Buster Chip icon

Buster Chip alternative icon

A favourite of script kiddies and low-level corporate sysadmins, the Buster Chip automatically breaks down firewalls.

Buster Chips are items which can be used to manually break firewalls on mainframe devices, when the agent is standing on a tile adjacent to the device. There are four “tiers” of Buster Chip; each type has an Anarchy skill level requirement for the agent to use them.

	Firewalls broken	Cooldown	Skill required	Availability
Buster Chip I	2	5 turns	Anarchy 2	Buy from a Nanofabricator for 250 credits. Buy from Monst3r for 200 credits. Rare loot from a Corporate Safe. Steal from an Akuma Drone. Archive Prism starts with one.
Buster Chip II	3	4 turns	Anarchy 3	Buy from a Nanofabricator for 400 credits. Buy from Monst3r for 320 credits. Rare steal from an Akuma Drone.
Buster Chip III	4	3 turns	Anarchy 4	Buy from a Nanofabricator for 600 credits. Loot from a Security Dispatch. Rare steal from an Akuma Drone.
Buster Chip IV	8	1 charge per mission, 3 turns	Anarchy 4	Buy from a Nanofabricator for 800 credits. Loot from a Security Dispatch.

Found in the Contingency Plan DLC.

Buster Chips can be useful complements to your breaker programs, to break some firewalls with no PWR cost. They are particularly effective in low-PWR-generation strategies, or to free up Incognita program slots for utility programs which do not break firewalls. They can be used to mitigate against Paradox and Null Drones, which only prevent hacking by Incognita, not by other means.

Buster Chips are most useful for breaking firewalls on devices your agents are going to be adjacent to anyway, such as Corporate Safes, Nanofabricators and Server Terminals, or devices you want to scan using Decker's Neural Networking ability. Buster Chips can also be used on devices like Databases and Power Supplies if you can spare the AP to move an agent next to them. Buster Chips are least useful for hacking Security Cameras, because you have to stand in front of the camera to hack it with a Buster Chip; however, this can still be done safely using a Cloaking Rig or Archive Prism's Holo Projection Mesh.

Except for the higher skill level requirements, the first three tiers of Buster Chip are strict upgrades of each other. The Buster Chip IV is not a strict upgrade since it has only one charge per mission; the charge can be replenished using a Charge Pack, but this is normally a waste of a Charge Pack, and a waste of inventory space to carry the Charge Pack. Therefore, Buster Chip IV should normally be reserved for specific devices with very high firewalls, such as Akuma 2.0 drones or OMNI Protectors, or devices hit by Castle or Castle 2.0.