Beta 3

Game systems

How the systems in Silicon Pirates Beta 3 work, one section each. For a single device, see its service manual. For your first hour, see the quick start guide.

On this page: Power · UPS · Bills · Rooms and racks · Networking · The internet · Heat and security · Storage · Workbench · Faults · Contracts · Hosting · Mining · Markets · Farming · Automation · The net · Auto services · Shards and Chips · Terminal · Visitors · Your room · The arcade · Your account

Power

Nothing runs without a live cable path into its power input. Anything with a power input plugs into a wall outlet, a PDU, a UPS or a power strip, and every device has a power button on its face.

• The breaker box. A steel breaker box hangs on the Main Room's back wall. Click it and the camera flies in: the main breaker at the top and one breaker per circuit. A handle pointing in is on, out is off, and in the middle with an orange flag it has tripped. Click a breaker to reset it, or to switch it off and on. A tripped breaker stays off until you reset it, and the alerts tell you when one goes.
• Grid service. The main breaker is the size of your lab's grid service, at 240 V: 20 A (4,800 W) to start, then 40 A (9,600 W, $2,500), 60 A (14,400 W, $8,000) and a 100 A commercial service (24,000 W, $25,000) that bills each kWh at 80% plus a standing charge. The whole lab together must stay under it, or the main trips and every circuit goes dark. Need more power? Upgrade the service in the breaker box.
• Two circuits a room. Real 120 V branch circuits: 15 A (1,800 W) at lab tier 1 and 20 A (2,400 W) from tier 2. At tier 3 every room also gets a 240 V, 30 A circuit (7,200 W) on its own outlet. Held over its rating, a circuit's breaker trips and its outlets go dead. One plug per outlet.
• Power strips. 4, 6 or 8 sockets with a rating. Past it, a strip first risks fire, then pops its breaker. A burned strip is scrap.
• PDUs. Three tiers with nine outlets each: 100 W, 500 W and 1,500 W. Chained PDUs and UPS units pool their capacity and their load.
• Redundancy. A device with two PSUs on two different chains rides out losing either feed. Two feeds from one chain are not redundant.

UPS and batteries

A UPS charges only while plugged into live power and switched on. The house UPS on the floor feeds a few sockets of its own. Each racked UPS is its own battery for what is downstream of it, and drains at its own load. In an outage only battery-backed gear stays lit. When a battery hits 0%, its gear goes down too.

Bills and outages

Power is metered onto a bill. An unpaid power bill cuts the grid and only batteries keep things lit. Water is metered the same way, and so is the internet (see the internet). The auto services can pay each one for you.

Rooms and racks

The desk terminal, the workbench, the storage shelf, the bookshelf, the house UPS and the delivery rug stay in the main room. Everything else places in any room. A cable never passes through a wall: rooms connect only through trunked patch panels.

The lab tier sets each wall circuit's breaker and how many grow beds a room takes:

Racks are bought from RACK FOCUS and put down in the room you are in: the 6U Low Rack ($280), the 12U Half Rack ($450), the 20U Rack ($700) and the 42U Full Rack ($1,400). They all take the same floor space. A taller rack is cheaper by the slot.

Networking

Routers, switches and firewalls cabled together form one network. A device can only see NAS shares, mirrors and ping targets on its own network, so racks share a network only when their patch panels are trunked.

Each network port takes DHCP, a static address or off. Two DHCP servers on one network is a rogue DHCP conflict: both fault and nobody gets an address. A switch can run a name server and give every device a name on your own domain: each box's overview shows its name, its address and the name server that answers for it. Your lab has one public IP of its own that other players can ping.

