Somehow this never happened to me or Shadowdraft in all the time we grinded out ILs, and then it happens two days in a row to me.

There's a minuscule chance that a terminal hack (the ones at the end of Bay and Timor) starts in a fully completed position. That sounds amazing, it saves so much time!

Problem is, you hit E twice when accessing the terminal to skip the intro screen. But when there is no hack necessary, it doesn't register the second E press as skipping the intro, but as exiting the terminal entirely. So you cancel the critical data download, then you have to activate the terminal a second time, and are forced to sit through the intro before you can click the critical data button again.

If it happens and you're not expecting it, it will kill your run. If you want to get the absolute perfect time, you'd have to reset until you get this, and then not break it. Good luck with that

Oh hey, a forum. Look at that. Hi.

Yeah, I was aware of this from five years back when my team was running. I was always the hacking guy and would get so giddy when it happened. Across far too many resets that I don't even want to begin counting it probably only happened to me a few times. It is exceptionally rare for some reason... the hack must not be quite completely randomized, there has to be different chances for numbers to be certain lengths apart otherwise I'd have to imagine this would happen much more often on Landing Bay, at least.

I actually wasn't aware that the E double tap would cause that if it autocompletes but it makes sense. When we were initially running five years ago I had no idea about the E double tap so when I did get an instant hack it saved quite a bit of time, but I guess it isn't reliable anymore. I wonder if it actually wastes time now since that intro screen is so painfully slow? Ah well...

Yeah if you double-tap E and get the instant hack it wastes more time than a quick hack would take. It sucks 🙁

The math behind the Instant Hacks is actually pretty simple. Consider that every column has 8 possible positions for the 1 to be in and you want all four of them to be in the same position. There's 1 chance in 4096 (8^4) for that to happen if the 1s are placed at random. Now consider that this can happen at any 8 position and you get 8 chances out of 4096 which is 1/512.

I guess the developers forgot to put a fail-safe preventing that to happen. ^^

You also need all of them to be moving in the same direction, don't you?

Hmm.. I did not think of that. I'm not really sure because when you get the instant hack you don't even see the intro which could mean that the game checks the position of the 1s before checking whether or not they are going in the same direction. We'd have to try a considerable amount of times and get some tangible statistics to make sure. In the end it's way too improbable (imo) to rely on, unfortunately as it can save a whole lot of time.

While I can't say for 100% certain, I am pretty sure to memory I saw them lined up with one moving away when I was running Landing Bay a while ago.

Too bad I don't still have the recording to see that...