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 Post subject:Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Wed Mar 25, 2015 5:53 am 
 

Joined:Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:42 pm
Posts:23
I have two major problems with this game-

1. Save file corrupts. Nothing I can do about this right now, please let me know how to send crash reports as this has always been what's kept me from really enjoying this game.

2. I have no clue what i'm doing past a point.

Digging through the outdated wiki and forums is difficult, and there's very little in game documentation explaining what everything does or what the hell is going on, especially if your computer background is limited.

I just redownloaded today and started playing again, having fun with the base missions (which are still SO much more fun than vanilla uplink) when I run into a file that's on a backup server. 30 minutes later I still have no clue how to handle this (file is instantly replaced after delete). Tried a couple of things with the DNS to screw with this, but to no avail. Was going to look at my other options (too poor for any LAN stuff, and it seems too early for that, was going to look through all the other programs for new shit) when I got hit with the corrupted save.

Now i'll play again and again, but it's really annoying knowing there's SO many walls out there waiting for me. Hell was there ever a way added to make real money besides chain robbing banks (the later upgrades are absurd). The farthest I ever got was dealing with the lights out puzzles and hacking personal PC's and maybe a mainframe, but god knows there's still a ton to go, and I'd like to do it, but since updating the wiki takes time and commitment we really don't have right now, I was hoping we could maybe compile a basic guide topic.

Start out with basic explanations of important places, then some spoilered stuff for more specific answers if people get stuck. I realize that almost everyone still playing at this point knows what they're doing, but at least justs letting people get off the ground and into the new content would help a ton(well that and the whole save corruption thing...i'd swear it's related to logs not deleting themselves anymore and getting those long lists of blank spaces).,


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Wed Mar 25, 2015 3:05 pm 
 

Joined:Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:16 pm
Posts:190
bank accounts sure are crazy in the latest versions, im getting hacked all the time, and the only safe way to keep my money is to store them in stocks, and im getting several thousands in donations from god-knows-who :mrgreen: weird, bug?


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Wed Mar 25, 2015 3:47 pm 
 

Joined:Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:42 pm
Posts:23
Quote:
bank accounts sure are crazy in the latest versions, im getting hacked all the time, and the only safe way to keep my money is to store them in stocks, and im getting several thousands in donations from god-knows-who :mrgreen: weird, bug?
I look forward to hopefully getting that far. I'm totally willing to faceplant into missions until I figure out what to do, but these save's not working is just killer.


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Wed Mar 25, 2015 9:22 pm 
 

Joined:Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:08 am
Posts:20
Certainly one of my favorite aspects of this game is that it's secrets are guarded by a layer of level 7 StO - Security through Obscurity!

It can be hard, but that's what makes it so fun.

I'd be willing to answer any questions you have that I can however!


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Mar 26, 2015 6:11 am 
 

Joined:Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:42 pm
Posts:23
Quote:
Certainly one of my favorite aspects of this game is that it's secrets are guarded by a layer of level 7 StO - Security through Obscurity!

It can be hard, but that's what makes it so fun.

I'd be willing to answer any questions you have that I can however!
Oh yeah I don't want to blow it all out of the water, but for example both my brother and I are trying to get back into it, and i'm on my 5th try through the early game (no HUD) due to corrupted saves, so trying to figure out the obscure mystery answer can be frustrating when just as I've got a new idea I need to start over.

I guess my first question is other than grinding through the early missions as you can until bank hacking is there any other way to really make money? It always felt awkward that the moment you can break a bank (which is admittedly later than in the old days) missions are sort of a joke. You can jump through 50 different hoops and figure out all the cool stuff, but in the end a simple bank heist fills almost all your financial needs.

And then a second one is if you have any suggestions for getting through the early game faster, as I suspect that's going to be a good portion of my time right now. Currently I just accept everything I can, see what I can get half up front for, get the lvl 2 ip probe, and put the rest into as needed software upgrades, and 1 stick of memory. I was all the way up to hacking backup servers and what not with the stock computer last time as efficent bouncing (accounts on all the banks, lots of hacked DNS servers) gives you more than enough time with a majority of the early junk to run all your disables and crackers (seems like you mostly need the proxy and b. monitor ones).


