink with any one switch, router or firewall dead. One cable through one switch is not covered; a second link through different hardware is.
• Storage: a NAS holding real data has a CURRENT backup mirror, or genuine built-in array redundancy. A stale mirror does not count.
• Services: every job has a second healthy device that could carry it. Note that AI servers, game servers, log servers and terminal servers are four different jobs even though all four are “servers” -- a second log server does not keep a hosted game running.

What Redundancy Actually Buys You

Normally any device going degraded, destroyed, faulted or dark resets your rack uptime streak. If the failed device's job has a healthy standby, that failure becomes a failover instead: the work carries on, the streak survives, and a Failover: line appears in your event log.

Redundancy covers one failure per job at a time. Lose a second unit of the same job before repairing the first and nothing is covering any more -- the streak breaks exactly as it always did. A mostly-broken rack is not a redundant rack. The failed device also stays listed as an issue in Rack Status the whole time: failover buys you time to fix it, not permission to ignore it.

The Redundant PSU Upgrade

Most devices ship with a single power input, so Power is the hardest row to satisfy out of the box. The Redundant PSU upgrade ($1800, Inspector → Upgrades) adds a second input to almost anything: servers, NAS units, routers, firewalls, switches, comm devices, KVM consoles. The Crypto Rig already ships with two and needs nothing; a Display Tray has no power port and takes nothing.

Wire the new port to a different PDU or UPS than the first. Two feeds from the same PDU protects nothing, and the panel will keep flagging it -- it simulates that PDU dying and watches the device die with it either way. Buying the upgrade and leaving the port unwired also earns you nothing: an unwired second supply is a part in a box. The spare idles at zero draw, so a redundant device is never billed twice for one machine's power.

PDUs and UPS units can take it too, and there the new port is an inlet (IN2) rather than a supply. That matters for a chained PDU -- one fed from another PDU's outlet instead of its own grid slot. Chained gear is a single point of failure for everything plugged into it, and a second inlet from an independent PDU fixes that. Be clear on what it does: it protects the PDU, not the devices on its outlets. Those still go dark if that PDU itself fails, so they want their own second supply as well.

The upgrade is physical hardware, so unlike the stat upgrades it has no jumper -- suspending it would have to decide what happens to whatever you already plugged into the port it added.

Hacker System

Defense: Heat, Reputation & Intrusions (man heat)

Heat rises with revenue-producing activity and always decays over time -- faster, and dampened on the way up, with a live, properly-configured firewall in the rack. Higher Heat raises the odds a random fault rolls as an intrusion rather than plain hardware failure. An intrusion doesn't force the device off -- it keeps running, flagged not-ok, while you get a real response window: isolate it (power off) to contain it with no penalty, investigate first with terminal commands, or do nothing and eat a cash + reputation penalty once it lands. A landed intrusion is also the moment NAS disaster recovery checks for a current backup (see Data Management below).

Offense: Scanning and Stealing (man hacking)

A rotating board of procedurally-generated remote targets you can scan, exploit, and steal cash or crypto from, all through the terminal. Getting caught is a real consequence, not a token slap on the wrist -- it raises your own Heat by a serious amount and carries a real chance of triggering a genuine intrusion fault back on one of your own devices. Reputation-gated tools (a Port Scanner, Exploit Kit, Crypto Siphon, and Ghost Protocol) improve the odds without making any attempt a sure thing.

Hacker Debt: Recurring Hacker Collectives (man medved)