• Zones. Split one network into parts: MAIN, SERVERS, STORAGE, FARM and GUEST. Put a box in a zone from its CONNECT tab. Zone rules on any router or firewall decide which zones may talk: a grid of ✓ and ✕, or presets such as "Isolate guests" and "Lock down storage". The internet always works. A segmented network shows less to hackers (lower exposure, heat ×0.9), and a break-in only locks one zone out for a while instead of the whole lab.
• VPN remote access. Any firewall can rent VPN seats to remote workers: up to 8 a firewall, $4 an hour each. Your standing decides how many workers want one. Firewall stealth hides them from hackers.
• Site-to-site VPN. Two firewalls, each picked as the other's peer, build a tunnel that joins their two networks into one, like a patch-panel trunk without the cable. The setup panel ticks off each step as it is done.
• Contracts and rewards. Guest Wi-Fi Done Right, Remote Office, Storage Lockdown, Branch Office, Segmented Fortress and Zero Trust ask for zones and the VPN, and the first zone, segmented network, VPN seats and tunnel each pay Chips once.

The internet

The internet comes in at the ISP box on the back wall of the main room. A router has to be cabled to a line on the box. Nothing earns without it.

• A month is 24 hours of the lab running. The first month is free.
• An invoice gives you 10 minutes to pay. Unpaid, the line is suspended until you pay it plus a $25 reconnect fee.
• If a line was up for less of the month than its plan promised, the next invoice is 25% smaller.
• LINE 2 comes from another carrier, so the two never fail for the same reason. It costs $250 to install plus the first month.

Heat and security

Two kinds of heat. Temperature: traffic heats network gear, drives heat a NAS, hash boards cook, lit grow beds warm the room. Every running box in a rack also warms the air its neighbours breathe, so a packed rack runs hot. Fans are the counter: more and better fans bring the whole rack down. A box held 15 °C past its limit for 3 minutes starts smoking, and a minute later the whole rack catches fire and every device in it is destroyed. What is left can be scrapped for pennies on the dollar, or scavenged for a lucky device or a few parts.

Security heat: how much attention the lab draws online, from 0 to 100. Under 40 nobody tries the door. From 40, break-in attempts start, more often the hotter it gets. A live firewall cuts it to about a quarter. Your router, switch and firewall settings add up to a security posture, and posture prints the same report an attacker's scan reads. An air-gapped lab draws no heat, and pulling the uplink cuts off an intrusion in progress.

Storage

A NAS carves its capacity into shares for the rigs and servers that write to it. RAID 0 uses every drive and survives nothing; RAID 5 survives one failure; RAID 6 survives two. A mirror onto another NAS survives the whole array. Disks fill for real: a full share starves a hosting stack, and a rig's share is its vault. See the NAS manual.

The workbench

Power a device off, then OPEN CHASSIS in rack focus to service it. The inspector only shows what is inside. Every change happens at the workbench.

• Processor: compute, which stacks fit, a rig's hash bonus, the terminal's script budget.
• Memory: which stacks fit, a rig's hash bonus, the terminal's cron slots.
• Hash boards: a rig's hash rate.
• Drives and controller: array capacity and how many bays run.
• PSU: the ceiling on what the box may draw.
• Fans: cooling. Better fans run cooler, wear slower and throttle less.
• I/O cards: the automation server's channels.

Every bay has a shape. A wrong part is refused with the bay named. Hover a spare to preview the gain before you fit it. Parts wear with use and fail at the end, and the used market sells them worn.

Faults

A running machine can hit a fault: a hung watchdog, a runaway process, a seized fan. A worn machine faults more. A clock of one to two minutes starts. While it runs the machine earns nothing, but nothing is lost if you answer in time.

• By hand, free: the inspector offers the one action the log asks for.
• Reboot, free: the fault dies with the power, and so does the uptime streak.
• Quick fix: a tech does it for a flat fee, from anywhere.
• Do nothing: it crashes, reboots itself over a longer stretch, and comes back on its own.

Nothing faults in your first five minutes. A cron job cannot answer a fault: it needs hands, or auto-repair cover.

