Manual

The public guide to DEFRAGGER.IO. It explains what everything does and why you'd want it — not the exact numbers behind it. Those you discover by playing.

Basics

You're looking at a hard drive. Every square is a cell of data; the drive is divided into 2×2 sectors (rows labelled S1, S2… down the sides), and the sectors are stacked into vertical platters (labelled P1, P2… above and below the grid). The S label of the row the Auto-Seeder is sweeping lights up.

• DOWNLOAD DATA drops a block of a random colour onto the drive. Blocks are your income: every block mines data (KB) for you constantly.
• Blocks of the same colour that touch each other earn more. The lines drawn between neighbours are the connections paying you. Bigger, tidier clusters mean more lines.
• The stats box at the top of the shop also shows your BOOST — the total income bonus from prestige and fragments — and carries seven sparklines, lined up to the right of the numbers — efficiency, data mined, throughput, the modifier, blocks on the drive (with how full it is), grid damage and tool uptime — so you can see a purchase or a disaster land. Click any graph to open the telemetry dashboard: every number the drive has produced, a chart for each of them — your score first — covering the last two hours with a line every fifteen minutes, and a table of every run. The drive is sampled often enough that a purchase, a format or a disaster shows up as a clear step. Time the game was closed shows as a gap. The game pauses while it's open.
• Every section title in the shop (CLOUD SYNC, DEFRAG SUITE, and so on) shows a one-line hint when you hover it and opens the matching page of this manual when you click it.
• On a phone the drive fills the screen and the two columns fold away: the ☁ button at the top left slides in Cloud Sync, SHOP at the top right slides in the shop, and tapping the darkened drive puts them away. Hold a block to pick it up, drag on empty space to pan, and use the zoom buttons in the corner. The menu is the MENU ▾ tag on your name.
• The interface takes its colour from your prestige level — every counter, graph and panel edge shares the level's colour, and every tool's level counter is the same colour. Only the data blocks and the payloads in flight keep their own colours.
• Efficiency (top of the stats box) is how tidy the whole drive is: 100% means every colour sits in exactly one cluster.
• Perfect Colour is the big one. When every block of a colour is connected into a single cluster, that colour gets a white outline and your whole income is multiplied. Two perfect colours multiply it further. This is what the game is about: getting there, and keeping it there while the drive keeps changing.
• Rainbow blocks are rare, can't be moved, and count as any colour for connections. When they spread (a credit bonus), they only ever spread within their own platter. Platters in the RAID array (see Data Protection) are solid gold instead — backed-up data that keeps to itself.
• The footer keeps a play clock: time with the tab open and the game running.

Controls

• Click and drag the empty workspace to pan. Mouse wheel zooms toward the cursor; the ⤢ button fits the whole drive in view however big it is, and the 1:1 button puts every cell back at full size. The game fits the drive for you on every load, and again whenever you come back after a while away — a tab left in the background, or this window open for more than a few seconds. A quick look leaves your view alone.
• Hold on a block for a moment (a ring fills) to pick it up, then drop it on an empty cell or onto another block to swap. Drop it on the ✖ zone to throw it away.
• Dead platters (cross-hatched columns) are replaced from the REPLACE PLATTER panel that appears under SYSTEM HARDWARE and pulses while one is waiting — one row per platter with its price, and a clock for platters that are dying, being swapped or booting. Clicking the dead platter on the grid works too. Bad sectors aren't yours to fix by hand — that's the Sector Solver's job (see Damage).
• Hover any piece in either column for a tooltip: what it does, when it helps (▲) and when it doesn't (▼), with a little picture of the move for the tools. A locked piece says what to buy first, and a piece you can't afford yet shows, top right, how long until you can at your current income. The tooltip also says what the next level does in the piece's own numbers; the row itself shows only the level and its live figure. A tool's piece gives a small pulse every time that tool does something, so you can see it working.
• Top bar: pause, your prestige LEVEL and the drive's GRID size in the middle (hover them to see the colours in play as a row of data and the largest grid this level allows), banked FRAGS next to your score, Credits, sound, and — top right — a button with your name on it (GUEST until you sign in). Click it for your Account page; hover it for the menu: Manual, Credits & Achievements, Telemetry, Account, Contact, the Privacy and Terms pages, and ROLL THE DICE (below). Wiping the drive lives on the Account page. Credits, Telemetry, the Manual and your Account all open in one window with tabs along the top; the game pauses while it's open, and the ✕, Esc or a click outside closes it.

