(If you already know how to hack that's wonderful but please understand there are several
people everyday who ask how so that's who this topic is for don't flame me please!)
Alright, so, you read the manual, but you still can't get the hang of hacking? First, let's
review what the in-game tutorial tells you.
The computer will tell you how many letters are correct, and in how many places. So, what does
that mean?
Well...
Say the password is "chairs."
The word you just picked is "stairs." The computer shows that you got 4/6 letters correct.
That means that not only are the four letters correct, but the password has those for letters
in the EXACT SAME PLACE. That is very important.
So you got 4/6 with stairs, and you see these choices:
Chairs
Raised
Both of them share four correct letters with "stairs," but only "chairs" could possibly be the
correct choice because it shares 4 letters IN PLACE with "stairs." Let's examine:
Stairs
Raised =
_ _ a i _ _ _
Even though "raised" has many similar letters, if we only count those in the proper place, we
see that only 2/6 are correct, and since we know "stairs" has 4/6, it would be a stupid choice.
(Protip: If you're working a REALLY hard lock, know that this also means that the first,
second, fourth, fifth and sixth letter positions cannot be "r," "a," "s," "e," and "d"
respectively. I wouldn't recommend paying attention to this normally though, the hacking game
is pretty easy and you shouldn't have to.)
Now let's take "stairs" and "chairs."
Stairs
chairs
_ _ a i r s
See? We can tell that we have 4/6 correct, so there is a very good chance chairs is the
password.
Now, let's go through an entire computer terminal. Say we get this list of words:
Sneak
Tapes
Great
Bleat
Mouse
Swear
Integrity
Now, the first thing to do, is try to find a word that has many similarities with other words.
Tapes is a bad choice, and so is Mouse and Integrity. But notice alot of words have the third
and forth letter as the dipthong "ea?" We should pick one of those.
"ick Great."
Alright, we picked great and got two out of five correct. Since we're fairly sure the password
has "ea" in it, we can guess that those are the two we got correct, and know that "g," "r," and
"t" are wrong, so our next choice can't be "bleat," since it has a "t" in it, in the exact same
spot as "great" does. We can, however, pick "swear," because even though it has an "r" in it,
it's not in the same spot as the "r" in "great," and so it could be correct.
So we pick "Swear."
This time we got three out of two correct.
So, there's only one word it could possibly be.
Sweat
S_ea_
=
Sneak.
Do you see? I hope this helps people who use the search function at least.
Don't forget: "You can find hidden character sets that have a chance of removing dud passwords
from the screen as well as a chance of restoring all of your tries. These sets always contain
two brackets at the same time facing each other in a line. The brackets may or may not have one