How to play › ADVENTURE
COLDWIRE
You rent a deck, a handle and a slice of someone else's bandwidth. Coldwire is a hacking strategy game played from a phosphor terminal: take a contract, route through your relays and break a target's defenses before its trace pins you.
PLAY NOW ▶The goal
Complete each contract's job (copy a file, wipe a record, move numbers) and disconnect before the active trace crawls back up your bounce chain. Climb from SCRIPT KIDDIE through NOVICE, OPERATOR, SPECIALIST and GHOST to LEGEND.
How a contract plays
Every host raises a stack of defenses, and you pour a limited pool of CPU cycles across them while the trace runs. Each wall fights differently. A PROXY is a plain gate. A FIREWALL regrows if you take all your cycles off it. A PASSWORD breaks fast but spikes the trace. ENCRYPTION has two layers unless your decrypter outranks it. While a MONITOR is live, the trace runs much faster. Elite hosts sweep back, so stop a wall when a sweep is coming or it loses progress.
Longer bounce chains buy time but cost fees and lag. Two scripts help in a pinch: FREEZE stops the trace for a few seconds and SPIKE finishes a task instantly at the cost of extra trace. If you are traced you are fined most of the reward and your heat goes up. Heat makes contracts pay less and hosts trace faster; LAY LOW cools it for a fee.
Between jobs, spend your pay on HARDWARE (more cycles, more tasks at once, more bounce links, a trace monitor) and SOFTWARE (tools matched to each defense).
Controls
| Keyboard | Pad | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Up / Down | Stick / d-pad | Select a task |
| Left / Right | Stick / d-pad | Move cycles |
| Z | A | Run or stop a task |
| Q | L | Freeze script |
| E | R | Spike script |
| C | C | Disconnect, details |
| X | B | Back |
On a phone or tablet, a see-through joystick and A, B, C, L, R and SPACE buttons appear over the game and do the same as the keys above.
Gamepad: the stick or d-pad moves and the buttons follow the Pad column (Start is START). Esc, P or Back pauses, and the HOW TO PLAY button over the game shows the basics any time.
Modes
The hub holds the CONTRACT BOARD, HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, MAIL, the DAILY CONTRACT, LAY LOW and your AGENT STATUS. Some contracts carry modifiers, such as a rush job or a clause that only pays if you wipe your trail. After the final story job, GHOST RUN opens: an endless chain where a trace loses the whole run, or you bank your depth and walk away.
Mastery stars
Each star pays tickets the first time you earn it.
- Bronze: First Blood: complete any contract.
- Silver: Giant Killer: crack an elite host.
- Gold: A secret: somewhere out there is a server that holds a file on you.
Daily challenge
Yes. The DAILY CONTRACT is a sequence of contracts, the same for everyone that day. A trace ends it.
Beginner tips
- Take a MONITOR down early. While it is live, everything else you do is under a faster trace.
- Never pull every cycle off a FIREWALL before it breaks, or it regrows.
- Leave PASSWORD walls for last when you can: breaking one spikes the trace.
- Keep FREEZE for the end of a job, when you only need a few more seconds.
- Disconnect rather than get traced. Abandoning a job costs the pay, but being traced costs a fine and heat.