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Mar 26, 2015 6:22 am 
 

Joined:Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:16 pm
Posts:190
Let me tell you that the start of the game is crazy hard if you intend to do that first "trace large unautorized bank transfer" mission, and you can't buy trace tracker because you don't have space, you can't buy MapShowTrace because you don't have the RAM to run MapShowTrace and B.monitor killer at the same time (and you dont have money to buy AdminPanel to disable MapShowTrace), and you'll have to take a bunch of missions on "I want all money in advance" because you need the money for the equipment, AND you dont have space to store the equpment needed to actually complete all these missions, coupled with the equpment needed to hack banks.. But when you pull it all off correctly, and you get that 900,000c'ish, and you buy your fileserver+130gb memory+full ram, ... you can buy the trace tracker :D after becoming a millionaire, you can affoard a standard-issue trace tracker, isn't that kinda cool ? and then you have to worry about completing the "all money in advance" mission, as hardware upgrade can take almost 24 hours, and on the "all money in advance" missions, you have a 24 hour deadline (PS: you'll need to buy and upgrade and switch to an auxiliary server, as upgrading your 127.0.0.1 server will take almost 48 hours, making it impossible to meet the deadlines. you switch between servers in the AdminPanel, which is a system upgrade you'll need to buy after bank hacks are complete. and its quite possible you'll need to hack 3-4 accounts to get all the money, as the money is probably split up between several accounts on several banks :evil: )


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Mar 26, 2015 7:32 am 
 

Joined:Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:42 pm
Posts:23
Quote:
Let me tell you that the start of the game is crazy hard if you intend to do that first "trace large unautorized bank transfer" mission, and you can't buy trace tracker because you don't have space, you can't buy MapShowTrace because you don't have the RAM to run MapShowTrace and B.monitor killer at the same time (and you dont have money to buy AdminPanel to disable MapShowTrace), and you'll have to take a bunch of missions on "I want all money in advance" because you need the money for the equipment, AND you dont have space to store the equpment needed to actually complete all these missions, coupled with the equpment needed to hack banks.. But when you pull it all off correctly, and you get that 900,000c'ish, and you buy your fileserver+130gb memory+full ram, ... you can buy the trace tracker :D after becoming a millionaire, you can affoard a standard-issue trace tracker, isn't that kinda cool ? and then you have to worry about completing the "all money in advance" mission, as hardware upgrade can take almost 24 hours, and on the "all money in advance" missions, you have a 24 hour deadline (PS: you'll need to buy and upgrade and switch to an auxiliary server, as upgrading your 127.0.0.1 server will take almost 48 hours, making it impossible to meet the deadlines. you switch between servers in the AdminPanel, which is a system upgrade you'll need to buy after bank hacks are complete. and its quite possible you'll need to hack 3-4 accounts to get all the money, as the money is probably split up between several accounts on several banks :evil: )
Yeah you're so out of my league it's not even funny (not that I expected much else, the draw to this game is that there's actually a lot of room for skill and knowledge).

My general start is pretty standard-
1. Buy password crack, trace tack 2, log deleter 1. Grab all missions trying to get more money/half up front (basically academic database stuff, file copy/delete with no security or backup, and DNS stuff)

2. Use the money from the half up front to get the IP probe 2.

3. Head to internic, add all the banks + stock market + test machine, hack the admin, delete the log, get all the DNS servers.

4. Make accounts at all the banks and stock market, set up a basic bounce through them to quickly hack the test machine. Also i usually copy the tutorial to the test machine in the off chance it's somehow useful later (because that seems like something I would do + the completionist in me wants to have EVERYTHING, but doesn't have space for it right now) and then manually defrag here.

5. Bust out the academic missions since they only need the cracker and the saved bounce + whatever missions is more than enough.

