but also a desire to see how many different ways, how early & how efficiently it can be achieved. I gather the 'standard' route to a bank job is to do missions until you get to 'trace a balance transfer' then use the information and money earned thus far to rob the bank. What other ways have you found to make some big upgrade cash in the early game?
Apologies if something like this is already documented. I just started a new agent and wanted to try hacking a bank with the bare minimum of software, and no hardware upgrades (thus minimising the amount of money I'd need to earn/number of missions done before trying the bank job). I accepted all the missions available after the Uplink Test Machine, making sure to get ALL the money up front. I completed a couple of those missions in order to raise my rating (I think two missions were enough) & gain access to a couple of higher paying Academic Database jobs, again getting all money up front. I also maxed out my Uplink Bank loan.* IIRR, about this time I had enough funds to buy Password Breaker, Trace Tracker v1, Log Deleter v4, Proxy Disabler v5, Decypher v1, Voice Analyser v1. (writing this from memory, hope I haven't forgotten anything)
I didn't have access to any balance transfer missions yet, so I didn't have any juicy account numbers. So I picked a bank arbitrarily and hacked the admin. 1st attempt: I just bounced off the systems I'd received from missions + the ones you start with (about 10?) - this gave me nowhere near enough time to hack the admin login, so I unplugged & cleaned my logs. I added all the links from InterNIC and made a bounce route through everything (yep, messy). I then highlighted maybe 10~15 Internal Services machines and hacked these to get admin access, in order to hopefully slow the trace further. Then tried the bank again. Decypher v1 was ridiculously slow, but I had enough time for it to complete, then I disconnected & cleaned logs. I can't remember if I did the voiceprint in the same session, or if it took two. Then finally (next session) hacked the password, got into admin and looked through the list of accounts. I was hoping admin could see the balance of each account, but that's not the case. So I noted down every account number then disconnected. Reconnecting to the bank, I used the 'Manage Existing Account' option, and hacked into each account in turn, viewing account details until I found one with a big balance. My trace beeps were getting insistent & I'd only found balances of a few thousand - I had three more accounts left to hack, I was about to disconnect & do the rest in the next session, but the 3rd-from-last account had over 700,000c in it.
EDIT: In my panic, I didn't notice that the bank admin can see the password of every account. So if you note all the account numbers and passwords, you won't need to break passwords in your next session. You'll have to key them in manually, so it probably won't be any quicker, but you won't have any active trace to worry about while poking through people's accounts.
So I'd found my target (I'll call him Mr. Rich) - I disconnected, and in the next session robbed the bank using this method:
- 1. Logged directly into Mr. Rich's account
2. Ran Proxy Disabler v5 (triggering an active trace)
3. Transferred 700,000 directly to my Uplink bank account
4. Deleted the 'transferred to' log from Mr. Rich's statement
5. Disconnected & cleaned logs
6. Logged into my Uplink bank account & deleted the 'transferred from' log from my statement
7. Disconnected & cleaned logs
All of this required (if I remember right) Uplink Test + 2 basic missions to be completed and took less than a day and a half game time. I should have made a note of real time but didn't think to do so. However, despite some tedious aspects I'm pretty sure this took less time than doing missions to build your rating up & find a balance transfer mission. Going with bare minimum kit makes the hacks harder but I think it saves time overall - the software to make a bank hack comfortable costs a lot more = many more missions. And for players who've started lots of games and just want to get going quickly, it's a change from going through the same grind again, those early missions just feel like donkey work after a while. A few points to sum up:
- - Getting all money up front can take quite a few clicks & may get tedious, but I'd say it's quicker than actually doing missions
- Bouncing through all the links from InterNIC is messy as hell, but only needs to be done once. Remember to save your route!
- I hacked 3 internal services machines in a row, then cleaned my logs, then did the next 3, and so on. You can probably hack more in one go, I was being cautious. And I highlighted them in the same batches of 3 to make them easy to find on the map (then un-highlighted them once I'd hacked them). In total, I did 10~15, basically just do as many as you can be bothered to do, each one will buy you a little more time.
- Clean your logs QUICKLY after EVERY visit to the bank! (obvious, but thought I'd mention it here for any newer players reading this)
I'd decided to play as an unethical swine for this run, so after the bank job I took some higher level missions that my new rating allowed, then aborted all the lower missions I'd been paid up-front for
. Cancelling 8~10 missions only cost me one rating drop. I don't know if there are any other (hidden) penalties for aborting lots of missions.
So that's one way to get big upgrade funds quickly. Could I have made it better? Is there another way to find big-money bank accounts before you get to the balance transfer missions? Is there a better way to use the bank's admin (I was scared! I might have missed something)? Are there other ways to get 700,000+ very early in the game? (I think that's the amount you need to get maximum hardware & all software in the unmodded game)
* About loans: one thing I'd hoped to do was open an account at every bank and take out lots of loans, but all except Uplink were capped at 0c. I tried transferring about 12000c into one of them, no change. And they didn't change after I completed a couple of missions and upped my rating. However, in a previous game, I'd accidentally made a secondary (empty) bank account into my main one, did a mission, got a rating upgrade & money paid in (only about 1700c) - the max loan amount then went up to something like 300c. So I'm confused - does anyone know exactly how max loan amounts work? Maybe these could be a good source of funds in the early game?
don't know
