In a randomly generated reactor, your goal is to guide your droid ship around the maze, evading contact with walls and other obstacles while trying to hack into as many purple and cyan computer consoles as necessary to disable the core. This has to be done using as little time as possible, which makes Core Runner essentially a racing game. Thus if your ship is destroyed, you are immediately provided with another one, but there is a 5 minutes penalty. The number of ships is unlimited, and so is the time to complete the task.

You are aided by special powers of the droid ship. To use them, and also to replenish your force field and protect your hull against the hot radiation within the core itself, batteries have to be collected and stored, which happens when hacking into purple consoles. Blue consoles, on the other hand, may boost your force field when nearly charged. The field may recharge automatically when the temperature of the environment is low enough.

To start the game, press fire (space). This will randomly select a beginner size reactor. To select a specific reactor instead, use the keyboard to enter its PIN first, then press space. The pin has up to 5 digits, the last digit selects the size of the reactor (0 - easy, 4 - medium, 9 - hard), and the first 4 digits are random seed for that particular size. While entering the PIN, you may select an alternative ship using the strafe keys.

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