6. Start using IP probe on targets to figure out what I need and then buy the absolute minimum. Usually i'll do the DNS stuff next which means decyphyer 3 and level 2/3 proxy disable. Partly because they're easy as sin and because having an admin bounce in the chain is nice. If i don't have the money for the decypher+proxy combo i'll do file delete/copies until I do.

7. Then it's just IP probe and go from there up the mission list? Usually a Bmontior disable is next since between that and the proxy you can get into admin, and then turn everything else off. I'll grab the extra stick of memory, and the decrypter and decompressor as well usually (whatever level is needed).

This as far as i've been able to get since my return. My best games a long time ago had several successful bank hacks, and I was screwing around with denial/lights out puzzles/PC hacking/Lans, although I can't remember most of it, and what I did or didn't figure out, and it seems there's new stuff anyways. I vaguely recall bank passwords being hashed by default, and i'm sure there's a LOT more required to do the bank hack than vanilla now (where you just needed the bypasses really), but I've yet to get far enough to really find out what. The fact that you're doing it with map trace and advance money is pretty mind blowing to me, as i'm not sure I could do that in basic uplink.

I guess my final question for now is "what should I save for?". I feel like hardware in general isn't THAT needed early, as I can get pretty far off good bounces and proper memory usage. I'm thinking the HUD_Connection analysis+bypassers since that's basically required for later, but I've no idea what the Admin HUD does or if it's even worth the money early.

Oh and while i'm on it, i've never bothered with an axillary gateway, but then I'm obviously still fumbling my way through all this. The middle of the line of the top 3 gateways seemed to be more than enough on the one or two occasions I actually got that far.


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Mar 26, 2015 9:04 am 
 

Joined:Mon Apr 23, 2007 1:16 pm
Posts:190
Quote:
1. Buy password crack, trace tack 2, log deleter 1. Grab all missions trying to get more money/half up front (basically academic database stuff, file copy/delete with no security or backup, and DNS stuff)
Wrong. take a few missions on "i want half/all the money in advance", and buy a log deleter v4, don't buy the crap versions :p
Quote:
2. Use the money from the half up front to get the IP probe 2.
why would you want IP probe? it's useless until you're hacking complex LAN's, as far as i know

Quote:
Start using IP probe on targets to figure out what I need and then buy the absolute minimum.
oh, i see... i just assume that the absolute minimum is Proxy Disabler V3 and B.Monitor Disabler V3, cause its true for some 99% (number i pulled out of my ass) of the systems you'll need to break in the beginning of the game :D
Quote:
i'm sure there's a LOT more required to do the bank hack than vanilla now
not really, there's a few new things, but its mostly the same, off the top of my head, only "B.Monitor and VDPIN/lights-out and hashed account records on bank admin panel" is new,
the rest is the same
Quote:
what should I save for?
hmm, i don't really know, i just save for the bare minimum to hack banks&DNS, doing all missions i can do, until i get the Trace Unauthorized mission..
Quote:
I feel like hardware in general isn't THAT needed early
the first thing you'll get low on is RAM/Memory,
buying 1x8 extra memory is the first upgrade you'll really need, the second hardware upgrade is going from 16 ram to 32 ram (this is actually enough RAM for a long time. sure you can buy 24 instead, but the price difference isn't much, i'd call it a waste of money to buy 24 instead of 32 ram).
...note that i hack banks without ANY hardware upgrade at all, i simply use what uplink gave me for my first bank hack ;) (but i don't have enough RAM, so i can not have voice analyzer + B.monitor killer+decyher running simultaneously, i must first kill b monitor, then kill proxy, then do decyper~)
...and the first gateway upgrade i would buy, if i were playing like you, would simply be the default+DOUBLE MEMORY gateway, as memory would be the only thing really missing, for quite a while (you can get by on 60GHz CPU and 32Gq RAM, but you can NOT get by on 16Gq memory..)