A recurring named threat that only starts paying attention once your rack is a real, working setup. One of three real collectives gets assigned to your rack at random the first time it activates, and stays the same one for as long as that rack exists: The Medved Collective (a comedic, broken-English ransomware crew), The Zaslon Directorate (a cold, corporate, clinically professional outfit -- no jokes, only invoices), or The Ratio Collective (a chaotic, extremely-online Gen Z crew, dead serious about the bag despite the slang). Same mechanics either way -- only the voice differs. Once active, an unprotected rack (no live, properly- configured firewall AND DHCP actually enabled) can get ransomware-locked at any time -- every device click, power toggle, and port click stops working until it's resolved. The demand is a real formula (a base amount plus per-device scale-up), never just your current wallet balance, so a broke player doesn't get a free pass. Four ways out: pay it in full, pay what you can afford (the rack unlocks either way, but any shortfall becomes real debt you still owe), attempt to break it yourself with the right tools at real odds, or an Instant Reverse Hack that always succeeds and steals a real, varying amount from them (never the same twice) instead of costing you anything. Reachable two ways: owning every hacking tool in the Darknet shop (free), or -- right there on the lock popup itself, not a separate shop trip -- spending real chips instead if you don't. Either way, the real price is the same: Heat maxes out immediately, and they get permanently angrier from that moment on, arriving on a shorter message timer going forward, not just a nastier tone.

Underpaying doesn't wipe the slate -- the shortfall becomes debt the same collective keeps nagging you about with periodic wallet messages until it's paid off. The Wallet panel's "Run a Job" button (a real ~1-minute cooldown between attempts) is the grind path: 70% of the time it knocks debt down and pays a small cash reward for off-the-books work; the other 30% it goes bad -- no debt relief that attempt, plus a real Heat penalty for getting caught. Debt never blocks play -- the rack stays fully usable the whole time you're working it off, and a properly-configured rack gets only escalating taunt messages instead of ransomware in the first place.

The RZAREKTA-Impersonation Scam

A completely separate trick from ransomware, offered only to registered accounts: a popup impersonating the real developer, RZAREKTA, asking for your account password under a fake security-test pretext with a bogus free-gift bribe -- one of 12 pretexts, picked at random, deliberately a little too casual and badly-argued to feel "kinda obviously not really the dev" once you think about it. Entering your real password is verified server-side for real, not just "did you type something" -- only the actual correct password triggers the worst outcome: the popup glows red, plays a brief virus-takeover reveal, then the rack ransomware-encrypts exactly like the mechanic above. Typing anything wrong, or just closing the popup, counts as refusing: a taunt in the collective's own voice revealing it was them, plus a one-time $300 and 10 Reputation for spotting it. This one deliberately bypasses having a firewall/router configured -- it's a social-engineering trick, not a network exploit -- but a Hacker Ward still blocks it completely, same as ransomware.

Live Hacking (Player vs Player)

Distinct from both systems above. The Hacker System is you against the game; this is you against other real accounts, with real credits and crypto moving between them. It is the only system in which another human can take something of yours, which is why it is the only one that is opt-in and stays off until a player deliberately turns it on.

Consent, and why it is asymmetric

Opting in requires a registered account -- consent should belong to a person, not to a browser tab that can be cleared -- and takes a deliberate second confirmation after a page that lists every consequence first. Opting out is a single button, always enabled, effective immediately, with no confirmation and no cooldown. A protection you have to qualify for is not a protection.

Corp Drills (practice, nothing at stake)

Added 2026-08-14. Registered players who have not opted in occasionally get a practice intrusion from a Corp operator keeping their skills sharp: the full alarm and defence experience, with nothing ever taken, however it ends -- the attacker cannot win a drill by construction. Tracing the intruder out pays 300 Lab Credits; pulling the plug works but pays nothing. At most one drill per player per day, only while the player is at their rack, never during any real attack, and with its own off-switch on the Live Hacking consent page -- a separate consent question from the real thing, deliberately. Opted-in players are exempt.

Opting in makes a rack attackable immediately but bars that player from attacking anyone for six hours. Without that gap the switch would be a weapon: hit somebody, then hide behind protection before they could answer. The risk lands before the advantage does. Opting out does not hide a player from the directory -- they remain visible, simply not attackable.

Every eligibility question -- consent, and whether the defender is actually there -- resolves through a single server-side authority, for player attacks and Corp attacks alike. There is deliberately no second copy of those checks anywhere in the codebase, because a second copy is how somebody gets attacked after opting out.

The four phases

An attack is four rounds played in order -- recon, breach, persist, payload -- each a mini-game drawn from a pool of sixteen built on five interaction shapes, so no two runs are identical. Losing any single round ends the run. Every game is tap-driven and plays identically on phone and desktop.

