NEWS UPDATE: Fair Block Payouts & 6 New Skills

UPDATE: FAIR BLOCK PAYOUTS + SIX NEW SKILLS

Built from your suggestions @WzerW

Mining

• Pool shares now count the whole block. The equal quarter is split by minutes mined since the last block, the hashrate half by hash work over the same stretch. A miner knocked offline by a DDoS stops earning for exactly the minutes they were down, even if they are back before the block lands, and everyone who kept mining picks up that share. Switching on a minute before a block only earns that minute.
• Block share on the dashboard. A new tile shows your live part of the current block.

Rigs

• Cooling stock is always visible. Thermal Paste, Industrial Fan and Liquid Nitrogen show how many you hold, right on the maintenance options and in the rig button tooltips.
• Smart maintenance adds a 5% fee on Shards spent, counted toward your budget. Supplies from your inventory stay free, and picking rigs yourself in Batch maintenance has no fee.

Darknet Operations

• Status bar. Your shield, Low Profile, infection, zero-day wave, next free target and retaliations now sit in one live status panel at the top of Operations instead of stacked banners, with timers that drain or fill as you watch.
• Live skill status. Every new skill shows what it is doing right now: ready or counting down, how many targets it applies to, who is marked, what your beacon caught.

Two new skills in every tree

• Low Profile +3% odds per level on your next operation after 12 hours without one.
• Ghost Routing Ignores 20% per level of the target's Reinforced Firewall skill. Hardware still counts in full.
• Predator +2% odds per level against anyone with a higher hacker rank.
• Vendetta +3% odds per level against anyone who attacked you in the last 24 hours.
• Trace Beacon 20% per level to see through Ghost Protocol. Caught attackers land in your log, your traces and your Vendetta list.
• Viral Countermeasure 6% per level to infect an attacker who gets in. An infected system runs its next operation at -10% odds; the virus is gone after that operation or after 12 hours.

Every bonus and penalty is already in the odds you see. Targets show them as tags, recent attackers are marked Hit you, the attack screen lists every edge and warns you when a target can infect you, and the result screen repeats them under the roll. Skill trees now hold 18 points each.

Suggested skills we did not add, and why

• Trojan Horse, Worm Protocol, Data Corruption, Backdoor Implant Merged into Viral Countermeasure. One virus with one clear effect is easier to read and plan around than five overlapping ones, and Backdoor is already taken by the Vulnerability Scanner.
• Dirty Cache, Salvage Protocol, Resource Salvage Three versions of a refund for failed operations. Making misses cheaper mainly rewards spamming long shots.
• Push Your Luck As a permanent trade it only pays off above roughly 77% odds, so it would mostly help strong players farming weak ones.
• Burnout Operations run on charges, not slots, and Overclock already raises your reserve.
• Bulk Buyer Black Budget already takes up to 30% off everything Operations bills you.
• Recon Sweep Too close to Reconnaissance to stand as its own skill.
• Emergency Firewall, Quick Reboot Smaller versions of Reinforced Firewall and Fortification.
• Decoy Wallet Winning and getting nothing feels bad, and in practice it is flat protection that Reinforced Firewall already gives.
• Honeypot Virus Fake intel would make every number on the screen worth less.
• Signal Scrambler "Every 5th hack" is easy to count around, and the effect is small.
• False Flag Hiding a failed attack from the defender is what Ghost Protocol already does.
• Insider Contact A daily item drop fits the Black Market better than a hacking tree, and it would flood the market with items.