Single Player mode

[CubeMatrix]

I'm not too hip on multiplayer games, in fact I tend to avoid them.

How «single player» is the single player mode in Gray Hack?
Is it just as diverse and procedural? I'd like to just play it single player... is it as deep, involved and worthwhile?

Cheers!

[3nigma]

This is a good question. Think about the game like a sandbox. You can play around with it and build/try different things but there is no singelplayer campaign or such in the game so the crazy things you try to hack or exploit will mostly revolve around your own ideas and curiosity.

This is where the multiplayer comes in for me and other players, building things that other players can see or use, trying to outsmart them with new ideas pushes you to explore and invent in ways that I do not experience the singeplayer mode does.

That said, you can still play around with it in singeplayer and have fun.

In the future there will be more things to do in the singeplayer mode and more things to incentivize exploring and inventing.

This is just my opinion ofc, other players might have a different experience and so might you.

[Sabranan]

For single-player in and of itself I'd have to say it's not worth it, at least not yet. Maybe that'll change later if they implement a campaign but for right now there's just not much there once you've learned the basics. Not in comparison to a game like Uplink or Hacknet anyway.

The fact that Grey Hack is more targeted at multi-player does address the problem with the above games. No matter how good they are, at some point you've done everything and there's nowhere left to go. You can never repeat that "first" time again, so you have to go looking for another game.

In Grey Hack you can build your own systems, implement programs and websites for other players to use or try to hack. There's always people coming up with new interesting stuff and that's definitely where the "meat" of this game is.

[SkyStream]

I think the problem some of us have with the Multiplayer aspect of the game is our fears of another player just seeing our "home station" potentially unprotected when we're still getting ready with MP and saying: "i wanna break that"
as I doubt there's some kind of Truce system in

[Sabranan]

In the public build your starting system is 100% safe as long as you don't install server software on it, which you would have to download and run in the terminal.

In nightly not so much, but then, you probably shouldn't be starting your experience there anyway as a new player!

In any event though the worst that can happen is you get so screwed that you have to start over and really, it's not the end of the world if you do.

[SkyStream]

hmm.... maybe I should try MP at some point then.....

[Memnoch]

Originally posted by Sabranan:

In any event though the worst that can happen is you get so screwed that you have to start over and really, it's not the end of the world if you do.

Tell that to anyone who has ever lost progress....like, ever. To that person it is the end of the world. Imagine someone who lost an MMO character they had played for 10 years.

This isn't to the same scale, of course, but the principal still applies. The comfort of single player is that you can back up your database any time you like, outside of the game, and recover in case you do something stupid. In online you can't do that.

I would say the simple advice for anyone is, if you are just starting out, or are overly afraid of losing progress, just play single player until you are comfortable with the game. Only go online when you are ready. You only have yourself to blame if you do something dumb and get caught.

Personally, I don't think the depth of gameplay is there yet to worry about progress lost. Other than rank, and money, you don't have much to lose except time. Money will get you a better computer, and all that really gets you is speed, storage and more concurrent programs. Players can do the same jobs, within reason, no matter how good or bad their computer is.

[Sabranan]

Well sure, in most any other game that'd be true but as you say right now there is no real "progress" to lose (not a dig at the game since it's early access and the missions need major expansion). Once you get reasonably good you should be able to go from starting a new game to more money than you know what to do with within about 15 minutes.

[Memnoch]

15 minutes is a bit of a stretch. It's RNG how much money is in the bank accounts you can hack, I expect. You might get lucky and land some rich ones, and you may not.

[Sabranan]

Each NPC bank account generates a certain amount as work payments and how much that is is random, but even at the lower end of the scale it's more than enough as long as another player hasn't been in there. The trick is finding accounts that haven't already been discovered, once you've got that down 15 minutes is embarrassingly long!

[Memnoch]

Embarrassingly! Okay, mate. But you seem to be trying really hard to show off for some reason. It's just a game, and you aren't a real hacker.

You can try optimising your Terminals that give you a good workspace. One terminal to connect remotely and one to work on local stuff, for instance. Some will like working in the Terminal, some will work with FileExplorer instead.

I hope you have some YT videos to show off your skills.

[Sabranan]

Yeah... I was just making the point that it's not a big loss, you challenged it so I responded. Don't read into something that isn't there.

[Memnoch]

It's like a snowball really. Once you have a "good" CPU you can crack passwords quicker than you can copy/paste them into the banking websites. There is little point right now getting anything faster than that.

Playing around with the nightly build and scripting is fun but little things like "sudo" don't seem to work properly so you can't optimise much beyond what you can do now by hand. Writing a program that would scan the home directory for any Bank.txt files, extract their contents and write them all out into a single file would simplify things no end. Doing that by hand is profitable but a lot slower.