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Cyberpunk 2077 hacking guide

How to sow digital chaos with your cyberdeck

Need to know how to hack in Cyberpunk 2077? Night City runs on tech, and if you know how to use it to your advantage, you’ll have a cybernetic leg up on the competition. Whether you’re remotely disabling all the security cameras so you can sneak around unseen, disabling goons’ weapons so you can take ‘em down with ease, or simply jacking in and swiping a few eurodollars – knowing how to hack is a must.

Holding tab will activate your scanner, where you’ll be able to scan individuals, see their affiliation and weaknesses, tag them, see your available RAM, and view the quickhacks available to you. As you survey your surroundings, you can see that nearby hazards are highlighted in red, hackable objects are highlighted in green, and other useful objects are highlighted blue.

There are also objects in the world which you can jack into and hack if you have enough points in intelligence in your Cyberpunk 2077 build. Often, terminals on the wall give you extra credits, and PCs allow you to access camera feeds and potentially disable or detonate hazards. Here’s everything you need to know about hacking in Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 RAM

RAM is the resource you use to perform quickhacks – the cost of each individual quickhack depends on your level, various perks, and occasionally your Cyberpunk 2077 cyberware. RAM regenerates outside of combat, and you can unlock more RAM by putting points in Intelligence, upgrading your cyberdeck, or with abilities and Cyberpunk 2077 perks.

cyberpunk-2077-hacking

Cyberpunk 2077 Hacking

Access Points can be found throughout the world, or can be located by using the ‘Ping’ quickhack on someone or something attached to the same network.

In order to upload a daemon into an Access Point, you must enter the correct code sequence by selecting characters from the Code Matrix, which appear in the Buffer at the top of the panel. You can’t just point and click on the correct sequence willy nilly- what’s the fun in that? You can only enter number/letter pairs from the active row or column. The first row is always active to begin with, and once you select a pair from this row, the column it belongs to then becomes active, and you can select the next pair of characters – after which, the row it belongs to becomes active, and so on.

When planning your upload sequence, it may be useful to work backwards from the last pair in the sequence, and figure out how to get there from the first row. Your target sequence may consist of fewer characters than you have slots in your Buffer, which allows you to enter pairs that are not part of the sequence in order to access the pairs you require – however, the sequence must be entered in order without interruptions. There’s also a timer ticking down while you puzzle it out, but this doesn’t begin until you enter the first character, so you’ve got plenty of time to plan your route through the grid.

You can upload multiple daemons simultaneously by incorporating their uninterrupted sequences into your Buffer. The available daemons will be on the right hand side of the screen – you’ll be able to see your progress in each sequence, and which ones you’ve locked yourself out of.

That’s everything you’ll need to upload daemons in Cyberpunk 2077 – aspiring netrunners should also check out our Cyberpunk 2077 cyberdeck loadout guide – useful no matter what build you’re going for.