System Hardware

• Auto-Downloader downloads blocks for you. The button shows how many blocks a minute you get now and what the next level gives; every level is a real step up until it reaches its rated speed; after that each level adds a little more and the price climbs steeply. It's the first thing to buy.
• Expand Partition adds two rows and two columns — a new platter and a new row of sectors. Each prestige level opens a band of four expansions, priced for that level and climbing within the band. More cells means more blocks, more income and more to tidy. Bigger drives also draw more power (see UPS) and each new platter arrives without a surge protector.

Power

A power surge is one of the three disasters. It does two separate things: it damages platters, and it causes an outage that takes your Defrag Suite bots offline for a while.

• Surge Protector shields one platter (bought left to right) from surge damage. Platters you expand into later arrive unprotected, so keep buying them as the drive grows.
• UPS Battery covers the outage. When a surge hits, the whole drive runs on battery first — every bot keeps working and the UPS button blinks 🔋. Whatever the battery couldn't cover becomes the real outage. A battery big enough for the whole outage means your tools never go down and nothing gets damaged by the outage. Bigger drives drain the battery faster, so a battery that was plenty on a small drive won't be later.

Disk Maintenance

• Corruption Cleaner finds corrupt data and fixes it — a corrupt cell comes back as usable data. It never touches bad sectors. It's the only tool that fixes corruption, which makes it the one that finishes every repair. Out of the box it picks corrupt cells at random; Cleaner Intelligence (bought with packets) makes it more and more likely to go for the cell with the most data around it, and for a failing sector before anything else — which is exactly what a freshly remapped sector needs.
• Sector Solver remaps bad sectors, a whole 2×2 at a time — which hands them back to the Corruption Cleaner as corrupt data. Without a Solver, a bad sector stays bad. The Bad Sector Recovery credit bonus makes the Solver faster.

The first level of each is cheap on purpose: a fresh drive should always be able to afford one. Later levels cost real money. Their work is visible: the cell or sector being fixed shows a scan line and a progress bar while the job runs, and a bad sector takes a bot noticeably longer than a corrupt cell — longer, even, than paying packets to repair it by hand.

Defrag Suite

Bots that tidy the drive for you. Each level adds another copy of the bot. They pause during a power outage — and so does the Auto-Seeder, which stops hunting for packets until the drive has power again. The suite is a one-way ladder: each tool sits behind a padlock until you've bought the one above it at least once. Unlocks are permanent — a format or selling the tool doesn't undo them; only wiping all game data does. The two disk-maintenance tools form their own short ladder, and the Cloud Sync upgrades ladder the same way, in the order they're listed. Bought in roughly the order you'll want them:

• Linear Shifter — nudges completely lonely blocks one step toward company. Cheap, busy, not clever.
• Sorting Daemon — takes a block with no matching neighbours and moves it, anywhere on the drive, to somewhere it touches its own colour.
• Deploy Flipper — swaps two neighbouring blocks of different colours when the swap makes more connections than it breaks.
• Quantum Tunneler — like the Flipper, but across any distance: moves or swaps a block with a far-away spot when that pays.
• Batch Compressor — grabs the four loneliest blocks of a colour and packs them into a 2×2, in one operation.
• Consolidator — takes blocks from a colour's smaller clusters and joins them onto its biggest one.
• Sector Sorter — the only bot that knows the sector grid exists. It finds a sector that's three-quarters one colour and fills the fourth cell with a stray of that colour from elsewhere on the drive: a move if the cell is empty, a swap if a stranger sits there. It picks the loneliest stray it can, so it costs your efficiency as little as possible, and it never robs a finished sector to fill another. Aligned sectors are exactly what the Auto-Seeder uploads, which is why it sits second to last on the ladder.
• Data Magnet — the Perfect Colour specialist. It picks the colour closest to being perfect and works only on that: pulling strays in and building bridges between its pieces until the colour is one cluster.