Grading is entirely server-side. The client submits the solution, never a score, and never receives an answer key: each puzzle is regenerated deterministically on the server from the same seed and graded there.

Every round is on a clock, scaled to the work the puzzle actually asks for: 25 seconds to pick one item from a list, 30 for a grid, 45 to order a sequence or dial a range, 50 for the multi-select shapes. Running out loses the round exactly as a wrong answer does. The deadline is held server-side and belongs to the round rather than to the window: leaving a puzzle and reopening it does not restart the clock, and a round whose time expired while the player was away is already lost when they come back.

What a breach takes

Half the credits and crypto the target rack is carrying, capped at 25,000 credits per breach. The pot is measured as the high-water mark over the previous six hours rather than the balance at the instant of the attack, so emptying a wallet when the alarm fires achieves nothing.

An absent player is not a cheaper target. They are not a target. An attack on a real player who is not at their rack is refused outright, because a defender who is not there cannot defend and a one-sided robbery is not a game mechanic. Waiting for somebody to log off is not a strategy; it is the end of the attempt. The same holds for a rack its owner owns but is not currently standing in.

A raid already in progress is unaffected -- if it opened while the defender was there and they leave, it continues, because closing the tab must never be the strongest defensive move in the game. Corp racks are exempt from the rule entirely and are always available, which is what stops the directory running dry when nobody is on.

Chips can never be hacked or siphoned, by anyone, ever -- nor can anything bought with them, Blackport certificates, profiles or saved racks. No device is ever permanently destroyed by another player. Only credits and crypto move.

The figures above describe the lump-sum settlement, which is what a breach pays when a raid cannot be opened -- an attacker without a registered account, or a target with no usable rack manifest. For a registered attacker a won breach does not pay anything at the moment it lands: it opens a raid, and the money settles when the raid ends.

Raid mode

Winning the four phases gets the attacker inside rather than paid. They land on the internet-facing machine and walk the rack one cable at a time, seeing every device and what it is holding, with roughly eight minutes before the way out closes.

The rule the feature is built on is money frozen, topology live. The pot -- per-device takings, uncollected crypto and the owner's Lab Credits -- is snapshotted when the attack opens, before the first puzzle is played, so a defender cannot shrink the prize by collecting once the alarm starts ringing, and an attacker cannot grow it by stalling. The rack's shape stays live: pulling a device's power or its network cable takes effect within seconds and kills any extraction running on it.

Taking anything requires holding still on a device for 30 seconds, and that dwell is the loudest thing an attacker can do -- the defender's scanner resolves their position more precisely the more noise they have made. Everything taken is carried, not banked: thrown out, cut off, beaten in a duel or still inside when the clock runs out, and the entire load drops. Leaving takes eight visible seconds and can be interrupted.

Both sides get the same itemised receipt when a raid ends: every device touched, by name, and exactly what came off each one, with credits, crypto and server takings listed separately rather than summed into a single figure that would hide which of them actually moved. An attacker who leaves with nothing is told so plainly, and a defender who stopped one is told what that attacker had been carrying at the moment they were stopped.

The defence

An intrusion raises an alarm everywhere in the game, not only on the multiplayer terminal, naming the attacker, the rack and the phase reached. Two responses: defend, playing the contest from the other side -- winning repels the attack outright with nothing taken, no downtime, and a one-hour counter-attack window that bypasses the pair cooldown; or pull the plug after 20 seconds, which always works and always costs -- a broken uptime streak, a two-minute device lockout, and no recovery of anything already taken.

A failed defence carries no additional penalty. If failing made things worse, the safe play would be never to try. A post-mortem afterwards records who, how far, what it cost, and why it went that way.

Anti-grief limits

Counted per account rather than per rack, so owning several racks does not multiply exposure: two hours untouchable after being robbed, six hours before the same attacker may return, and a cap of ten attacks per day per player. A failed attack costs more Heat (18) than a successful one (7) -- a sloppy run is louder than a clean one. A player can only defend a rack they are currently in, and a rack that cannot be defended cannot be attacked, so the racks they are not looking at are not soft targets either.

