Bitrunning

Bitrunning is a dungeon crawl you do from inside your own ship. A quantum server generates a virtual domain, you lie down in a netpod and wake up in it as an avatar, and if you complete the domain's objective the ship's byteforge materialises the reward as physical cargo. It is the one expedition that does not need the ship to go anywhere, but it is not free, and it is not safe: the damage your avatar takes is passed straight through to the body lying in the pod.

Getting a rig

A working setup is four machines: a quantum server, a quantum console in a tile cardinally next to it, a byteforge within a few tiles, and at least one netpod. There are three ways to end up with them.

• Buy the Delta's Bitrunning Den. Delta's cafe slot has a fitout with three netpods, a server, a console and a byteforge already wired, and it adds a Bitrunner to the crew roster. See the ship purchase screen for what it costs.
• Print them. All four boards come out of the Bitrunning Technology node, which sits behind gaming and applied bluespace research. Any ship with a working R&D chain can build a den from scratch.
• Salvage one. The Nullstack Arcade, a rare ruin reachable only by rumour chart, is an overrun netpod parlour with its rig still bolted down and powered. It also has a netguardian and a Syndicate garrison standing on top of it. See Ruins & Points of Interest.

Running a domain

1. Pick a domain at the console. Each one lists a cost in points, a difficulty and a reward. The server starts the round with no points, so your first runs have to come from the free end of the list: Beach Bar, Gondola Asteroid, Grasslands Hunt, Breeze Bay. Completing domains earns points, which unlock the pricier ones.
2. Choose an outfit and get in a pod. The netpod kits your avatar out; what your real body is wearing does not go with you.
3. Find the encrypted cache. Every domain hides one. Some also hide a secondary objective (an encrypted curiosity) worth an extra reward.
4. Carry it to the goal tile in the safehouse. That is the completion condition, not killing everything. The moment the cache lands on the goal, the byteforge back on the ship starts materialising a decrypted cache.
5. Leave through a hololadder. Disconnecting cleanly means walking to an exit and taking it. There are only so many exits per domain, and each one you use is spent.

Shutting a domain down puts the server into a cooldown of a couple of minutes, and everyone has to be disconnected before it will load a new one.

What you get

The decrypted cache pays in ore: iron and glass at every tier, then silver and titanium, then plasma, gold and uranium, and diamond and bluespace crystal on the richest domains. Higher-reward domains pay more of everything. Alongside the ore you get whatever loot that specific domain is written to drop, and a certificate graded on how fast you cleared it. Take a top grade on a domain of medium difficulty or worse and the crate also holds an experimental tech disk, once per domain, so the second clear will not pay it again.

Rewards scale up with the number of runners connected, with a randomly-selected domain instead of a chosen one, and with the number of hostile intrusions the server threw at you on the way.

Dying

This is the part that catches people.

• Damage crosses over. Anything your avatar takes that is not stamina or oxygen damage is applied to your real body in the pod at the same time. Your body can be beaten to death by something that never touched it.
• A hard disconnect scrambles you. If the connection is severed rather than ended properly: your avatar dies, your body is knocked out, someone shuts the server down, the pod loses power or gets smashed: you come out with serious brain damage on top of everything else.
• Your body is a target. Attacking an occupied netpod is a real attack on the person inside. If the ship gets boarded while the crew is in VR, the runners are helpless.
• Leave the way you came. The hololadder is the clean exit and costs you nothing but the exit itself.

Boss domains

Megafauna are rare in real space, but six virtual domains are built around one each:

The objective is the same as any other domain: kill the boss, take the cache it was guarding, and get it to the goal tile. Each of these carries a briefing describing exactly what its boss does, attack patterns, what changes at half health, where the fight goes wrong. It is on the domain info action your avatar gets when you connect. Read it.

Boss domains also do not pay for themselves. Every one of them costs more points to load than completing it returns, so a dive has to be funded by clearing the ordinary roster first.

Threats

A server that has been running domains all shift builds up threat, and a domain can boot with a malfunction in it: one of its own creatures taken over by a player from the dead, running as a temporary antagonist that is hunting you specifically. It makes the run harder, and every malfunction in a run raises the payout. There is no setting to turn it off.