Hacking Guide - Mayhem 3 Zero Hour
Ultimately hacking wants to mess around with a specific subsystem on a specific ship. Like disabling their shields with the press of a button. Or venting their lasers into space
. How you get there is a bit complicated, but it can give your empire an incredible edge. Your overall hacking ability has a limit. Eventually you will get detected and then have to switch targets or stop doing it. Zero Hour added a new feature which eventually 'unlocks' your hacking ability again but still on a very long cooldown.
In my playthroughs i never do much hacking but it often has great impact. Its most powerful when you want to prepare for betraying a friendly faction. Planning this can be real fun and useful, but overall its more of an early- to midgame feature. You can even use it as an effective opening strategy for your first sector. Only you can decide if its worth the investment (money/perks/effort).
1) First decide what you want to do:
A) steal lots of money for your early empire (Accounting hack)
B) get early access to capships by bailing them (Oxygen hack)
C) secretly compromise ships with combat hacks (Power, Cargo, Radar, Cooling) to prepare a major betrayal where you can instantly debuff a faction into the ground to defeat them easily
2) Scan a target
- choose a ship type that the NPCs use a lot and scan it. Don't choose one that they only got 1-2 copies flying around unless its a big capship. Having more hacking targets is better.
- its worthwile to try and look for matches of the same attack vector. Take this example when you want to steal money (Accounting hack): You have many Argon Mercury Freighters flying around in the general corner of the galaxy where your starting sector is. And their Accounting system can be attacked via Shellcode. Then you see Argon Miners also with Accounting > Shellcode and nearby are also some Split sectors with Caiman Miners, who also got Accounting > Shellcode and then there is also the Paranid Police nearby with their Nemesis which also has Accounting > Shellcode. Finding these matches saves you time and money because you can use just 1 virus to target all of them.
Good targets:
A) Money
- any ship which doesn't travel and stays in its homebase sector, so that the jump distance to your hacking station never changes > Miners, Service ships (TP)
- ships which tend to stay alive > civilians often better than military
- random example: Argon Nexus Miner TS
- maybe also bigger ships because they give you lots of money at once, but they often need higher virus jump ranges (less security) which you don't really want here
- friendly factions are best. You have to get close and do some manual work and even if your virus gets detected later they won't go to war with you
B) Bailing
- capships because you want them
- example: Split Ocelot M2
- also works well for friendly factions because they cannot attack you over this
C) Combat Hacks / Debuff
- always go for capships first because debuffing them has the biggest impact
- its best to target factions that you plan to attack later. Also works if you are already at war but then it might not be worth it anymore.
- Xenon/OCV also work in Zero Hour and they even have worse firewalls than the others. (but money + oxygen hacks are disabled for them)
- example: Paranid Patroclus M2. Lets say you want to betray them and they have randomly built lots of this ship type in your game
- for the navigation hack (forced retreat to a different sector) NPC fleet leaders are best because their entire fleet will follow them
Manual port scanning requires the Hacking rootkit on your playership. You get it from pirate bases or by upgrading your ship in your Outpost with color crystals. Target an NPC, then hit Shift + C and select Hacking > Scan ports
Automatic scanning needs the Cyberwar perk on an Outpost. This one bulk scans entire nearby sectors. It has quite the range but staying within 2 jump distance is best.
3) Research port for the entire ship type
- this is basically your guys finding an exploit for a specific subsystem which already exists on all ships of the same type but hasn't been noticed by anyone
- once you have researched it you will know the vulnerability while the enemy does not yet. He will only know once you fail with a virus upload. Then he patches it away and you get locked out.
- convert a research station into a hacking station with the Outpost perk
- inside the hacking station select your target ship type and research the target port
- ports are always the same for all ships of the same type. Sometimes a port is closed on an individual ship. This port on this one ship simply cannot be hacked.
- now transfer money to your hacking station. It consumes it to generate port research progress.
Example
Stealing money:
A) Argon Nexus Miner > Accounting
Bailing ship:
B) Split Ocelot > Oxygen
Preparing betrayal for the Paranids
C) Paranid Patroclus > Cargo and Cooling
- once your hacking station finishes port research all 'Open' ports for that ship type turn into 'Vulnerable' ports.
4) Infect a ship
- installing a 'Backdoor' into a 'Vulnerable' port gives you the opportunity to upload a virus whenever you want or use that ship as a relais to upload to other ships and cover your tracks this way.
- 1 Backdoor always consumes 1 Hackerchip. In Zero Hour you can build those instantly in any Outpost consuming Microchips
- Cyberwar perk slowly generates them passively, depending on research speed in that sector. But you will want to put additional Hackerchips in that Outpost to speed things up
Backdoors for A) Stealing Money + B) Stealing a ship can only be installed with the Hacking rootkit from the playership (game balance). Note that you can still mass scan with the Cyberwar perk. But it will not install backdoors into these systems for you. Only for combat related debuff hacks. With the Rootkit installed select target > Shift + C > Hacking > Install Backdoor > type port number
example:
A) you fly around and randomly stop to install lots of backdoors like > that specific Argon Miner Nexus in sector Hila's Joy > Accounting > 57312. Then next sector 2 Argon Miner Nexus > Accounting > 57312
B) you fly to that Split Ocelot that you want and install the backdoor just once
C) Hacking Rootkit also works for combat hacks, but its not required and since you probably want to compromise a lot of different ship types that a faction is using, the Cyberwar perk should always be more convenient. It frequently converts all vulnerable ports in a nearby sector into backdoored ports, consuming a Hackerchip for each backdoor. The sector research stat also speeds up the frequency how fast the perk goes through different sectors.
example: player simply waits a couple hours and now 3 of 5 Paranid Patroclus in the player's corner of the galaxy have an active backdoor in their cargo and cooling subsystems.
