Are memory or packet scanning tools allowed?

[Simoyd]

@Wieghant

For example know when a region is “dried up” or what is the possible tier for next meteorite. Ideally tools that would render platform speed farming irrelevant.

You only receive entity updates from like 600 blocks away max (source: Meteorite Rules? - #8 by Simoyd). I don’t think such a tool is viable without having hundreds of characters logged in with MITM spread across all the planets. But that’s just a hunch I guess. It’s always possible there’s some data in there…

@Wieghant

This is probably most complicated and from what I got PMed violates ToS. But assuming you get portal info (from and to coordinates) and tracked coordinates you want to visit. Then you can solve what is known as a graph problem. Specifically what most if not all CS students are familiar with as Dijkstra’s algorithm or shortest path first. This one fascinates me because portals add another dimension to a common problem. This would make visiting places a lot easier for new players. Instead of jumping hoops and crossing fingers you fumble into the right portal, you could just have an arrow that points where to run and what portals to take.

Again you’d need to farm this data somehow by moving characters around. (to be clear simulating game inputs is against the TOS)

@Wieghant

duping and moving exploits

doubtful. this is all server side but it’s possible

@Wieghant

You might be able to make maybe an XRAY kind of tool that shows where closest diamond is but I feel like that’s probably easier to do client side with no need for MITM.

I agree, would be easier to just read the blocks from memory and show a transparent overlay on top of the game client window.

@Wieghant

Packet FORGING

packet forging was used for the price harvester

@Wieghant

You can not stop a malicious actor.

They choose to control relevant things server side. Although there may be server bugs, I think the security model is pretty stable overall.

@DKPuncherello

all portals

portals change and it wouldn’t be useful if there’s a significant chance to find a dead portal along the path every time you use it.

@Alwin

Every download of an executable should be taken with the utmost scrutiny, let alone running that executable. No matter how much a community has vetted something, or how trustworthy anyone claims to be. In general, in society, we should be teaching people NOT to take this risk. And we should not be rewarding downloads. Even in the hypothetical (and likely) situation where every hypothetical boundless mod is a good thing and not malicious in any way, we have done something unfortunate–we have taught people (who may come from various ages and backgrounds) that it is okay to just trust strangers and download stuff.

I totally agree with all this. Running mods through virustotal is a good idea. I also want to point out that almost every mod for every game has custom executable code in it.