Background - You exist in a criminal underworld where you must compete with others to gain money and power. You have at your disposal several devices. Use them to find out about the world around you, hack other devices, eavesdrop on electronic channels of information and crack events.
Work with other players to find out more about the game, devise strategies and gain power and fame. But be careful to concentrate on furthering your own aims, do not trust other players too much.
Only the careful survive. Good luck.
Most players do start off a little confused and unsure of how to start to play. Don't worry, this short section will tell you what to do for the first few times you log in.
To play well at this game you need knowledge. And you gain knowledge by dropping and cracking. But dropping definitely comes first.
You can check on your knowledge of the world by looking at the WORLD tab - there are a few pages under that tab showing you all of the signals, events and devices you know.
"Dropping" is an abbreviation of eavesdrop. You use one of your devices to listen to a channel of electronic information. On this channel your device will detect "signals". Each signal tells you something about an event. By cracking events you can gain money, discover the device IDs of other players and so on.
Each device that you set dropping can drop up to 4 channels at once.
There are different types of channel that you can drop. Dropping the Commerce channels will enable your device to detect the signals of Money Transfer events. Dropping the Mail channels will enable your device to detect the signals of Mail events. Dropping the Security channels will enable your device to detect the signals of Dropper Sweep events.
A dropper sweep event is the internal security of the system. These events can pop up on any channel and when they do they seek devices dropping on that channel and force them offline. By detecting the signals of these dropper sweep events you can tell which channels they will appear on and when and thereby avoid them.
Once the WORLD tab shows that your devices have detected some events, you may wish to try "cracking" these events.
To successfully crack an event you must exploit one of the vulnerabilities that the event possesses. The WORLD tab shows you what vulnerability(s) the event possesses. The more devices you have dropping, the more vulnerabilities they discover and therefore the easier it should be to crack the events.
To crack an event, lease a technology that exploits the vulnerability. You can do this from the TECHNOLOGY tab. Then choose one of your idle devices (status of "online unassigned"), install that crack technology and use it to crack the event specifying that technology as the "crack step". Simple!
Cracking an event may give you information about other players' devices. For example imagine you have cracked a mail message event that is a message from the authorities telling a player that their device has been caught dropping.
You will now see that message in your inbox and the message will be marked in the "cracked?" column in your inbox. But you will also have found out about that device - it will appear in the list of known devices in your WORLD tab.
See also the detailed guide to cracking
Hacking works differently. You don't have to exploit a vulnerability possessed by the target device, although that definitely helps. Hacking works on a balance of probabilities.
The technology you use to hack with, and other technologies installed on the device you use, have an influence, as do the technologies installed on the target device. One quick tip - if a hack finishes as soon as you have started it check your inbox on the MAIL tab for the reason.
You can not hack a device that is in an offline status. For this reason some players leave some of their devices offline in order to avoid losing them to hackers.
You can also not be hacked by players of much greater rank than you.
Do ask for help in the Chat or Forum facilities if you need more help. Or contact the game's creator at contact@claudio.co.nz
See also the detailed guide to hacking