Contracts and standing

Clients hire your rack. A contract lists what it needs, read off your lab every second, how long you must hold it and how much downtime it forgives. They ask for things like capacity online, no open faults, low security heat, a live firewall, N+1 power, battery minutes, current mirrors, filled seats or a RAID level.

Kept contracts raise your standing from 0 to 100; failed ones, breaches and grid cuts lower it. Tiers are ROOKIE, CONTRACTOR (30), TRUSTED (60) and ELITE (85). There are 24 contracts across the four tiers, plus daily work orders and quick jobs.

Hosting

A 1U Server rents its compute while idle, or runs an application stack of services with tenant seats. Tenants move in up to seats times trust: your uptime streak, backups, posture and array health. Seat rent waits on the server until you collect it.

Mining

A rig mines the coin you choose into its vault while it is powered, online and writing to a NAS share. Flush the vault into your crypto wallet. Boards make the hash rate; the processor and memory raise it. Profiles trade speed for heat: eco, balanced, turbo. See the 1U Crypto Rig and the 4U Mining Frame.

Markets and the crypto wallet

MARKETS has four tabs: CRYPTO, STREET, TOWN and EXOTIC. Every market steps every twenty seconds with its own moods and news.

• Six coins on one exchange for every player: LabCoin, RackToken, DarkNet Credit, Doubloon, UptimeCoin and GridWatt. A big sale anywhere moves the price for everyone.
• Crashes: now and then the whole market, or one coin, falls to between a quarter and two-thirds of its price for four to twenty minutes, then climbs back over the next hour. Every player sees the same crash at the same moment.
• The wallet: FINANCE, CRYPTO WALLET. It has an address of its own that starts SPW-. Flushed coins land here and nothing sells on its own. Selling or buying costs half a percent.
• The street, the town and exotics are yours alone: your sales move only your prices.

Farming

Grow beds sell on the vendor's GROW tab: the Grow Table (6 sites), the Vertical Grow Rack (2 tiers of 3) and the Mother Cabinet (1 site). Plant seeds or clippings, set the light to VEG, then FLOWER, keep water and food in the green, and harvest in the READY window. One grow-day is one real minute.

• Water comes from a metered tap, bought per room, through a hose to the bed's tank. The sprinkler pumps from the tank.
• Food comes from the bed's hopper, which the feeder doses from. Only you refill the hopper (FILL HOPPER on the bed's FOOD tab); automation can run the feeder but can never refill it. An empty hopper feeds nothing, and the plants starve and die.
• The light cycle is yours to run: VEG 18/6 while plants grow, then FLOWER 12/12 to make them bud, one press each. If an automation server runs the light, its timer keeps fixed hours: set 18 hours on for VEG and change it to 12 yourself when it is time to flower.
• Vegetables (tomato, bell pepper, cucumber, strawberry, lettuce, basil, mushrooms, potato) sell at the town market and draw no attention. Mushrooms want the dark.
• Crosses of two plants in the same room breed a new strain, or an exotic that sells for far more and is picky about its conditions.

Automation

The automation server switches lights, sprinklers, feeders, fans, taps, lamps, signs and rack devices, through control cables or over the network: a bed, the aquarium or a lamp with its network jack on any switch of the server's network can be linked to a channel. Nothing is wireless. Programs run as timers, intervals, rules on any reading, or bands that start at one line and stop at another.

Automation that works earns Chips, once each: the first channel running, a timer, a band, a rule, a network link, a grow bed that runs itself, the aquarium's feeder, a sign on a program, and 4, 10 and 20 channels at work at once.

The net

Every day a fresh set of companies sits on the net, each with systems and flaws in them. It all happens at the desk terminal with net.

• Buy tools: a SPYGLASS to see flaws, a LOCKPICK to open them, a SIPHON, a SCRUBBER to wipe your trail, a CLOAK to slow the trace.
• Break in and a TRACE starts. Eight kinds of lock each state their rule on screen: counter locks, passphrases, relay boards, handshakes, checksum grids, packet routes, phase locks and side doors.
• Inside, loot the ledger and the secret files. Some files are parts of longer cases.
• Leave a trail and the company audits it later. Get traced and you pay a fine of a quarter of your cash.
• Or report the flaw instead. Companies with a bounty programme pay for it, and your hat climbs toward WHITE HAT.