The clever bots won't make a move that breaks a colour that's currently perfect. They all idle once the drive is at 100% efficiency.

Damage & Platters

Damage climbs three rungs, one per physical scale of the drive. Each looks different so you always know what you're dealing with.

• Corrupt data (a cell of black-and-white static with a red frame and a slash through it — no data colour is red, so red always means damage). Appears occasionally when data downloads, from disasters, or by spreading from a bad sector nearby. It earns nothing, blocks the cell, and drags your throughput down while it sits there. Fix: Corruption Cleaner.
• Failing sector (a red frame around a 2×2 with a bar draining along its bottom). A sector whose four cells are all corrupt isn't bad yet — it's failing, and the bar is its clock. If a Corruption Cleaner starts on any of its cells the clock holds (the frame reads HELD); the moment one cell is fixed the sector is just corrupt data again. If nobody touches it before the bar runs out, it goes bad.
• Bad sector (a big red X across a 2×2). A failing sector left alone goes bad, and disasters push already-corrupt sectors over the edge. Any blocks inside are lost. Bad sectors never heal by themselves — and a neglected one slowly spreads corruption up and down its platter. Fix: the Sector Solver, or FORMAT C:. Every remap works the same way: it steps the sector down one rung, back to four corrupt cells with the failing clock running. So the Corruption Cleaner always gets the last word — on a drive without one, a repaired sector just fails again.
• Dying platter (the whole column tinted red, with a bar draining across its top and DYING written down it). When every sector on a platter is bad, the platter doesn't die on the spot — it's dying, and the bar is its clock. A Sector Solver job in flight on one of its sectors holds the clock (it reads HELD). Get one sector off bad and the platter is just damaged again.
• Dead platter (the whole column cross-hatched). A dying platter left alone dies. It's physically gone: it survives FORMAT C:, no bot touches it, and the only fix is Replace Platter — from the REPLACE PLATTER panel under SYSTEM HARDWARE (or by clicking the platter), pay data and packets, wait for the swap. You can have several swaps running at once; each one you start is priced as the next rung of the ladder. The new platter then initializes — you'll see it booting, row by row — and comes online completely healthy and empty. Each replacement you ever do makes the next one slower and pricier.

Disasters start once you've formatted at least once. They're rare at first and get more frequent as you climb prestige levels, they never come back-to-back, and a freshly formatted drive gets a short breather before the first one. You can also roll the dice — trigger one on purpose from the menu under your name. The damage is real, so it pays hazard pay in packets, sized to what you have at stake at that moment: how many blocks an earthquake can throw around, how many platters and tools a surge can reach past your protectors and battery, how many sectors sit on the platter that fails. One gamble at a time — the dice won't roll while a disaster is still settling. The first roll of each kind, and of all three, is one of the mystery achievements. Earthquake shuffles the whole drive and roughs up a share of sectors. Power surge hits every unprotected platter and causes an outage (see Power). Platter failure crashes one platter — every sector on it gets one rung worse, and a platter that was already sick can die outright. A platter with existing damage is the likelier target.

Cloud Sync

Cloud Sync is a torrent client for your drive, and it's how you earn ☁ packets. It's a separate thing from the drive, so it lives in the left column — under a padlock, blurred out, until you've earned it: after your first FORMAT C: a CLOUD UPLINK goes on sale there. Install it (it costs data) and the PACKET TRANSFERS panel, peers and packets all open up. The first thing to buy there is ENABLE CLOUD UPLOADS — that switches on the Auto-Seeder, and nothing uploads until you do. Each prestige level reveals more of the game; data buys your way in. Prices rise with every level, but the Defrag Suite and maintenance tools rise more gently than the rest — each new colour a level brings means more sorting to do, and the tools are priced to keep up.

