Nodes
Build the network. The network is the weapon. Wire a node-based hacker rig, balance power, heat and bandwidth, and breach 21 escalating targets, from a branch post office to NASA's Deep Space Network. A calm automation game with no timers and no fail states.
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Overview
Summary
Build the network. The network is the weapon. Wire a node-based hacker rig, balance power, heat and bandwidth, and breach 21 escalating targets, from a branch post office to NASA's Deep Space Network. A calm automation game with no timers and no fail states.
Description
About This Game
You don't hack by typing. You hack by engineering.
Nodes is a calm automation game about building a machine that breaks into other machines. Drop modems, GPU clusters, VPNs and coolers onto a node canvas, wire outputs to inputs, and grow a rig that out-produces a target's defenses on all three axes at once: bandwidth, compute and obfuscation.
When your architecture clears the wall, commit the breach. The bar fills, the music builds, and the terminal narrates every step: port open, payload delivered, root. How fast it lands depends on the headroom you engineered beforehand.
From a post office to NASA
Start in a basement with one cheap rig. Finish at NASA's Deep Space Network. On the way: a public library, a regional ISP, an ad-tech firm, a credit union, a crypto exchange, the tax authority, a power grid's SCADA network and a defense contractor. Twenty-one targets, each one asking your rig a harder question.
Higher tiers fight back, calmly: rate limiters, honeypots, geo-locks, intrusion detection and crypto challenges. Counter them with the right node, or ride them out. Breaches never fail. A trace only hardens the target for a while.
Every watt counts
Every node draws power and throws off heat. Stamping out more hardware won't save you. The puzzle is to fit more throughput inside the same power and heat budget. Re-balance a starved pipeline and watch a crawling breach start to fly.
A research tree with Hardware, Utility and Stealth branches unlocks new node kinds, efficiency upgrades and auto-placement, so the late game is about design, not clicking.
Features
- 19 node kinds: modems, GPU clusters, uploaders, VPNs, scanners, three tiers of cooling, solar panels, generators, fuel cells and more
- 21 targets across five tiers, from a branch post office to NASA
- A three-axis breach model: bandwidth, compute and obfuscation
- Power and heat budgets that turn every layout into a puzzle
- Five active countermeasures, each with its own counter
- A research tree in three branches, with auto-placement for the late game
- GhostOS, a warm retro desktop with a Mailer, a Terminal, a NetMap and a Trophy Wall of every system you've rooted
- Adaptive music that builds with every breach
- 34 Steam achievements
- No fail states, no timers, no microtransactions
