Manual Virus Removal

Viruses can be broadcast from NPC ships or beacons and have a minimum of 20 chances to infect the player ship. The odds of infection succeeding on each attempt is determined by your Cyber Defense. Should they successfully infect your ship they will appear as active on the Virus screen at the Science station.

Viruses will expire over time but can be terminated early in three ways:


 * Using a virus removal program (Instant Antivirus or Burst AV)
 * Rebooting the ship
 * Manually decrypting and deleting it

While the first two options are clearly tutorialized, the manual process is not. This page should help explain how you can delete a virus that has successfully infected your ship.

The manual deletion process takes the form of a mathematical pattern-matching minigame. To start, on the Virus screen click the red bar to the right of the active virus. If the virus has not yet successfully infected the ship, clicking the red bar will cause no pop-up.

General Method for Solution
In the mini game a sequence of numbers is presented and the "odd one out" has to be clicked in order to delete the virus. The first four dark grey numbers (top-left in the first row) establish a pattern in which the numbers increase throughout the two rows. One of the numbers will not follow this pattern.

To determine the pattern, find the difference between the first and second numbers:

The first number of the pattern in this example is 1. Next, determine the difference between the second and third numbers:

The second number of the pattern is 3. Repeat this for the last set:

The last number of the pattern is 2. This gives us the pattern sequence of:

 +1 → +3 → +2 

Now starting from the last pattern number (61) apply this pattern repeatedly as you step forward through the set:

61 → 63 ( +2! )

We would expect the first number to only increase by one (62) so we have immediately found our target. Clicking the 63 will delete the virus.

This was a particularly easy example since the very first number broke the sequence. Let's try this with a different set:

Following the same steps as before, our sequence would be:

+3 → +2 → +0

As we apply this pattern, we see the first three numbers check out:

55 → 58 (+3)

58 → 60 (+2)

60 → 60 (+0)

This pattern successfully repeats until: [...]

68 → 70 (+2)

70 → 70 (+0)

70 → 70 ( +0! )

The third 70 breaks in a row breaks the sequence (expecting +3 to 73) and is the target number for this example. Clicking it will delete the virus.