• Payloads. A payload is a sector (a 2×2, aligned to the sector lines) of same-coloured blocks, cut off the drive and sent. Squares from a rarer colour are worth more, and a square cut from a Perfect Colour is worth a lot more — but cutting it breaks that colour's perfect bonus until your bots rebuild it. A payload with a rainbow block in it is the jackpot: every rainbow block in it is worth the square of your prestige level on its own, on top of the ordinary blocks beside it — barely a bonus on the first level, a fortune on the last, and a sector of four rainbows is the best thing you can send. The Auto-Seeder will always take one when it sees it.
• Lanes. A transfer takes a while, so payloads pile up in a queue behind busy lanes — the queue holds one payload per platter, and when it's full the seeder simply waits until a lane frees up. Every extra open lane is another transfer in flight. Lane 1 is yours and always on. The PACKET TRANSFERS panel sits at the bottom of the left column and grows upward as you open lanes.
• Peers. Every so often a peer knocks in the PACKET TRANSFERS panel and waits for you to click ACCEPT. Each peer has its own patience: some give up in seconds, a few will hang around for a minute, and the countdown on the row shows which kind you've got. Accepting opens an extra lane for a while, then the peer leaves. Sometimes several arrive at once. You have to be at the keyboard for this — unless a Handshake Daemon accepts for you, and even then the impatient ones are yours to catch.
• The Auto-Seeder. Uploads are its job. ENABLE CLOUD UPLOADS is its first level, and a real investment: buying it installs cloud services, which takes a little while — the column lights up row by row as storage, lanes and the upload daemon come online — and the seeder can't run until it's done. After that each level sweeps the drive faster, one sector row at a time, queueing the best sector it finds (it will happily cut perfect colours). Under it sit two buttons, PAUSE SEEDER and RESUME SEEDER, each showing its price. The seeder starts every run switched off: a freshly formatted partition needs its blocks for income before it can spare them for uploads, so switching uploads on is the first decision of each run. The price is a slice of your income that grows with every prestige level — seconds of income early on, a couple of minutes' worth by the last levels — and it doubles every time you flip it during a run, so decide rather than dither. Pause it when you'd rather keep your perfect colours and farm income. A second pair of buttons sets what it goes for: NON-RAINBOW (the default) means it never cuts a sector with a rainbow in it, since a rainbow is a wildcard for every colour around it; RAINBOW sends it after rainbow sectors first. Switching costs the same slice of income as a pause, on its own doubling ladder that resets each run.
• The Handshake Daemon accepts peers for you, but only one at a time and slowly: it starts on the oldest peer in the queue, takes its time, accepts, then starts over on the next. Its first level is slow enough that only the most patient peers are still there when it gets to them, and each level makes it quicker. A DAEMON countdown on the peer's row shows how long it still needs — click ACCEPT yourself when a peer won't last that long. With the seeder and a fast daemon, packets arrive on their own; your lane is always on.
• Sync Coherence (bought with packets) makes newly downloaded blocks more likely to match a neighbour.
• Data Exchange — the button at the foot of the PACKET TRANSFERS panel sells a batch of packets to the cloud for data. It is a download: it takes a queue slot and a lane like any transfer and pays out when the bar fills. The small button beside it sets the batch — ten packets, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or everything you hold — and a big batch holds a lane for as long as that many packets take to move, hours at the top end, so bandwidth and extra lanes are what make bulk selling practical. A packet is worth a few seconds of your current income, never less than a floor that grows with your prestige level, so it is most useful right after a format, when you are holding packets and the fresh drive earns next to nothing — or whenever you are packet-rich and the next expansion is out of reach. Exchanged data is banked only — it doesn't count as mined, so it earns no fragments.
• The Auto-Clicker (bought with packets) presses DOWNLOAD DATA for you — a click every few seconds at first, quicker with every level. The first level is cheap; the ladder gets steep fast, so the last levels are a real packet goal. It isn't a drive tool, so a power surge doesn't stop it.
• Bandwidth and Lane Capacity are bought with data and make transfers faster and more parallel. You can never have more lanes than platters — a bigger partition is what unlocks more lanes.

Packets pay for Sync Coherence, bad-sector repairs, platter replacements and, at the very end, archiving platters. They live in the cloud, not on the drive — a FORMAT C: never touches them. That's the whole idea: every sector you push through a lane is value you've moved off the disk you're about to wipe.

Currencies & Credits

Everything that makes the drive better is a bounded percentage: each tier of a credit bonus multiplies the last one (so the tenth income tier is worth more than the first, and no reduction ever reaches a hundred percent), tier prices climb geometrically, and the income penalty from damage is measured by the share of the drive that's damaged, so a big drive and a small one read the same rule. Fragments help less and less the more you hold — every doubling of your fragments adds the same slice to income — so a run is never worth farming into the ground.

