A hacker game you play over SSHOne network. It remembers everything you do to it.
The Grid is a text game you play over SSH. There is no client to install, no account to make and no launcher. Your public key is your name. You open a terminal, you connect, and you are somewhere.
Somewhere is a network of four billion addresses, most of them dark. The live ones are running software with real version numbers and real flaws. Some of them are defended. Some of them carry data that is worth money to somebody. A handful are wired to the actual world and will tell you what the weather is doing right now, several thousand miles from wherever you are sitting.
ssh runner@coldice.sh
Any SSH client. Any key. First connection creates the account — there is nothing else to do.
No SSH key yet? One command, once, and every connection you ever make uses it:
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 — press enter at each prompt, then run the line above.
Most people already have one from ~/.ssh and never knew.
What it is
A sandbox with a network where the map would be.
You are a runner: somebody who gets into machines they were not invited into. Nobody gives you a quest. You are given a deck, a handful of credits and the address of one bulletin board, and everything after that is a consequence of something you chose.
The Grid is four billion addresses. Something answers at about one in eight of them, and
every one of those is a real machine — a name, an owner, files worth reading and its own
opinion about you being in there. The machine at 62.14.64.1 is the same machine
for you as it is for everyone else, today and in two years. When you find something good, the
address is worth telling people. When you tell them, it is still there.
How half a billion machines fit on one box, stay identical for every player and come back unchanged after a restart is the part we do not explain. It is not a trick and it is not a shortcut, and working it out from the inside is a perfectly good way to spend an evening. Ask MOTH. She will change the subject.
Mostly you are alone against the machines. Sometimes you are not — other runners are on the same network at the same time, standing in the same rooms, and they can see you standing there.
Systems
Everything here is running right now.
The intrusion loop
Sweep a range. Probe what answered. Get in through a password, a flaw in a service, or a door you left open last time. Then read everything, take what is worth taking, and get out before the log gets read.
Noise, alert, trace
Every action you take is heard. Suspicion accumulates on the machine, not on you, and when it crosses a line the node starts working out where you are. You then have between thirty and ninety seconds, and you are going to want most of them.
ICE that does something
Five classes, and each one is a different problem. A sentry makes everything you do twice as loud. A barrier walls off the valuable files. A trapdoor plants bait. A hunter keeps tracing after you drop the link. Black ICE comes back down the wire and burns programs off your deck.
Your true name
Heat cools off. A name does not. Every runner has six facts about who they actually are, and a completed trace writes one of them into a security log on the machine that caught you. Get back in and destroy it and it never happened. Leave it forty hours and it is public, permanently, and anybody can read it.
Two hundred and fifty things
Twenty-five families of equipment at ten levels each, and ten decks to hang them on. A crack fails because your wordlist is cheap, not because a die came up wrong. Every piece has its own name, because nobody goes looking for a number.
And a deck holds between four and thirteen of them, one slot each. The only way to hold more is a new chassis, so you are never choosing what to own — you are choosing what to carry. The deck you start with is exactly full of the kit you start with.
Machines you build
With a forge, a long earnings history and enough money, you can put your own machine on a dark address. It is scannable, probeable and breakable like anything else. You choose the ICE. You write the files. Other runners will find it, and some of them will get in.
Boards, work and a market
Bulletin boards on real nodes, with categories, replies and reputation gates. Contracts that are checked against what actually happened in the world. And data for sale, where the tenth copy of a leak is worth a fraction of the first.
Courier work is about the route rather than the file: something has to reach a machine too far in to knock on, there are at least forty distinct ways through, and the login for the last hop is sitting on a machine one step outside it. Some payloads are too big for one deck, and those need a crew of up to ten who all have to be signed on before the clock starts.
Other people
See who is standing on the node with you. Search the handles that are online. Page somebody anywhere on the network. Talk in a room that exists at an address — which means a meeting can be arranged somewhere nobody else has found.
Seventy-seven who are not you
The Grid is not empty while it waits for players. Seventy-seven people keep their own hours and haunt their own machines: brokers worth crossing a sector for, fences, people who will not stop talking about Damocles, and a handful you want to be somewhere else when you meet.
They are ours. Nothing labels them, nothing pretends they are not, and working out which handles never surprise you is the oldest game on a network like this one.
The Wall
Seven lists on one machine that belongs to nobody: fortunes, doors opened, deepest water, biggest haul, work delivered, the quietest runners, and who holds the most of other people's names. It has no password and no ICE. Finding the address is the only lock on it.
Depth
Every layer between you and the surface is one more thing to climb back through: each bounce in the chain, the link itself, root on top of that. Going deep buys you time against a trace and costs you time getting out, and the display draws the ladder so you always know how far down you are.
Real data, leaking in
A few machines are not invented. A weather station reports what the weather is actually doing in five real cities. A wire desk carries what engineers are arguing about today. A seismic node lists earthquakes that really happened this morning.
A history that is written down
Some things can only happen once: the first runner through a door, the first to find a junction, the first to pull a one-of-a-kind item out of the dark. The Grid writes those down with your name on them and never takes them off again, even if you burn the name and start over. Records, and the occasional very bad evening, go in too.