5) Design your Virus
- done in the hacking station. Virus gets researched with money just like ports
- you have to choose between Virus Efficiency vs. Security. This affects many things but most importantly virus jump range on the galaxy map and detection risk.
- when your virus eventually gets detected you will loose the ability to hack that specific port on that entire ship type. In base Mayhem 3 this lockdown was permanent for the rest of the game. In Zero Hour the entire ship will reset with a software update after a long waiting time. Meaning that this locked system where your virus got detected will eventually get unlocked again, but you have to redo your port research for that entire ship type for all ports.
- a virus gets designed for a specific subsystem, not for a specific ship type. You can reuse the same virus on different ship types, but they must have the same attack Vector, like SQL infection, or Buffer overflow. The vector has no real gameplay effect other than that your virus must be designed for it.
A) stealing money
- high virus Security rating gives you the most money on average because you can upload your virus very often before you finally get detected. Select your virus Efficiency just so high that your virus jump range can still reach the sector where your preferred targets are, measured from your closest hacking station.
- high virus Efficiency can also work well sometimes because you will reach a lot more targets and you also get loads more money at once. Its just that you will probably get detected soon and it locks down for you. Zero Hour rebalanced high efficiency so that its much more viable and you should not get detected instantly all the time. There are still diminishing returns if you go over 90 Efficiency.
example: Accounting > Shellcode > 80/20 Security/Efficiency
- here we choose high security. It only gives us little money per virus upload, but we can probably upload very often before detection happens and get more money overall this way. With 1% detection risk you can get about 10 million credits before getting detected. With half a dozen different ship types to target you have like 50 million credits earlygame. All money worries are basically gone now.
- high security means low range. But that is no problem because we target mostly mining ships who always stays in the same sector so we can perfectly tune our virus to reach them on the galaxy map
B) Bailing
example: Oxygen > Buffer Overflow > 10/90 (high detection risk, range and success chance)
- we go for maximum efficiency because the target is a military ship that travels on the map so we need high range or it might be too far away when we are ready. We also want high success chance so that we get it right the first time and don't waste time following it around. Or even worse, getting detected before we can even make 1 Ocelot bail out.
- we also don't need high security here because we probably only repeat this hack once or so and then already run out of targets
C) Debuff
example:
Cargo > Network Exploit > 10/90
Cooling > Shellcode > 10/90
- we want maximum efficiency because we probably betray the Paranid only once. WIth just 1 virus upload we can already cripple the Paranid fleet and destroy almost all of their weapons and hull integrity of their many Patroclus M2s! They will most definitely detect us but its worth it.
6) Upload Virus
- upload happens from a hacking station to an unlimited amount of targets in jump range. Any upload has a one time effect on each target ship.
- target ships need an active backdoor on the subsystem that your virus was designed for. And the virus needs to be designed for the correct vector.
- you can trade away potential targets to act as relais and not upload the virus TO them, but THROUGH them. This is just for risk management.
- selecting relais is optional. If you get detected any relais will make it harder for them to know that the virus came from you. Relais do not reduce detection chance.
- if they successfully pass a backtrace check through all your selected relais ships they will blame you publicly (infamy) and launch random cyberattacks on your ships in retaliation (only a single wave). You can prevent these counterattacks by activating the 'Active Defense Program' in advance as an insurance.
example:
A) stealing money
Eventually we have 12 Argon Miners in virus range of our hacking station. All have a Backdoor in the 'Accounting' subsystem port. Now we select 9 of them as targets for our actual virus upload and 3 will act as relais to mitigate the risk of Argon counterattacks in case we get detected. After a while we steal about 2 million cash and can repeat this a couple times until someone probably detects us and patches the Accounting port for the ship type Argon Miner Nexus. For detection chance its irrelevant how much time passes between our multiple virus uploads. But we better do them quickly anyway in case the Argon miners get physically destroyed by something.
B) bailing the Ocelot
We upload when the Ocelot is in range and then follow him around to quickly claim the ship before an NPC salvage crew beats us. We don't need relais because we only plan to upload once or twice and the Ocelot is so big of a price that its worth the risk.
C) crippling Paranid fleet
We will probably get detected because of uploading 2 virus with high detection risk to multiple targets. We don't care about port lockdown for the Patroclus because after this these ships are done for anyway and we don't need to do these hacks again. But we still use the active defense program because hacking counterattacks are just annoying. We upload our virus and after a while all Paranid Patroclus M2 loose 90% of their hull and weapons!