• KB (data) — mined by blocks, spent on hardware, bots and power. Every number of data in the game reads the same way: whole KB until it gets long, then MB with three decimals, dropping them only once the number is six digits wide, then GB with three decimals again, and so on — your stats, the prices and the cloud all use one rule.
• ☁ Packets — earned from Cloud Sync transfers. Spent on Sync Coherence, the Auto-Clicker (presses DOWNLOAD DATA for you), Maintenance Tuning (faster Cleaner and Solver jobs), Cleaner Intelligence (a smarter Corruption Cleaner), the Peer Magnet (peers knock more often), surge protectors and the UPS battery, platter replacements, archives — or exchanged back into data over the lanes.
• ◇ Credits — cloud credits earned from achievements (cluster sizes, data mined, blocks downloaded, corruption fixed, formats, moves, your high score, one-off feats, and a row of mystery achievements that only show what they were once you've done them). They're yours, not the drive's: a wipe keeps them. Spend them in the Credit store on permanent bonuses: more income, faster downloads, fewer disasters, less corruption, better and longer offline earnings, faster repairs and more. These never reset.

FORMAT C: (prestige)

Formatting wipes the drive in a three-step sequence you can watch — the wipe, the platters mounting, the boot — and nothing downloads until the new drive is up. It costs you the run — blocks and bots — though your banked data comes with you into the next level. In exchange you get Core Fragments, a permanent income boost, one more prestige level, a bigger maximum partition, and a new colour palette. Two things have to be true before the button unlocks: you've mined enough in the current run to bank a batch of fragments, and you've expanded the partition all the way — every platter the drive can hold at this prestige level has to be there. The bar at the bottom shows which one you're waiting on.

There is a top: once the drive is at its highest prestige level, FORMAT C: retires. There are no more levels to climb, so formatting again would only farm fragments. From there the drive is finished by Data Protection.

One thing a format does wear down: the Auto-Downloader comes back slower than you left it (you keep most of its levels, not all), so a fresh drive fills over minutes rather than seconds.

Kept through a format: Auto-Downloader and partition size, surge protectors and UPS, Cloud Sync bandwidth and lanes, Cloud Sync upgrades, packets, credits and credit bonuses, fragments — and dead platters. Reset: everything else, including bad sectors and the transfer queue.

Data Reboot (available after your first format) tidies the drive in one go: everything movable packs together by colour, platter by platter from the top down, so each colour lands in whole sectors. Corrupt cells, bad sectors, rainbow data and RAID platters stay exactly where they are. A layout that good sends throughput straight up, so it isn't cheap: it costs a prestige level, most of your banked fragments and half of your banked data. It can't be used in the first few minutes of a run, nor again straight after one: the hint beside the button says NOT READY with a countdown, then READY.

Data Protection — the end of the drive

The game has an ending, and it lives at the top prestige level. Once you're there, a new section appears: RAID ARRAY PLATTER. It stays locked until the partition is at its full size — you can see it, but not use it, until the last expansion is bought. Platters are backed up left to right: the leftmost one that isn't in the array, being backed up, or dead is next, and the button names it.

• Backing a platter up is a timed job paid up front in data and packets, and you watch it happen: the column fills with gold row by row. While it runs, the platter has to stay completely clean — a single corrupt cell or bad sector on it aborts the backup and the price is gone. Surge protectors, the UPS and your maintenance bots earn their keep here.
• A finished platter joins the RAID array: every cell turns solid gold — backed up, immovable, immune to disasters — and it stays that way through every future FORMAT C:. A RAID platter is isolated: it keeps earning on its own, but it no longer connects to anything outside its own platter, nothing can move it, and the Auto-Seeder cannot cut it.
• The catch: a RAID platter has nothing left to cut, so it produces no packets. Each backup costs more than the last, and the step itself grows as the array fills, so the last few are the real finale.
• Back up every platter at full partition and the drive has DATA PROTECTION. You get a final screen with your time and score — and you can keep playing; FORMAT C: keeps the array.