Corp racks

Not every rack in the directory belongs to a person, and every rack that does not is labelled CORP. This is the reverse of the original decision, which left a dozen unlabelled house racks salted in among the players on the theory that flagging them would render half the directory scenery. Those twelve were retired: there was nothing behind them -- no account, no session, no rack to walk -- so breaking into one was playing against a loot table. What remains is ten generated corporate data centres, which have real racks and are honest about what they are.

Corps are always open, are stored rather than regenerated so that a balance pass cannot reshape a rack somebody is standing in, and are richer and deeper the larger they are. A Corp goes dark for an hour once raided and what was taken is gone from it for good. Extraction from Corps is capped at 40,000 credits per player per day, because those credits are minted rather than transferred and an uncapped version is an infinite money faucet with extra steps.

They also attack. A Corp attack is an ordinary attack record internally -- the same alarm, the same defence, the same shutdown, the same post-mortem, with no special cases -- so it is indistinguishable from a human attacker. Corp attacks do not play mini-games; instead they run for 150 seconds, which is the defender's window, and then resolve slightly under a coin flip if nobody answered. Any defence or shutdown that lands first always wins over the timer. A Corp will not attack the same player more than once every 12 hours -- counted per account, across every rack they own -- will never attack one below 60 Reputation, and will never pick a target who has not been seen recently.

Corp attacks are driven by live play rather than a scheduler, so they cannot accumulate against an absent player. Returning after a long break never means a queue of robberies that could not have been answered.

Automatic Payments

A one-time 350 chip unlock that lets the lab settle its own recurring charges. Managed from Wallet → Auto-Pay.

Chips buy the automation, never the money

This is the part worth being precise about. Chips unlock the feature; they do not pay the bills. Each charge is settled in its own currency and no conversion exists in either direction:

• Cash: the utility bill (including the reconnection fee), a ransomware demand, and hacker debt.
• Chips: Hacker Ward and Auto-Repair Protocol renewals — services that already cost chips.

If chips could clear a cash bill, chips would buy cash at a fixed rate and every earning mechanic in the game would be competing with a credit card. It would also make “insufficient funds” meaningless, and reporting that honestly is half the point of the feature. No fee is ever waived either — a disconnected grid is still charged the bill plus the reconnection fee, exactly as if you had paid it by hand.

It only ever does what you told it to

• Every rule starts off. Unlocking the feature enables nothing.
• Per-rule limits. A charge over its limit is refused entirely, not part-paid — a surprise partial payment is harder to reason about than an honest refusal.
• A cash reserve auto-pay may never spend below. Set it to whatever you would be upset to lose while you were not looking.
• Failures are reported, in the history and as a notification. Nothing fails silently.
• Renewals only renew what you already own. Auto-pay can never start a subscription on your behalf.

Order, and the one rule that asks twice

Charges settle in a fixed order: utilities (they keep the rack alive), then a ransom (it locks the whole game), then debt (it only nags), then renewals (conveniences). That order is not configurable on purpose — putting a cosmetic renewal ahead of the bill about to disconnect your rack would be a footgun dressed as a feature.

Automating the ransom requires a second confirmation, because paying is only one of four ways out and the other three cost no cash at all. The screen says so before it lets you switch it on.

The management screen shows upcoming charges, what each rule would do right now and why not if it would not, and a full payment history of both successes and failures.

Terminal Command Reference

35 commands. Type help at any terminal for the live list, or man <topic> for the in-game manual. The authoritative internal reference is docs/TERMINAL_REFERENCE.md.

Four gates, four different refusals

Before a command does anything it checks what it needs, and each requirement refuses in its own words. The refusal message is the diagnosis — it tells you what to go and fix.

• Power — the terminal itself.
• Link — a live network port. ping self-checks before it resolves anything.
• Mount — a NAS share shared to this terminal. Exactly ten commands need one: append cat cron df ls rm run source stat write. Anything else unrecognised answers unknown command.
• Device — something specific racked and powered, e.g. players needs a live Comm Device.

