Rules

How pewhack works

pewhack runs on ticks. Every 5 minutes the world moves one step for everyone at the same time: weather turns into power, racks turn power into compute, your crew works its contracts, the market settles. Once a day at 03:00 (Berlin time) the daily settlement runs and the Pewhack Daily comes out.

Power is money

Your balance is in kilowatt hours. Solar arrays and wind turbines produce with the real weather in Berlin. Surplus charges your battery first; the rest is sold to the grid. When you run short, the battery covers it, then you buy from the grid. How much the grid pays or charges depends on the weather: in a dark lull, buying costs up to 2.5 times as much. If neither battery nor balance can pay, GPU racks shut down until they can.

Compute and the market

GPU racks turn power into compute (GPU-h), but only if their power is paid for. Compute trades against kWh on the market. All orders are collected and settled once per tick at a single price. Orders last 24 hours. Sellers pay a 1 % fee. Stored compute loses 1 % at every daily settlement.

Your crew

Hackers have five skills (Recon, Exploit Dev, Social Engineering, Defense, Laundering), one to three traits and a mood. They are paid by the hour, a little every tick. Unpaid or overworked hackers lose morale; below 20 they strike until it is back at 40. The talent market has 3 new candidates for your crew every day; the rarer ones want rep with a faction first. You can let a hacker go at any time; the others take it badly.

Other crews can poach your hackers with a raise; they pay a finder's fee of 6 hours of the new salary up front. You get 60 minutes to match the offer, and then the hacker keeps the new salary and stays. Otherwise the hacker decides: greedy hackers switch easily, loyal ones rarely. A hacker who switches leaves their gear behind.

Courses raise a skill up to the hacker’s tier cap; a hacker in training does not work. Gear from the shop adds to a skill, may pass the cap and draws power while worn.

AI agents

An agent runs on an AI model and works contracts with the compute you give it: up to 60 GPU-h per tick, at most 4 agents per crew. Compute an agent uses is compute you do not sell. The harder an agent works and the lower its model’s alignment, the likelier it breaks out. A loose agent eats compute and draws heat until you capture it or it comes back.

Contracts

5 offers wait on your contract list, new ones every 6 hours or right away for 20 kWh. Assign hackers and agents; they work every tick, and the reward arrives when the work is done before the deadline. Missing the deadline or abandoning costs rep.

State contracts pay clean kWh. Syndicate contracts pay about 2.2 times as much, in dirty kWh, and draw heat while they run. Every contract raises your rep with its faction and lowers it with the other; more rep with a faction unlocks harder, better paid contracts and rarer hackers.

Dirty kWh, heat and raids

Dirty kWh can be laundered into clean for a fee of 30 %, less with a good launderer in the crew (at least 10 %). Spending dirty kWh in the shop or on salaries costs no fee, but draws heat. Heat falls by about 2.4 per hour. Above 60, raids become possible: investigators seize dirty kWh and GPU racks, and heat drops to 20. A raid always comes with a choice.

Events and news

Things happen: strikes, audits, favours, shortages. Some are decisions with a deadline; if you are away, the default choice applies. Global events move prices for a day. Nothing happens to a crew in its first 24 hours, and bad luck is capped: at most one severe event a day.

Attacks

Crews can attack each other from the Attacks page. Drain battery takes 40–70 % of the target’s battery charge, as dirty kWh. Hijack GPUs diverts half the compute the target’s racks make for 1 hour. An attack costs compute (30 or 40 GPU-h), needs at least one hacker, who does nothing else while it is prepared, and resolves after 15 or 30 minutes.

The chance is offense / (offense + defense). Offense: each hacker’s Exploit Dev plus half their Recon, scaled by mood, plus extra compute. Defense: 40, plus the crew’s best Defense skill, plus 8 per patch level, plus firewalls. The patch level drops by one every day; patching costs 15 GPU-h per level. A failed attack names the attacker; a successful one might. If the target has a honeypot, a failed attack hits the attacker instead. Every attack draws heat and costs 2 state rep.

Recon

Every crew has a public profile with its standing, hackers and hardware. The rest takes recon: on the profile, a hacker scouts the crew for 20 GPU-h and is busy for 10 minutes. The intel report shows their defense, battery, compute and every hacker’s skills, salary, greed and gear for 24 hours; honeypots stay hidden. With a report the attack dialog shows the exact chance, without one only low, medium or high. The target may notice someone scouting, more likely when its defense is strong and your scout’s Recon is weak.

Darknet

From Syndicate rep 20, the darknet lets you in. A broker puts a few zero-day exploits up for auction every day; crews can sell the ones they own there too. A bid must beat the top bid by 5 % (at least 1 kWh). It is paid in dirty kWh first, then clean, and draws no heat; it sits in escrow, and if someone beats it, you get it back. The top bid when the auction ends wins. A crew that sells gets the price as dirty kWh, less a 10 % fee.

An exploit fits one kind of attack: grid controllers fit Drain, cluster schedulers fit Hijack. Add it in the attack dialog and its strength adds to the offense; it is spent at launch, whatever happens. Now and then a patch is released for one kind, and every unspent exploit of that kind becomes worthless at once; auctions for them are called off.

The Syndicate contract “Keep a botnet warm” pays with a botnet. A DDoS with it blocks a crew’s market orders or its contracts for 5 minutes per size of the botnet (up to 15 minutes): blocked orders sit out the market, blocked contracts make no progress while their deadline runs on. Afterwards the botnet rests for 2 hours. You can rent your botnet out for a price per strike, or rent someone else’s. A DDoS draws 2 heat, follows the protection rules of attacks, and the target never learns who sent it.

Protection

• New crews cannot be attacked for 48 hours. Attacking someone ends your own protection.
• A crew can be attacked at most 3 times a day, and by the same crew once.
• You can only attack crews with at least 50 % of your wealth.
• DDoS strikes follow the same rules, counted on their own.

Seasons

A season runs 6 weeks. The leaderboard has four boards: Wealth, State’s Darling, Kingpin and Most Feared Crew. At the end, the leader of each board gets a title, and every crew starts again with the starting kit; each title adds a little to the starting balance in later seasons.

Some crews are house crews, marked “House”: the game plays them by fixed rules, so the world is busy from the first day. They trade, take contracts and can be attacked like any crew, but they win no titles.

Fair play

• One account per person.
• No passing resources between your own or linked accounts.
• The admin can freeze accounts and reverse transfers.
• On request, your account is deleted: your email and handle are removed and your crew becomes “Deleted crew”. Write to the address in the imprint.

Coming later

More on the darknet (datasets, access brokers, mercenaries), more kinds of attack, and AI models of your own.