Every battlefield is wired.
Smartguns negotiate firing solutions across local meshes. Powered armor runs predictive threat modeling. Turrets coordinate arcs over encrypted channels. Starships, drones, exosuits, and even “dumb” hazards usually have enough firmware to talk to something.
Combat hackers are the ones who interrupt that conversation.
Where most people think of hacking as a downtime job—quiet rooms, dim lights, longcode wars—combat hackers write their exploits for seconds, not hours. They dive into an enemy’s targeting systems mid-burst, force thermal regulators to misread coolant flow, or slam a drone’s friend-or-foe tables with garbage just long enough for it to hesitate.
To a combat hacker, a firefight isn’t just bullets and beams. It’s a live network map, every enemy outline surrounded by quietly broadcasting vulnerabilities. Combat Hack is the discipline of pulling that trigger as surely as the one on a pistol.
Guild commanders love having a combat hacker on the squad. Pirates and mercenaries, too. It’s one thing to win a fight; it’s another to win a fight while leaving the other side’s gear glitching, locked, or begging for your repair invoice afterward.
Combat Hack Feat 1
Source Player Core pg. 217
[one-action]
Prerequisites: Expert in Computers
Requirements You are holding or wearing a hacking toolkit and have a free hand.
Attempt a Computers check to Hack an adjacent creature, hazard, or item with the tech trait. The DC is equal to the creature, item, or hazard's Fortitude DC, or the Fortitude DC of the creature attending the object. If the target is an unattended object, the GM sets the DC for the check based on the item's level. The target is temporarily immune to your attempts to Combat Hack it for 10 minutes.
Critical Success The target becomes glitching 2 for 1 round.
Success The target becomes glitching 1 for 1 round.
Critical Failure If the target has the glitching condition, reduce the value of its glitching condition by 1.
Non-Combat Applications
Though named for combat, the techniques behind Combat Hack show up in quieter parts of Starfall life:
Stress Testing & Audits
Guild engineers and security contractors use Combat Hack–style intrusion routines to simulate hostile conditions, verifying that drones, turrets, and seals fail safely instead of catastrophically.Rift-Site Exploration
In Rift-scarred ruins, ancient magitech systems can’t be trusted. By deliberately inducing minor glitches, explorers see how old constructs and wards react before committing bodies into danger.Negotiation Leverage
During tense talks, briefly glitching a rival’s weapon, personal shield, or hover-chair reminds everyone which side owns the higher ground—without spilling a drop of blood.
Societal Impact
Combat Hack has quietly reshaped how Starfall’s powers design and deploy technology.
Security Arms Race
Factions now invest heavily in fail-open or graceful-degradation systems. Weapons that simply “refuse to fire” when glitching are unpopular; those that drop accuracy slightly instead of hard-bricking are in vogue.Regulation and Black Markets
Certain exploit suites, battlefield firmware injectors, and live-combat intrusion rigs are regulated as weapons. In response, black markets sell “civilian diagnostics packages” that just happen to interface cleanly with most battlefield hardware.Status & Fear
On some stations, being known as a combat hacker is social currency. On others, it puts a target on your back—rivals, corps, and guilds all want your talents locked to their cause, or permanently out of circulation.
Adventure Hooks
Glitch City
In a conflict-scarred arcology, all tech intermittently glitches—turrets misfire, doors lock at random, medpods reboot. Rumor says a legendary combat hacker seeded a self-propagating exploit into the city’s mesh before dying. PCs must trace and neutralize the code before factions weaponize it.Borrowed Time
A guild offers the PCs top-tier gear on loan—on the condition their in-house combat hacker rides along in the squad, using Combat Hack to disable or reclaim equipment the moment it risks falling into enemy hands.Ghost in the Turret
A frontier settlement’s automated defenses have started “choosing” targets on their own. Logs show Combat Hack–style signatures, but no hacker in range. Is it a remote enemy, an evolved exploit, or something born from Rift-corrupted firmware?
Combat Hack is the Computers feat that turns expert-level hacking into a frontline weapon, translating Starfall’s tech-saturated battlefields into playgrounds for clever, high-Intelligence characters. Paired with feats like Phreaker and Digital Diversion, it defines the “systems saboteur” archetype—fighters who win not by shooting straighter, but by making the enemy’s tech fall apart at precisely the wrong moment.
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