Auto services

FINANCE, Auto services. Each one unlocks once with Chips, then it is a switch. What it does still costs cash, plus a 5% service fee (at least $5) on payments.

Shards, Chips and your level

Shards are free points, paid for play: work orders, contracts, faults answered by hand, harvests, sales, the daily drop and missions. 500 Shards make 1 Chip. Chips buy looks and conveniences, and every one can be earned by playing. Milestones pay whole Chips once, including medals at the arcade and rewards for automating, and every 7th day of a daily streak pays a Chip. With an arcade cabinet or an automation server, missions for those come up too.

Your LEVEL records what you have done. It never goes down, survives a reset, and buys nothing. Once a day a gift box arrives on your storage shelf with a random part and 25 Shards.

Donations to the project are optional. They pay for the servers and the development. See the donation tiers.

The terminal

A shell on the desk monitor, run by a live terminal server. Anything the inspector can do, the shell can do. help lists every command and man <topic> prints a manual.

• Inspect: devices, status, ip, ping, nslookup, posture, traffic, nas.
• Configure: dhcp, dns, router, firewall, patch, isp, power <dev> on|off.
• Earn and trade: rig, svc, contracts, market, grow, auto, net.
• Scripts: edit, run, cron add <name> every 60 run job.sh, cron add <name> on outage run shed.sh. Scripts have variables, loops, conditions and a reading for anything in the lab.

Visitors

Other operators can walk into your lab, and you into theirs. YOUR DOOR, in CUSTOMIZE or NEIGHBORHOOD, has four settings: DOOR CLOSED, FROM THE DOORWAY, READ ONLY and FULL ACCESS. You pick the rooms a visitor may enter. With FULL ACCESS, you can let guests move things and use switches and cables, only while you are home. A guest never picks anything up, buys, sells, changes a setting or uses your terminal.

Visitors can leave kudos and a note in your guestbook, and anyone can send you a gift that arrives as a crate on the rug in your main room.

Your room

CUSTOMIZE restyles the room you stand in: themes, floor and wall colours and patterns, and the light, from full bright down to 0%, where only lamps, screens and device lights still glow. The vendor's DECOR tab sells lights, posters, canvases you paint yourself, signs, furniture, plants and rugs. Decor has no limit: a piece goes wherever it fits.

The aquarium is a living tank of up to 12 fish from twelve species. Feed them by hand or with an auto-feeder cabled to the automation server. Too little starves them. Too much bloats them.

A locked piece needs the Premium Visuals pack (5 Chips). The aquarium and the arcade cabinet are Premium Visuals pieces.

The arcade

RACK ATTACK is an arcade cabinet that plays a real game for a quarter. It ships with the RA-1 board and PACKET PING. The RA-4 Multi-Game Motherboard ($420) has four ROM sockets: add RULE BREAKER ($140), CABLE RUN ($140) and BOT SWARM ($160). Switch the cabinet off to fit a board or a ROM.

Every game has one high-score board for every player in the game. The server plays your game back before the score counts, so nobody can type one in. A score pays no cash, but every game has medals, paid once: bronze (150 Shards), silver (1 Chip) and gold (3 Chips) for a score, 1 Chip for the world top ten and 3 for number one.

Your account and your lab

Your lab is saved on the server against your account and waits for you between visits. While you are away, compute and hosting keep earning at half rate for up to eight hours.

CUSTOMIZE, Danger Zone, Reset save wipes the lab back to a new game once you type RESET. Chips, packs and unlocks, your public IP and your wallet address are kept. Cash, hardware, decor, plants, fish, paintings and the coins in your wallet are lost.