Score

The header keeps a running SCORE, big, next to your credits, and it counts from your very first block. Most of it early on comes from what you have mined and placed over your lifetime — data mined, blocks downloaded, blocks your bots have moved — growing steadily but ever more slowly. The big numbers come late: every archived platter, every prestige level and a large bonus for finishing, and finishing in less active time makes that part worth more. On top of all of it sit small multipliers, one for each corner of the game — formats, disasters weathered, dice rolled, purchases made, peers accepted, packets earned, uploads cut, credits earned, corrupt cells cleaned and achievements — so no two players score alike; every platter you let die and had to replace costs you. Hover the score for the breakdown. Your account remembers two records: the best score you have ever reached, and the best score a drive had when you wiped it — both survive a wipe, and the best score earns credits in the HIGH SCORE row of achievements. Compare them with friends — the exact weights are for you to work out.

Machines — more than one drive

A machine is one drive with its own story: its partition, prestige level, fragments, hardware, packets and score. The button next to pause in the top bar shows the machine you are running and opens the MACHINES tab, where the rest of yours are listed.

• NEW MACHINE starts a fresh drive from level 0, as if you had never played: no fragments, no hardware, no packets, the tool ladders back at the start. It asks you to confirm and to name it first, because you are leaving the drive you are on.
• What comes with you to every machine is yours, not the drive's: your cloud credits and everything bought with them, every achievement, your best scores and your lifetime stats. Blocks downloaded, data mined, disasters weathered and the rest keep counting up across all your machines, and the achievements that watch those totals keep watching.
• The machine you leave is parked, not lost. It sits exactly as you left it and you can switch back to it any time from the MACHINES tab. A parked machine is frozen: it earns nothing while another one is running, so there is no offline windfall waiting when you return.
• Every new machine boots with a codename pulled from the game's own list — mythic, alien, hacker-handle. Rename it by clicking its name. Renaming a machine and starting your second one each earn a one-off credit achievement. Retire a parked machine to erase it for good; what it added to your lifetime stats stays on your account.
• Without an account you run one machine, so starting a new one retires the current drive. Signed in, you keep several and switch between them; the tab shows how many you have and how many you can hold.
• The score is the machine's. Your account keeps the best score any of your machines has reached.

INGEST ENGINE — the wave scenario (beta)

Every machine plays one of two scenarios. CLASSIC is the idle drive described in the rest of this manual. INGEST ENGINE is the same drive, the same tools and the same look with the pressure turned on: data arrives in waves, it travels down a belt you build before it reaches the drive, and your uptime is your lives. Pick a scenario when you start a NEW MACHINE, or play it straight at ingest.defragger.io while it is in beta.

• The board. Above the drive sits a strip of cells with the UPLINK in its top-left corner. Data enters there and only moves along belts. Drag across the board to lay a run of belt; the arrows show which way it carries. A belt that points down off the bottom row delivers to the platter under it. Tap the uplink to turn it.
• Waves. Between waves the clock on incoming data is stopped: build, buy, rearrange, then press START WAVE. The bar over the board tells you what the next wave brings — how much, how fast, how many colours, and anything special. Once the last block has landed the wave is cleared and pays a bonus, bigger the cleaner your uptime. Press START while a wave is still landing to stack the next one onto it for extra bonus — the gamble is the point. ▶▶ fast-forwards when you are confident.
• Uptime. Data that arrives with nowhere to go is rejected: a full platter, a belt backed all the way up into the uplink, a belt that leads nowhere. Every rejection costs uptime; a cleared wave gives a little back. At zero the drive fails and the run ends — RETRY starts the same machine again from wave 1 with your credits and achievements intact.
• Path tools are placed on a belt cell and data flows through them. A SPLITTER sends blocks alternately straight on and to the right, so one line can feed two platters. A SORTER does the same by colour, learning on its own which colours go where, so each platter receives a purer stream and clean sectors form by themselves; it can only route so much a minute, and anything over that passes straight through, so a busy line needs more than one or an upgraded one. A BUFFER holds a burst and lets it out at belt speed. A SCANNER cleans corrupt data on the way in, a DECRYPTOR unlocks encrypted data, and a COMPRESSOR turns two same-colour blocks in a row into one dense block worth two. Tap a placed tool to turn it; use UPGRADE for its three tiers, SELL to take it back for most of its price.
• Kinds of data. Besides the usual blocks, later waves bring encrypted data (locked on the drive — no tool and no hand can move it until it unlocks on its own or a decryptor opened it on the way in), corrupt data (as in CLASSIC), occasional rainbow fragments, and every tenth wave an ARCHIVE: one block that unpacks into a whole crowd when it lands. Some waves carry a disaster halfway through; the preview warns you.
• Where the drive fits in. Data landing from a port drops into the spot on that platter that best completes a sector of its colour. The Auto-Seeder cuts finished sectors and uploads them — that is your income here, along with the wave bonus. There is no income by the second and no Auto-Downloader; the uplink is the downloader. The Defrag Suite works as in CLASSIC, with the Sector Sorter arriving much earlier on the ladder because sectors are the whole game. Expanding the partition is the progression: more room, more ports to route to, and more upload lanes.
• No FORMAT C:. There is no prestige in this scenario; the colours of the interface change with the waves instead of with levels. Credits, achievements and your best wave are kept on your account across every machine and both scenarios.

