Torn Cracking Guide: Rigs, MIPS, Heat and the Brute-Force Formula

Passwords come from real wordlists

Every known job draws its password from existing password lists. That means once you have even one character revealed, external tools can narrow the answer down dramatically. Guessing is free.

You get three mistakes, and they are not fatal

Click any blank slot and type a character. Three wrong guesses locks you out of guessing for that job, but you can still crack it by brute-forcing. There is no reason to be timid about guessing.

Guessed characters show a green aura. Brute-forced ones appear plain.

Guessing grants no crime skill

It saves nerve, it does not build skill. That trade-off is what separates the two routes through this crime.

Brute-forcing costs 7 nerve per attempt

On a long encrypted password, that adds up brutally. Each attempt runs a number of cycles equal to your brute-force strength, and each cycle reveals one character or strips one encryption layer.

One to nine layers, depending on target

A target with five characters and one encryption layer needs ten brute-forcing cycles, not six. Layers must come down before you can guess at all.

This is what makes high-tier targets expensive

An Intelligence Agency at nine layers of encryption is a completely different proposition from an ex-partner at zero. With BFS 1 you would spend enormous nerve before making a single guess.

A rig needs 100,000 MIPS to come online

Below that threshold it simply does not run. Above it, brute-force strength scales with total MIPS from your CPUs, eCPUs and HPCPUs.

Strength scales logarithmically

The community-derived formula is BFS = 0.0052 × √MIPS − 0.6252, accurate to within about 3%. The practical consequence is that early MIPS are cheap and later MIPS are brutally expensive.

Decimals are a probability, not a rounding error

The game uses stochastic rounding, so a brute-force strength of 1.7 means one guaranteed cycle plus a 70% chance of a second. Fractional strength is genuinely useful.

Overheating no longer cancels the attempt

Previously, components overheating mid-attempt affected the outcome. Now the brute-force attempt resolves using the initial values instead of the final ones.

So disposable rigs are optimal for nerve efficiency

You can build something enormously powerful that overheats completely after a single use, take the full benefit of that one attempt, and then wait for it to cool. For pure nerve efficiency this beats a modest rig you can run continuously.

Heat decays 1% per minute, so a fully overheated rig is back in service in a couple of hours. If you are playing other crimes in between, that downtime costs you nothing.

Or build low-heat and take short breaks

The alternative is a rig that heats slowly, letting you brute-force repeatedly with brief pauses. Less spectacular, easier to manage.

One course cuts heat by a quarter

CMT2570: Fundamentals of Computer Architecture reduces all heat gain from components by 25%. Worth taking before investing heavily in cooling parts.

Cracking pays double brute-forcing at two-thirds the nerve

That makes successfully cracking a job roughly three times as nerve-efficient as brute-forcing. Neither is affected by target type, service, or your rig's strength.

But cracking is daily-capped

Like Disposal, jobs generate daily. Once you have cracked everything available, brute-forcing is the only remaining source of skill. That tension defines the two routes below.

Failing a crack is always a crit

There is no soft failure at the final step. You lose the job, forfeit the pay, take standard penalties and possibly jail time.

The slow, efficient route

Brute-force once, or guess immediately, then use external password tools to work out the rest with minimal further brute-forcing. Your nerve stays free for other crimes, and it fast-tracks the Character Assassination honor bar. Pair it with a low-heat rig and wait out the cooldown between attempts.

The fast, wasteful route

Brute-force everything and never guess. Enormously inefficient per nerve, but since cracking is daily-capped, brute-forcing is the only way to keep gaining skill once the day's jobs are done. It unlocks harder jobs and new chassis faster.

For this route use either no rig at all, a barebones 100k MIPS build, or a zero-heat rig, depending on how much nerve you have to burn.

Cryptographer: reach CS 100

Standard progression via either route.

Character Assassination: guess 250 characters

This is why the efficient route is worth taking. Guessing costs nothing and builds towards this bar, so a player who guesses habitually earns it as a by-product.

Cybercrime medals are expensive here

All attempts count as cybercrimes, slightly better than planting viruses in the old system. Reaching the maximum 10,000 offences costs somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 nerve using this crime alone.

Farm HPCPUs from Cyber Force

The most efficient rigs need 30 to 50 HPCPUs. Shoplifting Cyber Force with security down is far cheaper than buying them, and the components double as the rest of your rig parts.

Take the architecture course before building

A 25% cut to heat gain changes which builds are viable, so take it before spending heavily on cooling.

Guess aggressively on unencrypted targets

Ex-partners, friends, colleagues and jurors have no encryption. One brute-force to reveal a character, then guess the rest. This is where the Character Assassination bar comes from.

Leave the nine-layer targets until your rig is strong

Armed Forces and Intelligence Agency at nine layers of encryption are unreasonable at low brute-force strength. Build up MIPS first, or accept that those jobs will consume most of a day's nerve.