Exploit & cheating policy

Early Access
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:warning: THIS IS NO LONGER VALID. IT HAS BEEN REPLACED BY ⚠ Exploit & cheating policy

CHEATS vs EXPLOITS

If some game mechanic is broken or unbalanced in the game and you take advantage of it, that’s an exploit. It’s an exploit if you find somewhere to sell equipment for more than you bought it for. It’s an exploit if you farm boss levels for keys from the infinitely spawning chickens. And it’s an exploit if you use an auto-clicker to reach much higher manual firing rates than any human could.

In exploits you’re still playing within the rules defined by the game, and it’s up to the game to fix them. We’re fine with this – you’re doing nothing “wrong”. The game should change prices, or should prevent chickens from dropping too much food, or should lower the maximum allowed firing rate of a weapon.

Now, if you use Cheat Engine (or whatever) to remove/increase the firing rate… well, now you’re cheating. You’re cheating if you hack the game so that items cost less. You’re cheating if you reduce enemy health. And you’re cheating if you gain an unfair advantage against other players.

With exploits, everyone is still playing by the same rules. With cheating, you’re making up your own rules.

CHEATING POLICY

We’re amending our previous policy, which was too inflexible and perhaps a bit poorly explained:

During Early Access, you are not going to be banned if you cheat. In fact, during this stage we welcome people fiddling around with the game. If you’re the first person to report a working cheat to us and, as a result, that particular cheat gets patched/disabled in a future update, then you’ll get up to 1000 free keys (depending on the severity) and a custom medal :medal_military: .

Clarification: Not being banned doesn’t mean that you’ll be allowed to keep the cheated keys or anything else you gained by cheating. If we discover your cheating at a later date, but it’s too late to separate the consequences from your legitimate progress, your progress may be reset entirely. That’s (one of the reasons) why it’s important to let us know if you discover a working cheat – so we can immediately undo its effects with minimal impact to your legitimate career.

This rule applies only during Early Access. We’ll issue an update after the game is officially released.

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Hey, @InterAction_studios. I got speedhack to work using the latest version of cheat engine and I also accidentaly changed the food value. Could you disable this in future?

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Speedhack works everywhere and in many cases it’s not cheating (unless you use it to slow down really hard sections of games in which you have to be extremely accurate). I love to use it with old flash games so they can have 60+FPS. It is amazing.

Tell more about how you changed food value. I was messing around when I first read IA post, but only ended up with crash.

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Well, here’s a video of me using speedhack or “Frenetic mode” as we like to call it: freneticciu

Me and other people already have experience with this mode from previous CI games. It makes the game harder by increasing the game speed. It demands more attention from the player, suitable for those who find the regular game to run its course too slowly in some waves. It’s both challenging and fun, since you have to wait less for enemies to spawn. I also find the pause between stages boring in singleplayer.

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Yeah. I used that to farm keys in CI4.
And by the looks of things, this still works in CIU so I’d argue that’s a problem.

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That’s an inferior farming method to editing the key values and getting the unlockables almost instantly, though.

If you use the speedhack to make the game faster, your speed and skill also need to increase to match it while in combat. It’s not a pure advantage, your risk to die increases proportionally with the speed. If you use it to make the game slower, then you could gain the ability to evade shots that you wouldn’t have reacted to fast enough otherwise, but a slower speed also means you’ll finish the game slower. This reminds me that if your ship’s movement speed was limited as it used to be, you might not be able to move fast enough anyway to avoid an incoming bullet.

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Good points but from the video you sent earlier I noticed that you can control the speed of game whenever you want so you could still play in normal rate certain waves while farming keys at fast speed on other waves.

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@theguyisp Your cheating was detected by the server (as well as a similar cheat from someone called ‘SkyAndSun’ this morning).

There’s not a lot we can do about preventing these types of cheats (it’s a losing battle), but there’s a whole lot more we can do about detecting them. Detection is all we need to (eventually) ban someone or reset their profile. That’s why it’s relatively easy to change your keys on the galaxy screen – we don’t care, we always know that you did it :wink:

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Ah,I see.

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You should still definitely let us know about any cheat you discover, however, because there’s always a chance it will be something new that we don’t know about.

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What about cosmetic cheats? It’s really beautiful when engine out is black with some thrusters(see post in “post your spacecraft!”) and it is not affect to the gameplay.

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Coſmetic cheats ſhould not be neceſſary in the final game. If there is enough demand for a new ſpaceſhip paint deſign than that feature ſhould be added. That ſort of change is fairly eaſy to make, I ſuſpect.
Beſides, it’s far eaſier juſt to have a blanket rule than lots of exceptions.

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We’ll add more color options in the coming updates.

Although cosmetic changes are harmless, we are forced to treat any external modification to the game as a cheat. CYA wins this one :frowning:

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Why not to give options to change transparency and select any color of every part in hex format when the game will out of “Early access” stage? It would be perfect, you can’t do something like this now without cheating. It could be advanced setting by checkbox in settings.

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The lastest version (13.1) changelog says: “Stricter server handling for cheated missions.” What does that mean?

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It’s an exploit if you farm boss levels for keys from the infinitely spawning chickens

But it’s game mechanic. You can wait keys not only in boss stage but in all waves.You can limit the maximum amount of keys in every wave

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Although given that key ſpawning is timer-baſed (I’m pretty ſure), I don’t know that time-wiſe you get more keys juſt ſitting around and waiting.

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Keys give a significant amount of points, so it’s worth the wait if you’re looking for high score.