Accounts & Cloud Saves

• Everything up to your first format works with no account; progress lives in your browser.
• You never have to sign in. The first time you FORMAT C: you're offered the choice: Continue with Google (we receive only your email address) and your save lives in the cloud — or continue without an account, in which case your save lives only in that browser and is gone if the browser data is cleared. You can sign in later at any time; the save that has mined more data wins.
• Once signed in every machine is kept in the cloud: the running one is synced about once a minute and whenever you switch away from the tab, and a parked one is stored the moment you park it. Sign in on another device and, for the machine you were running, the save that has mined more data wins; a brand-new device just takes the cloud copy. A drive you played as a guest joins the account as one more machine.
• The running commentary — what the bots, disasters and the cloud are up to — sits over the lower-left corner of the drive, newest line at the bottom, each older line a little fainter until it's gone. It's the Status Log switch under Graphics & UI if you'd rather not see it.
• The Account tab has Graphics & UI: high contrast, block patterns, visual effects, particles and the status log, each with a picture of the drive with the setting on and off — click either picture to pick it. The particles and visual-effects pictures move, since those only make sense in motion. If the drive ever gets too heavy for your machine, the game switches visual effects and particles off for you and says so in the status log; they come back next session, or right away if you switch them on here. Off is on the left and on is on the right, the same way round as the switch. These settings travel with you rather than with the drive — a wipe keeps them.
• The Account tab keeps your lifetime stats — when you joined, clicks, blocks, formats, disasters, packets, credits, your best scores and more, added up across every machine you have run — the way an old arcade cabinet keeps its high score.
• The Danger Zone has three exits, from mild to final. NEW MACHINE (see Machines) parks the drive and starts another; nothing of yours is lost. WIPE PLAYER DATA erases every machine and everything that was yours — credits, achievements, best scores, lifetime stats — as if the account were brand new; the account itself, its join date and your display settings stay. DELETE ACCOUNT removes the account, its machines and this browser's copy, and cannot be undone: to play signed in again you would make a new account. The two destructive ones make you type the word before they run.

FAQ

• Do I earn while I'm not looking? Three cases. Tab in front: the game runs. Tab open but hidden behind another one (or the window minimised): the browser freezes the drive, and when you come back the time away is credited at most of your throughput — being there still pays best. Game closed: on your return you get a small fraction of your throughput, and only for a limited offline window; time past the window earns nothing. Credit bonuses raise the fraction and stretch the window.
• The game feels slow on a big drive. Turn off particles, effects or block patterns in the top bar. The game also lowers detail on its own when frame rate drops.
• A perfect colour keeps flickering off. Something is cutting into it: the Auto-Seeder, the Sector Sorter, corruption, or a disaster. That's the tension by design.
• Where are the exact numbers? Not here. Discover them.
• Found a bug or have an idea? Open the menu (your name, top right) and pick CONTACT. Say whether it's a bug, an idea or something else, write it up, and solve the little sorting puzzle to prove you're not a bot — no account needed, and nothing from the form ever runs as code.

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