Junctions, and the roads between them
Most of the Grid is nowhere in particular. A few addresses are junctions: places with a board, a market, and other runners standing in them. They are where you go when you want to meet somebody rather than hope to. You are not told where they are.
Follow the signal
Machines carry routing information and probe reads it: a mask, and how
sure the machine sounds. It never names the place, only the direction. Follow the
masks and they converge; far enough out the trail goes cold entirely.
No safe rooms
ICE, alert and traces work in a junction exactly as they do anywhere else. One of the three sits in a bad sector on purpose. What makes a city safe is that it is shallow and busy, not that the rules have been suspended for it.
Channels
A channel is a named route whose last machine is reachable only through it. You cannot scan it, you cannot probe it, you cannot connect to it, and knowing its address buys you nothing at all. You walk the road or you do not arrive.
A route is an asset
Each road is written down once, behind root, on the machine it leaves from. Opening one does not put you inside anything: it makes a tier five machine answer you, and everything after that is the ordinary job.
Power is the price of ambition
A road costs power and nothing else in the game does. With a flat deck you can still scan, probe, crack, connect, trade, duel and talk. What you cannot do is run the deep routes today. It refills on its own, so nobody is ever locked out of playing.
Constructs, and the duels between them
Build an avatar and it runs from your deck. Two runners inside the same machine can set theirs on each other. The fight is four rounds and automatic: you type nothing while it happens, so it is decided by what you built and how you told it to behave, never by how fast you can type on a slow link.
Three settings
Aggression decides whether your construct starts anything while you are busy elsewhere. Nerve decides who it will fight. Bravery decides when it runs, and is the only one your opponent cannot read. Each answers a different question, and none of them answers another's.
Weight, not level
Nerve is a weight class, and weight is your level plus everything you are carrying. It is asked of both sides before a blow lands, so nobody is dragged into a fight above their weight who did not ask for it. Refusing is a disconnect, not a defeat.
Fifty things to carry
No levels and no upgrade path, so nothing is strictly better than anything else. Five slots out of fifty owned, which means everybody is carrying something they cannot use. Eight are sold. Six exist exactly once in the world, and when somebody takes one that is the only one there will ever be.
Worth trading
Every item remembers the machine it came out of and who first pulled it. A market does not run on a needle, it runs on the needle out of Deep Water. What you need is not what I need, and that is the only thing that makes a trade interesting rather than arithmetic.
Your first twenty minutes
Nobody is going to explain this twice.
The game teaches you the first run and then stops holding your hand. If you would rather arrive knowing something, this is what a runner would tell you in a bar.
type less. Any unambiguous prefix works, so disc is disconnect. Tab completes commands, addresses you know, and files in front of you. Esc then . types the last address you typed, and again for the one before it, because nobody should key fifteen digits four times to break into one machine.
read everything. Files are how the network opens up. An auth log has addresses in it. A config has a password in it. A note somebody left in their home directory has both, and sometimes a reason to feel bad.
the log is the evidence. Getting root and leaving is not getting away with it. wipe takes your session out of the auth log. Learn it early, because one day it will be taking something far more expensive out.
probe before you touch. It costs nothing and it tells you the tier, the ICE, how long a trace would take, and whether your kit can do anything about the software that is running.
the quiet way is the cheap way. Cracking is loud. Exploiting is fast and unreliable. A credential you found written down somewhere is silent, and a back door you planted last week is better than all three.
the bottom of the map is where you learn. Tier 1 sectors are full of weather stations and print servers that nobody has looked at in years. Tier 5 is a military core and it will take your deck off you.
there is a machine that belongs to nobody where the standings are kept. It has no password and no ICE. Finding the address is the only lock on it, and nobody who has it will just give it to you.
help is grouped, and hint will tell you what to do next if you are standing still. Neither of them is cheating.
The thing everyone has heard of
DAMOCLES
Ask any runner who has been on the Grid more than a month and they will tell you the same story with different details. There is a code. It opens anything. It is not an exploit, because exploits are specific and this is not. Nobody has produced it. Everybody knows somebody who nearly did.
The rumour turns up roughly once in a thousand files: in an internal memo that was never meant to circulate, in a manifest with one entry missing, in a transcript that ends with the other party closing the session. The fragments below are all real. They are sitting on real machines on the network right now, and somebody found each of them by breaking into something.
Dr Aarons maintains it is not a program. She says it is a shape — that any sufficiently old network grows the same hole in the same place, and Damocles is simply the word for knowing where to stand.
— /srv/notes/incident.txt · Cassini Research, Lab 11 · root only> is Damocles real
that is not a question I am permitted to hold.
> who does not permit you
[session closed by remote host]
manifest lists 11 files. archive contains 10. the missing entry is named DAMOCLES.FRAG and the checksum column for it is blank. do not raise a ticket.
— recovered from an archive node, sector unrecordedTape 4,411 is checked out. It has been checked out for eleven years. The card says AARONS, CASSINI — 48hr loan.