The command set

• Files (need a mount): ls, df, cat, read, stat, write, append, rm. Flat namespace, real NAS blocks — df is the truth.
• Network: ping, ip, netstat, who, logs, devices, racks, rackscan. Cross-rack needs a powered router with a VPN tunnel; without one it says no VPN tunnel rather than timing out.
• Services: svc list|install|status|start|stop|rm.
• Scripting: run, run -n (dry run), run -v, run -max N, and source.
• Automation: cron add|list|rm|enable|disable|run, per terminal server.
• Hacking: targets, scan, exploit, steal cash|crypto, disconnect, hackback.
• Everything else: achievements, milestones, inbox, players, slots, man, help.

run versus source

run executes a script in a fresh shell and throws that shell away. source runs it in the shell you are already in, so anything it sets up survives. Most “my script did nothing” reports are a run that should have been a source. run -n prints what a script would do without doing it — worth using on anything touching a rack that is earning.

Conditions and exit codes

Inside scripts: if ip, if link, if internet, if ping <addr>, or if exit == 0 to test the previous command — it reads the previous command only, so anything in between tests the wrong thing. Close with endif, optionally via else. exit <code> stops early. 0 success, 1 refused, 127 no such command.

Learn it properly

BIT-401 Terminal and Scripting at the Blackport Institute covers all of this with a practical exam, a certificate, a 15% discount on Terminal Servers and a cash reward — and completes the Diploma in Continuity.

Industrial Grid Upgrade

A commercial supply tier. Bought once, account-wide — every rack you own, now or later, becomes eligible. Eligibility is not use: each rack still chooses its own supply, so a small rack can stay residential while the big one runs industrial.

What it removes

• No wattage limit. Residential caps each grid slot; industrial does not cap at all.
• No brownouts. Not reduced — they cannot happen on this supply.
• Flatter peak pricing. 1.15×/0.85× against residential’s 1.4×/0.7×, so a rack that runs through the evening stops being punished for it.

Why it is not simply better

The commercial tariff is a 30% cheaper unit rate plus a $9/h standing charge you pay whether the rack draws anything or not. That produces a real crossover rather than a strict upgrade:

Break-even is 500W continuous. Below it, residential is genuinely cheaper and switching a small rack is a mistake you can make. Above it, industrial pulls away. The figure the game quotes is derived from the two rates, so it can never drift from what you are actually billed.

Price

Scales $10,000 to $100,000 on lifetime earnings and rack count — not your current balance. Pricing off the wallet would punish saving up for it, and would let a player empty their balance to buy it cheaply.

Switching supply

Per rack, from the grid panel. You cannot swap a live grid — every slot must be unplugged first, and the game names how many are still connected. That is a safety rule rather than a balance one: swapping a supply under load would mean re-deriving every device’s power state mid-flight.

Data Management

man nas -- Storage, Shares & Disaster Recovery

A NAS carves its total capacity into per-client storage-block shares; a share must be enabled for a client device before that client can use it, and real terminal file writes on a mounted share patch the same used/capacity numbers the NAS Inspector shows.

Setting one up: open the NAS that will hold the copy (a Backup Appliance is purpose-built for it), pick the NAS holding the data, then pick a client shared on it — or Everything on this NAS to mirror every client it serves at once. The mirror share is created, sized and linked for you.

A NAS can only back up the client shares another NAS hosts, never that NAS's own storage — a NAS has no share of itself, so picking one as the client creates a mirror that can never sync. The game says so plainly instead of sitting on "never synced", and clears such dead links automatically. When a mirror isn't syncing, the status names the reason: nothing linked yet, the target NAS is gone, this NAS can't sync, the primary can't be reached, or how stale the last sync is. Mirrors are sized against what the backup unit actually has free, so backing a large NAS onto a small one fills it and stops rather than claiming capacity it doesn't have.

