Blackport Institute of Technology
— founded in open water —
Blackport teaches the systems you are already running. Every course explains how a thing works, why you would reach for it, and what it costs you when you do — then makes you prove it under exam conditions.
Most games explain themselves with a tooltip. This one has a school. Every course
covers a system you are actually running in your rack, 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 — a course that only lists upsides
is an advert, and you would learn to skip it.
Passing an Exam Pays
Each course ends in its own practical exam — a different one per course, not the
same quiz five times over. You wire a rack that has to survive a grid slot failing, cool
a room to a budget, work out which of cable, link, lease or route is broken on five
machines, pick out the backup that quietly stopped working weeks ago, and handle four
security incidents including the one no firewall stops.
| Passing a course | $600 – $900 in Lab Credits |
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| Passing with distinction | +50% |
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| Completing a diploma | +$1,200 |
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| Graduating (every diploma) | +$5,000 |
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| Every certificate, permanently | 10–15% off the hardware that course covers |
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Work through the whole institute taking every distinction and the school is worth
$13,850 to you. Once. The reward is paid the first time a
certificate is awarded and never again, so re-sitting an exam you have already passed is
practice rather than income.
Exams are marked by the server. Your browser sends the solution you built, never a
score, so a certificate is something you earned rather than something your machine
claimed on your behalf.
The Courses
BIT-101 — Power and Redundancy
Where the watts come from, what happens when they stop, and why two of something is not automatically redundancy.
- The path to the grid — Almost every 'my device does nothing' report is a broken path rather than a broken device. Reading the path yourself is faster than any diagnostic panel.
- PDUs and headroom — Sizing against idle draw is the classic mistake. The rack works perfectly until the moment everything is busy at once, which is exactly when you need it.
- What a UPS actually buys you — Outages in this game are real events with a duration. A UPS converts an outage from 'everything stopped and uptime broke' into 'nothing noticed'.
- Redundancy that is not redundancy — The Redundancy panel scores weak points for exactly this reason. A high device count with one shared root is a rack that looks robust and is not.
Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%.
Pays $600, or $900
with distinction, and takes 10% off pdu and ups
hardware permanently.
BIT-102 — Thermals and Maintenance
Heat is the tax on everything profitable you do. What raises it, what removes it, and how it turns into wear.
- Where heat comes from — It explains the single most confusing thing in the game: a device you 'turned on' reading stone cold. It is not broken; it is not powered.
- Heat becomes wear — This is why cooling is an economic decision rather than a cosmetic one. Every degree you remove is wear you never pay for.
- Cooling modules, and their limits — Buying up a tier replaces the old one's effect rather than adding to it, so the upgrade path is 'replace', not 'accumulate'.
- Maintenance versus repair — A rack that is never maintained does not degrade gracefully — it runs fine, then faults, then costs you a repair and the uptime along with it.
Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%.
Pays $700, or $1,050
with distinction, and takes 15% off cooling
hardware permanently.
BIT-201 — Networking and Addressing
Getting a device genuinely online: the difference between a cable, a link, a lease and a route.
- Cable, link, lease, route — 'It has a cable, why is it offline' is the single most common networking confusion, and the answer is always one of the other three.
- DHCP and leases — Pool exhaustion is silent and looks exactly like a cabling fault, right down to the device sitting there doing nothing.
- Switches, routers and firewalls — Reaching for the wrong one wastes money and does not fix the symptom — adding a switch never gets you online, and a router does not give you more rack ports.
Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%.
Pays $600, or $900
with distinction, and takes 10% off switch and router
hardware permanently.
BIT-202 — Storage and Backup
Shares, capacity, mirrors and staleness — and the difference between a backup and a second copy of the same mistake.
- Shares and capacity — A full share does not degrade politely — the things depending on it stop working, and the cause is one screen away from where the symptom appears.
- A mirror is not a backup — Knowing which failure you are actually protected against is the whole point of having a second copy at all.
- Staleness, the silent failure — This is the failure that costs people real data: they had a backup, it stopped working weeks ago, and nothing told them.
Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%.
Pays $700, or $1,050
with distinction, and takes 10% off nas
hardware permanently.
BIT-301 — Security and Defence
Heat, intrusions, ransomware and the social attacks that no firewall stops.
- Heat and attention — It is the game's difficulty dial and you control it. Earning hard raises your own risk, deliberately.
- Firewall posture — Posture, not ownership, is what the intrusion roll checks. Buying the box is not the same as being defended.
- Ransomware, and paying — You should be choosing between routes on their merits, with the costs of each stated plainly.
- The attack no firewall stops — It is the one in-game threat that maps directly onto something real, and it is deliberately built so that the safe answer is the same one you would give in real life.
Pass at 75%, distinction at 92%.
Pays $900, or $1,350
with distinction, and takes 15% off firewall
hardware permanently.
Diplomas & Graduation
Certificates group into diplomas, and holding every diploma makes you a graduate of the
institute — which shows on your public profile and on the honour roll below.
Diploma in Infrastructure
Keeping hardware alive: power that survives a cut, and heat that never gets the chance to age your gear.
- BIT-101 — Power and Redundancy
- BIT-102 — Thermals and Maintenance
Diploma in Networks and Defence
Getting a rack online, and keeping other people out of it.
- BIT-201 — Networking and Addressing
- BIT-301 — Security and Defence
Diploma in Data Continuity
Storage that fills, mirrors that drift, and the difference between a backup and a copy.
- BIT-202 — Storage and Backup
Honour Roll
Live from the game. Players who have earned the most certificates, and anyone who has
graduated. Players who switch their profile to private are not listed.
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Your name appears here by passing exams, not by paying for anything.
Your Profile
A registered player gets a profile: a tagline, a biography, where you are based, a link,
a picture, and a cabinet holding every certificate and diploma you have earned. It is
free, and registering keeps your current save exactly as it is.
Uploaded pictures are reviewed by a person before anyone else can see them.
Until a picture is approved only you can see it. 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.