Part 5: Sitting in a basement has never been so boring

Sitting in a basement has never been so boring

Programming took the vote with ease.



Because we're not a real decker unless we're too busy coding to do any actual decking! So let's take a look at starting a project.



To go with our Stealth skill of 2, we're going to make a rating 2 Hide program. Because it's easiest of all if nothing sees us in the first place, right? Now, the estimated time it gives you is in days, so this will take almost a week to finish. We'll still have most of the month left afterward, it shouldn't be hard to get to 500 nuyen after that. Piece of cake!



Except for this little gem. You can expect this to pop up at LEAST once every time you try to program or design something at your max skill level. In fact, it popped up twice while trying to finish this project, and each time it does, it adds yet more time before your project finishes. This is why a Design Assistant add-on is so important (and expensive): it not only reduces the base Estimated Time, but it helps prevent these flaws from popping up.



Finally, after an extra 3 days (putting us at January 12th instead of the estimated 9th) the project is done.



Compiling a program from the source code we made takes no time, so we get our very own Hide 2 program. Naturally, it's not going to remain named Hide 2; I need the thread to give me an appropriate name for our first homemade program!



Meanwhile, every week the Contracts and marketplace refresh with brand new options. Of course, this being still very early in the game, we can't afford any actual upgrades in the store.



After some jiggering around, here's what our deck loadout looks like. Our new program is twice the size of our old at 6 MP, so some sacrifices had to be made to get us back to a Light load. I brought back Analyze for the continuous effort of trying to optimize our odds, but in return I've unloaded Zap 1.0 (because really, it's useless to us at this point) as well as Decrypt. If we need to decrypt something, we can load it up after using and unloading Analyze. Medic (in both forms) remain on the bench for when needed.

So, toss out some suggestions for what to name Hide 2, and we'll proceed with an actual mission to try it out!