While both NAS units stay reachable (powered, linked, addressed, not faulted), the mirror stays in sync and its status reads "Protected"; a confirmed mirror keeps counting as cover for 60 seconds, so a brief blip isn't lost protection. Let longer than that pass without a successful sync and it reads "Stale" instead. A NAS that suffers a real hardware fault, or an unresolved intrusion, wipes any of its shares with no current backup -- logged as a real data-loss line in the wallet's activity log -- while a share backed by a currently-synced mirror survives untouched. Some NAS tiers (RAID NAS, Backup Appliance) also carry real built-in redundancy that stacks on top of an external mirror rather than replacing it. The Inspector's rack-wide overview and the always-on Rack Status widget both surface a rolled-up total across every NAS device: used/capacity blocks, and how many shares hold real data with no current backup anywhere -- a nonzero count there is a genuine, right-now data-loss risk worth fixing before the next fault, not background noise.

Real Shares, Real Mirrors, Real Data-Loss Risk

man session -- Browser Session & Save Reset

Zero-friction, zero-signup: a random token is created in your browser on first visit and used to save your whole rack, no account or password involved. Autosaves every 30 seconds, plus a final flush whenever the tab is hidden or closed, so refreshing or closing the page always picks up right where you left off. Chips (the premium currency) are the one exception -- they live server-side against your token and are never part of the save blob.

The red "Reset Save" button in the top nav (distinct from the unrelated cable-color "Reset" button next to it) wipes your whole save back to a brand-new game once you type a confirmation word. Lab Credits, your rack, devices, reputation, and everything else in the save resets -- but any Chips you've bought are kept, since those are a real purchase rather than part of the save. This cannot be undone from inside the game.

man notebook -- Private Notes

A private notebook, fully separate from the rest of your save -- unlimited pages, real rich text (bold, italic, underline, color, headings, bulleted lists), and a search box that finds text across every page at once. Works with zero registration, scoped to the same session token as your rack, and lives in its own tab (desktop's bottom tab strip, mobile's bottom nav) alongside Wallet, Grid, and the rest.

Insert a real snapshot of your whole rack or one specific device directly into a page -- the same capture technology as Show My Rack (see above). Select some text and link it to another page; Ctrl/Cmd+Click a link to jump there, a plain click keeps editing normally. Export your entire notebook as a real .txt file to your own computer whenever you want a permanent, off-site copy -- rich formatting flattens to plain markers, and pictures are noted with a clear placeholder line rather than silently dropped, since a plain-text file can't hold image data.

Troubleshooting Quick Reference

• Your uptime streak reset when one device failed: that is what redundancy prevents. A failure whose job has a healthy standby becomes a failover instead of an outage -- see Redundancy & Failover. If the streak still broke, either that job had no second healthy device, or a second unit of the same job was already down: redundancy covers one failure per job at a time.
• Income stopped: follow the cable path backward from whatever stopped working -- players left, storage filled, the network dropped, or power failed further upstream than you think.
• A mining rig reads Offline or Paused: check its Inspector's own Reason line first -- the four requirements (real power, a valid IP, a real NAS share sized above 0 blocks, mining actually toggled on) are each checked and reported individually, not lumped into one generic error.
• No DHCP lease: confirm the port is enabled, cabled through to a router with DHCP on, and that no switch port between them has DHCP override blocking broadcasts on purpose; static IP addressing is always a reliable fallback.
• Grid power missing downstream of a switched-on PDU/UPS: confirm the PDU/UPS itself is actually receiving power -- either wired straight into a Residential Grid slot, or (if it's chained behind another one) fed by an upstream PDU/UPS that's itself powered; being switched on is not the same as being powered. A dark UPS specifically might just need charge time -- it only charges while its input is actually live.
• A NAS backup mirror isn't syncing: the status line now names the cause directly — nothing linked yet, the target NAS is gone, this NAS can't sync, or the primary can't be reached. Both units need to be powered, linked, addressed and fault-free at the same time for a sync to land. If it says the mirror can never sync, the client is a NAS (which has no share of its own storage) — pick a client the primary actually shares.
• Unexpected wallet drain: check the activity log for the exact line item -- utility billing, a hacker-debt job gone bad, a botched darknet deal, and a data-loss wipe all log themselves individually rather than showing up as one unexplained balance drop.

Advanced Gameplay

Rack optimization, thermal/power trade-offs, marketplace strategy, contract optimization, and preparing for future multiplayer all get a full dedicated walkthrough in the Quick Start Guide's Advanced Guide section rather than being duplicated here.