I might write up how i play at the start of the game if requested, its pretty extreme ;p


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Mar 26, 2015 5:43 pm 
 

Joined:Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:08 am
Posts:20
The whole early/mid game can be handily skipped by following these steps:

1st things 1st - you can use the onlink connection manager to make ridiculous bounce paths.

start by connecting to internic and adding every single hop. It'll take a second but its worth it.

using the manual dialer window, add internic manually first by using the filter, then add the rest of the hops.

finally, add the target IP last, by taking it out and putting it back into the list on the right of the screen.

save this connection.

Observe you now have approximately 23,000 seconds to complete work on the adacemic database, about 1400 on a bank.

have fun!


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Mar 26, 2015 7:59 pm 
 

Joined:Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:42 pm
Posts:23
Quote:
The whole early/mid game can be handily skipped by following these steps:

1st things 1st - you can use the onlink connection manager to make ridiculous bounce paths.

start by connecting to internic and adding every single hop. It'll take a second but its worth it.

using the manual dialer window, add internic manually first by using the filter, then add the rest of the hops.

finally, add the target IP last, by taking it out and putting it back into the list on the right of the screen.

save this connection.

Observe you now have approximately 23,000 seconds to complete work on the adacemic database, about 1400 on a bank.

have fun!
I'm aware this is an option, it's just overkill in my experience, and then obnoxious to look at/deal with. Granted the new dialer system makes it MUCH easier with the filters, I've never found a need to do this, as getting banks+DNS servers already gives you so much time that you can do every academic mission you have in one hack, and similar results for later missions (hell i've always thought that if they can get the game stable this should be something that's a little more balanced, as right now it's too easy, and bothering to get admin access or an account obviously isn't needed)


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Mar 26, 2015 8:29 pm 
 

Joined:Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:08 am
Posts:20
well, i start that way, because I played a lot of uplink, and as soon as you hack a bank and successfully trans the money, you get promoted like 4 times in a row, and then get the email from ferrous moon to start the new story.
So what I meant by skip is that you dont need to ever buy software except proxy disable v5, bmonitor disable v5, log deleter v4, pword cracker, and a trace tracker for lolz. I use the extra starting money to start with denial from uplink research labs, that way i have 15-20 clients by the time I have hacked a bank or w/e.


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Apr 30, 2015 8:51 pm 
 

Joined:Mon May 29, 2006 6:11 pm
Posts:266
Quote:
bank accounts sure are crazy in the latest versions, im getting hacked all the time
Say what? I'm frantically scrolling through threads trying to find the patchlog with this in it. The player can be attacked now?


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Apr 30, 2015 9:25 pm 
 

Joined:Sat Apr 18, 2015 1:00 pm
Posts:8
not attacked per say, if you manage to get the logs cleared and pull of a successful bank heist, you -may- get those funds pulled out without warning. The bank notices your nefarious and mysterious 100k's of credits randomly showing up in your account and makes it *poof*. Sooo hacked is a misinterpretation. IDK that's as far as i'm aware...

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Help with:
(Bankrupt/Acc# Missions) viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2946
(Changing DNS Info) viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2972
(Breaking VSEC 3.0) ==IN PROGRESS==


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Apr 30, 2015 9:28 pm 
 

Joined:Mon May 29, 2006 6:11 pm
Posts:266
Quote:
not attacked per say, if you manage to get the logs cleared and pull of a successful bank heist, you -may- get those funds pulled out without warning. The bank notices your nefarious and mysterious 100k's of credits randomly showing up in your account and makes it *poof*. Sooo hacked is a misinterpretation. IDK that's as far as i'm aware...
Oh right, I can barely remember versions anymore but i'm reasonably sure that this is pretty old. I think it's part of banks auditing accounts. There are ways around it.


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 Post subject:Re: Can we get a general forum guide up?
PostPosted:Thu Apr 30, 2015 9:52 pm 
 

Joined:Sat Apr 18, 2015 1:00 pm
Posts:8
easiest way is to bounce the cash a few times and NEVER send it to your uplink Bank first :mrgreen:

_________________
Help with:
(Bankrupt/Acc# Missions) viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2946
(Changing DNS Info) viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2972
(Breaking VSEC 3.0) ==IN PROGRESS==


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