Problem and solution

Problem

For those who don't know, hackmud is an MMO where you write scripts in JS to automate almost every aspect of the game and also hack NPCs and other players (it is amazing, go get it!). Some parts of the game are very easily to automated while others are next to impossible.

There are 3 ways to execute actions in the game

1. You run commands in the game terminal and get a response.

   >>accts.balance
   131B947M886K515GC

2. You make scripts that execute multiple commands for you

   >>cake.inv
   
    ╔════════════════════════════════════╗
    ║  cake.inv - specs                  ║
    ╠════════════════════════════════════╣
    ║                                    ║
    ║  hardline_count: 12                ║
    ║  slots: 116/256                    ║     <-- c001 ASCII window!  :)
    ║  loaded: 60/64                     ║
    ║  user: cake                        ║
    ║  balance: 131B947M886K515GC        ║
    ║                                    ║
    ╚════════════════════════════════════╝

3. You put your script on a cron bot.

Crons are very speed limited and fragile

• An average cron bot can execute a script every 10 minutes and it runs for 5s.
• if it runs more than 5s it will time out and unload itself.
• You only get one cron per user.
• You have to pay a fee every time a cron runs.
• Crons can't automate some parts of the game.

However you, as a player, can execute any number of commands and can perform task sequentially. You are only limited by server response time and script execution time.

That means that you either

• Deal with slow crons and work around the 5s runtime constraints
• Or sit and grind.
• Or...

Solution

We can keep a hackmud window open and simulate keyboard key presses! We need to imitate a player.

The loop is:

Note

This is not the only way to do this. You can also use the flush command to dump the contents of the terminal into the shell.txt file instead of reading memory. It works and can actually be enough for most players but it does have its limitations. If you don't want to implement memory reading consider flushing the terminal

This way we can achieve quite a lot of things in the game. We can automate:

• corp scraping
• hardline entering
• NPC breaching
• loot filtering
• and anything else your heart desires

If you know a thing or two about hacking you may say

But why do all of this when you can just decompile the game and find the networking logic and just talk to the game server directly?

Nah-uh-uh! Not allowed by the game developer! People did get banned for doing this.

Now that we see the task at hand let's finally get to the point!