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Exploits

If you are filing an issue report you believe to be an exploit, please file it in the Exploit Forum.

If you are unsure what an exploit is, read on.

Definition

Exploits refer to ways for players to:

  • gain an unintended or unexpectedly disproportionate mechanical advantage over other players or some aspect of the game,
  • degrade or perversely affect the stability and performance of the game server,
  • or damage or destroy any of the services, infrastructure, or data used to run Paradise and its associated tooling

This definition is not exhaustive or exclusive. Ultimately issue managers, maintainers, and headcoders are responsible for determining if an issue is an exploit.

Exploits are reported in a different venue than ordinary bugs or other game issues because the possibility exists that other players can reproduce the behavior and propagate knowledge of the advantage or destructive activity to themselves and others.

Examples

Some examples of a mechanical exploit might be:

  1. A player finds an item that, when inserted into an autolathe, returns more materials than it requires to print the item from the autolathe. In this way, by constantly recycling and printing the same item, they are able to create an unbounded amount of material for free. This is an exploit because it subverts the intended design of the autolathe, which is that things should cost consistent resources and should never lead to runaway amounts of materials that would normally have to be mined or found elsewhere.

  2. A player finds that when holding a certain jetpack and wearing a certain suit, that they move faster in space than they would otherwise. This is an exploit because it makes them faster when they didn’t actually do so in a way the game intended. Note that whether or not there’s a fair counter for this behavior is irrelevant.

Some examples of a server exploit might be:

  1. A player finds a command that, while only intended for admins, does not perform a permissions check, leading to the ability for non-admins to execute the command and potentially change player records or change the course of a game not meant for non-admins to be able to do. This is an exploit because it bypasses the permissions system, giving ordinary players privileged access to game behavior.

  2. A player finds that when upgrading a certain machine that produces output, the creation of so many of a certain kind of object causes server lag for all players. This is an exploit because while the player may not have been performing any malicious actions, a coding error causes performance issues in an otherwise unremarkable situation, meaning the player can lag the server and hurt the experience for players simply by performing the same otherwise mundane action repeatedly.

An example of an infrastructure exploit might be:

  1. A player finds that an API call to Parastats causes degraded service as the API server attempts to fill the request, and them performs that call repeatedly for no reason other than to cause performance issues for other people attempting to access the server.