Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Guide: Tips For Hacking Successfully

Depending on how you go about doing things in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, hacking will either be a possible option for how to do things or your main order of operations. The hacking system featured here is an updated take on the one featured in Human Revolution, requiring you to hack your way through a system by capturing nodes and eventually capturing all of the green Registries nodes on the screen while avoiding the security trace. However, there are several facets to this little mini-game that need to be accounted for, and this guide will be a way to get you through them as easily as possible.

While the networks that you hack early on will be fairly simple with not many nodes and a pretty direct path, each network will have a security level that dictates how challenging they will be. If hacking is something you will be doing often, then you will want to make sure that you focus your Praxis Points on Hacking Capture, Hacking Fortify and Hacking Stealth augmentations to make your hacking attempts easier. This will also allow you hack into higher level networks, which will often result in greater rewards.

The ultimate goal is to connect your hacking line from your starting IO Port and connect it to all of the green Registry nodes. However, there will be various kinds of other nodes along the way (more on those soon), and depending on how strong of a node they are will determine the chance that you will be spotted for capturing them. If you are detected, then a security trace will attempt to block your path and will slowly make its way to your IO Port. If it reaches your IO Port then the hacking attempt fails.

While you’ll want to move as quickly as you can when a security trace is on the move, there is something that you can do to slow its movement down. You can fortify nodes that you have already captured to cause it to take longer for the security trace to get through them, though you can also use the Stop! Worm Software item to temporarily freeze it in place.

There are several kinds of nodes that you’ll come across on your way to the Registry nodes while hacking, and they are the following:

Datastore: Capture Datastores to find rewards such as credits, XP, and hacking softwares.

Spam API: Capture Spam APIs to automatically slow down any trace attempt by the system.

Clearance API: Capture Clearance APIs to reduce the security rating of all datastores by 2.

Transfer API: Capture Transfer APIs to reduce the security rating of an adjacent node by 2 and transfer it to another adjacent node.

While the previously mentioned augmentations will make hacking easier for you, there are also some items that you’ll come across in your travels that can be utilized when things get tricky. The five items in question are the Stop! Worm Software, Overclock Software, the Nuke Virus Software, the Reveal Software and the Stealth Software. The following is a description of each piece of software’s functionality:

Stop! Worm Software: Freezes any trace attempts for a few seconds.

Overclock Software: Increases the speed of the Capture and Fortify operations for a few seconds.

Nuke Virus Software: Instantly captures a node of any rating, with a 100% chance of being detected.

Reveal Software: Lifts the fog that hides a subnet’s nodes.

Stealth Software: Reduces the detection rating on a node to 0%, regardless of its rating. Also evades any hidden Firewall booby trap that may be found on inter-nodal bridges.

Utilizing the above tips should make hacking pretty pain-free for you, but if you still find yourself in hot water with a particular hacking attempt there is one more thing you can do to bypass all of this. This game has an item you can find (or craft) called the Multi-Tool, which you can just point at your hacking target and it will instantly hack it in just a few seconds. These items aren’t the most common ones you’ll find, though, so be sure to save them for only the most dire circumstances.