How to play
The loop, without the marketing.
A raid is one target. A run is the chain of raids until you die or retire, and the run total is your score. Integrity and credits carry from raid to raid. Unlocks do not — every run starts you back at the cheapest Probe there is.
Step one
Read the target.
Before anything else you get three numbers about the site you are about to run: a source multiplier, the odds of the cache holding something high-value, and the odds of it holding a gem. A 4×/35% target pays roughly five times what a 1×/8% target pays for exactly the same work and exactly the same risk.
Reading those three numbers and deciding the raid is not worth taking is a legitimate move, and often the correct one.
Step two
Fit the deck. This part is free.
No clock, no trace, nothing shooting. You click warez off the rack and they load into the memory bus. A Mark I deck gives you 6 memory and 1 core.
| Warez | Mem | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Probe | 1 | Names the layer you are looking at. Better versions read more of it. |
| Crowbar | 2 | Breaks Barrier. 2d6+2, a fast 3.5-second cycle. |
| Solvent | 3 | Breaks Ward. 2d8+2. |
| Spike | 3 | Breaks Sentry. 1d12+3 — swingy, and the swing matters. |
| Mask | 1 | Scrubs a percentage of your trace back off. |
| Siphon | 3 | Mines the cache. Holds a core the whole time it runs. |
| Patch | 2 | Restores integrity. Once per run — burning it frees its memory. |
Add it up. You cannot carry a breaker for all three ICE types and still carry the Siphon. Six memory does not stretch. Every raid makes you name the thing you are willing to be unable to answer, and everything that happens after that is the consequence.
Memory is the whole decision, so it is also the design constraint. Later ICE behaves in new ways, but it never needs a fourth breaker. A new counter would delete a puzzle rather than add one — on a Mark I you could not carry it anyway.
Step three
Engage, and know what each layer is costing you.
The clock starts and the trace starts climbing. You click a layer of ICE — or the cache bar — to target it, then fire a warez at it. Attacks roll d20+6 against the layer's defence, then roll damage. Fire the wrong tool at a layer and you take −8 to hit and half damage; miss badly enough and the layer seals, which costs you more trace.
Break order is the entire tactical game, and it is decided by what each layer takes from you rather than by how hard it is to kill.
| Layer | Def / HP | Takes | What that means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barrier | 11 / 10 | Extraction | Never shoots at you. No income at all until it falls. Only Barriers stop the Siphon. |
| Ward | 13 / 14 | The Siphon | Heavy hits, and each one that lands can knock your mining offline again. |
| Sentry | 12 / 12 | Trace | Light damage, but +4 trace per hit. It does not kill you, it shortens the run. |
A layer never names itself by fighting you. Only a Probe names one, or breaking it. Until then you read the effect: two integrity and a jump in trace is a Sentry; five integrity and your mining dropping is a Ward. An unidentified layer shows you the raw die and nothing else, because showing you its defence would identify it by arithmetic.
Step four
Mine, and notice what mining costs.
The Siphon aims itself at the cache, holds its core, and pulls until you disconnect, eject it, a Ward disrupts it, a Barrier comes up, or the cache runs dry.
On a one-core Mark I, that sentence has teeth: while the Siphon is holding the core, you cannot answer the ICE at all. Extraction is not a button you press at the end. It is a standing commitment you make while things are still shooting.
If the target has a gem, it is buried somewhere between 35% and 90% deep in the cache. Pushing is the only way to reach it. Pushing is also how runs end.
The rule that changes everything
Trace is your odds, not your timer.
Nothing shoots at you until you are discovered. Every probe, every attack, every tick of the Siphon rolls against your current trace as the chance of being spotted. At 20 trace, each action carries a 20% chance of being the one that gives you away. At 60 it is a coin flip you keep taking.
So trace is not a bar filling toward a fail state on a schedule you can plan around. It is a price attached to doing things, and the way to pay less of it is to do fewer, better-chosen things. Get through an entire raid without ever being discovered and the debrief pays you a GHOSTED bonus on top of the haul.
Step five
Three endings, and only one of them is a win.
- Disconnect
You bank everything you are holding and the deck comes home intact. This is the only good ending, and it is available at every single moment of the raid.
- Traced
Trace reaches the cap. The cargo is gone and the run is over.
- Deck failed
Integrity reaches zero. The cargo is gone and the run is over.
Filling your storage does not end the raid for you. It stops extraction and tells you to disconnect. Leaving is always a decision you make, never one the game makes for you — which is exactly why losing feels like your fault.
Step six
The debrief, and the chain.
Between raids you spend: repairs at five credits per point of integrity, a refit for a spent Patch, better versions of your warez from the market, or the next deck up. Marks II, III, IV and V unlock as the chain gets deeper and cost 400, 1,200, 2,800 and 6,000 credits.
All of it comes out of the run total, and the run total is also your score. The currency of staying alive and the currency of winning are the same currency. Spending on survival is spending on not winning, and this is the decision the whole game is built to make uncomfortable.
Then you take the next target, or you retire and bank the run. Targets escalate on both sides as you go deeper — more layers, faster reinforcements, but bigger caches and richer sources.
Mission types
Most raids are theft. A few are not.
Across a full campaign of twenty-eight targets, twenty-two are ordinary extractions. The other six are set pieces, and they exist to break the habits the extractions taught you.
Extract
Get in, take, get out. The pressure is greed against the clock, and it pays from the haul.
Inject
Get in and stay while the payload writes. Leaving early pays nothing at all — a courier who turns back is not a courier. Trace stops being something you outrun and becomes something you absorb.
Disrupt
Clear the whole stack. No cherry-picking the cheap layer and leaving. Pays double bounties plus a bonus for levelling the thing.
Inject is the one that earns its place, because it inverts the core tension. Every other raid rewards leaving; this one punishes it. A half-written payload is worth exactly zero.
At the keyboard
It is a browser game, and it plays like one.
Click a layer or the cache bar to aim. Click a warez, or press its number, to fire. Space is whichever of engage, disconnect and debrief is currently live. Shift and a number ejects that warez and frees its memory — which is also how you stop a Siphon that is holding your only core.
Nothing to install. No account. Every mechanic stays fully legible in the teletype era, because the teletype era is the compatibility floor and no information is ever allowed to exist only in a later era's art.