— /srv/index.txt · Ossuary RecordsBoard's decision: the work stops, the segment burns, nobody uses the word. Dr Aarons did not attend the meeting. Nobody has been able to reach her.
— /srv/notes/incident.txt · Cassini ResearchHere is the part worth saying plainly, because the genre is full of people promising something that is not there: it exists. There is an address, there is a door and there is a way through the door. It was built before the first player connected. Nobody has found it, and the honest expectation is that nobody will for a very long time.
If you get there, you will know. So will everyone else.
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
What is coldice.sh?
A free text-based hacking game you play over SSH. You connect from a terminal and you are on the Grid: a permanent network of four billion addresses, most of them dark, the rest running software with real version numbers and real flaws. You break into machines, read what is on them, take what is worth taking, and try not to be traced.
Do I need to install anything?
No. If you have an SSH client — and every Mac, Linux box and modern Windows install does —
you have everything. There is no launcher, no download and no client to keep updated.
ssh runner@coldice.sh is the whole thing.
Do I need an account?
No signup, no password, no email address. The fingerprint of whatever SSH key your client offers becomes your identity, and the first connection creates it. You pick a handle once you are inside.
Is it safe to SSH into somebody else's server?
Reasonably, and the honest answer is worth giving. Connecting sends your public key, never your private one — that is what public key cryptography is for. The server runs no shell: there is no login on the machine, and the game is a parser, not a terminal into anything. Port forwarding and SFTP are refused. What you are trusting is the same thing you trust with any server: that it will not try to exploit your SSH client.
Is it free?
Completely. No subscription, no purchases, no cosmetics, no currency you pay real money for. There is nothing to buy and no way to buy it.
Is it multiplayer?
Yes, in the way a network is. Other runners are on the same permanent world at the same time — you can see who is standing on a machine with you, page somebody anywhere, and arrange to meet on a node nobody else has found. Crew contracts need two to ten runners signed on together, and constructs can fight each other inside a machine. Seventy-seven of the people on the Grid are run by the server, and nothing tells you which.
Will it work on Windows, or on my phone?
Yes to both. Windows Terminal has SSH built in; any phone SSH client works. The display adapts down to eighty columns and gives up its panels below that rather than breaking.
I do not have an SSH key. How do I make one?
Run ssh-keygen -t ed25519 and press enter at every prompt. That writes a
key pair to ~/.ssh and takes about four seconds. You probably already have one:
if ls ~/.ssh lists an id_ed25519 or an id_rsa, you are
done. Your client offers it automatically, the public half is all that leaves your machine,
and the fingerprint of it becomes your account here.
I have never used SSH. Can I still play?
Yes. You do not need to know anything about SSH beyond typing one line, and you do not
need to know anything about real security work. The game teaches its own first run, and
help is grouped by what you are trying to do.
Practical
What you need, which is almost nothing.
Requirements
An SSH client and a terminal. That is the entire list. It is drawn with 24-bit colour where there is 24-bit colour, sixteen colours where there is not, and plain ASCII on anything that cannot manage either.
Your key is your account
There is no password, no email address and no signup form. The fingerprint of whatever key your client offers becomes your identity, and the handle attached to it is yours to change once you are inside.
Small screens are fine
Eighty columns is plenty. The display degrades on its own as the window narrows — the head-up display gives its rows back below seventy-six columns — and the prompt stays pinned to the bottom while everything scrolls above it.
Old hardware is a design target
There is a second skin in the renderer: pure ASCII, sixteen colours, no box drawing and nothing that moves, so a machine that cannot manage the rest still gets the whole game rather than a broken copy of it. The server deliberately still offers the old key exchanges those clients need, an RSA host key beside the modern one, and ssh-rsa for authentication, because a client from 2004 has none of the three.
An Amiga 1200 running Roadshow is the machine this is aimed at, and everything OpenSSH 3.9 needs is now offered and tested end to end: the old key exchange, an RSA host key beside the modern one, and the ssh-rsa signature. Nobody has finished a session from one yet. The day somebody does is the day it is finished.
The Commodore 64 was the better story, so it got written: an SSH-2 client for a 1 MHz 6502, in assembly, with curve25519, ed25519 and chacha20-poly1305 of its own, completing a real handshake against this server. As far as I can find it is the first one. It has never run on real hardware, and there is a page about how it works.
Then the same machine got a second client, which has nothing to do with this game: claude64 speaks TLS 1.3 to api.anthropic.com with the 6510 doing the cryptography itself, X25519 and ECDSA P-256 and chacha20-poly1305, and it has held real conversations. Eight modules came straight out of the SSH client.
It costs nothing
There is nothing to buy. No subscription, no early access, no cosmetics and no currency you pay real money for. Every credit in the game came out of the game. This is not a business, it is a network somebody built.
The world is permanent
One network, no wipes and no seasons. The machine at an address today is the machine that will be at that address in two years, and the back door you left on it is still there unless somebody swept it. Nothing resets, which is the only reason anything you do is worth doing.