Hacknet – Tips for Beginners

In this guide I’ve collected some advices for beginner players. Maybe experienced players will find something useful here too since the points I gathered here are not mentioned in the game or they are easy to miss.

Command Line

Note: Credit goes to Dmitry

• Don’t forget about autocomplete (tab key). You can use it for both commands and files/directories.
• To execute a command that you’ve executed earlier use the arrow up and arrow down keys to go through your previous commands. Very useful when analyzing firewall or when a program couldn’t start at first because of the memory limit.
• You can use command “addNote [your note]” to make your own notes.
• Command “exe” shows all tools that you have.

Optimizing Your Break-in

• If a server has both firewall protection and proxy detection you can start overloading proxy detection first and proceed to removing firewall protection while overloading is still in progress.
• To speed up overloading proxy detection use several shells.
• You can run several port opening tools at the same time (as many as your memory allows).
• During break-in you can disconnect (“dc”) any time to avoid being traked and your progress (opened ports and bypassed securities) will be saved, you can connect again and continue. This works on most servers, but there are few of them where you have to do everything in one go.

General Advices

• If you’ve gained access to a server before and you need to access it again you don’t need to do it by force again. You can just choose login option and you’ll see correct user/password pair there.
• If you rely on GUI too much to navigate through file system and look through files you may forget that everything you do in GUI is actually being executed in the command line. Remember this when you need to use information from a file somewhere else (send in email for example). Instead of memorizing it or making a note just look for the file’s content in the console.