Hacking and Glitching
Hacking can be a crucial part of any mission. A good hacker can stop Watchers from discovering your Deadnauts, open doors from a distance and even control Sentinels.
Find a console
To hack and view the status of Watchers, you'll need to choose a Deadnaut, find a console, and select the 'Hack' option.
The screen will switch to a top-down view of the network. To exit the screen and return to normal, press Escape or click the 'Log off console' button in the Viewport.
What can I hack?
There are several things you can hack.
- Doors: Open or close any discovered door
- Sentinels: Controlling a sentinel will stop it from attacking your Deadnauts
- Firewall: Placing a firewall will block a Watcher
- Power: Increase or decrease the power distribution to a room
How to hack
Once you've hacked into a console and found a target, just select it on the network and a blue hack line will move toward it.
You can start multiple hacks, but the time to completion will be distributed among all the active hacks - if you have three hacks going at once, then they'll move at a third of the speed.
You can improve your hacks with a high hacking skill or using different types of equipment:
- Decrypters: boosts the speed that your hack travels to its destination
- Firewallers: creates stronger, longer-lasting firewalls
- Scramblers: creates more resilient, longer-lasting hacks
When you hack an object, such as opening a door or coverting a Sentinel, a portion of the sub-network line will turn blue and a marker will be placed at the end. When a Watcher tries to reset the hack, it must first push back the blue line - the longer the line, then the longer it will take the Watchers to reset it.
A good hacker and/or superior scrambling tools will create a longer line.
Getting caught
If a Watcher hits a hack in progress, it will stop the hack.
If a Watcher discovers evidence of a hack - say, an opened door or a hacked sentinel - it will try to revert them back to their original state by releasing smaller Watchers on the sub-network lines.
When the smaller Watchers encounter a blue line, they will push it back slightly. Once they've pushed it all the way back, the hack will revert.
Glitching
The biggest threat that Watchers pose to your Deadnauts is that they disrupt the signals going between you and your Deadnauts.
This happens in three ways.
- Audio: You'll struggle to issue orders and the chatter you receive from Deadnauts will be garbled
- Data: The data screens on your dashboard will be hard to read
- Video: The main viewport will become corrupted, making it difficult to see what's happening.
You can attempt to boost a signal type, which will alleviate some of the effect. But the best way to combat glitching is to stop it from happening in the first place by avoiding Watchers.
The image below shows two Deadnauts that won't receive orders because there's too much interference on the Audio channel.
