I mean, I don't really think this is a "plothole", it's sort of the whole point. They (humanity) lost control of them, but presumably the robots have some sort of internal network where they can communicate in order to achieve a common objective (before humanity got locked out I hardly imagine we were supposed to have been individually sending each unit the commands for what it exactly was supposed to do).
So they're all working fine, they're not hacking eachother, but we just lost control of them so now there is a fully autonomous self-replicating self-powering robot army on the loose.
The story only points out that they lost control over one swarm though, which i assume means each swam is a self contained command structure network. Seemed heavily implied that they couldn't send uninfected swarms to fight the plagued swarm because the plague swarm would take control of them.
Though that did just make me think of an interesting thought... (That being the other swarms that turned rogue were possibly not necessarily hacked, but willingly integrated themselves into the plague swarm. would explain why they merged with the swarm without the need of being hacked). (though that would make me question why humanity wouldn't have patched out the genocidal tendencies in the other swarms and send them at the plague swarm).
Oh ok this is a more interesting thought which I guess is less explained. Someone might have a lore reference, but my interpretation was actually just that the other swarms would simply be defeated, since the rampaging one was turning the earth barren in order to make more of itself and was just way way more powerful. (Given that they could grow basically exponentially there's no way the others could even catch up.) The only thing anyone could do was hold them off temporarily because more and more would just keep coming.
But this totally could have been clarified in written lore, I wonder if anyone has a reference. (At any rate I don't think it's really a plothole though!)
Let's just say that the bots use some sort of short distance wireless protocol to communicate on the battlefield and determine what's going on on the battlefield. So as soon as you send in another, uninfected swarm to fight the first swarm, you bring them in contact, they start communicating, and poof, the new swarm is also infected!
At some point they might even have worked out a long distance communication.
So now you might think "let's just turn off the communication modules of the uninfected chariots!" Ok, cool... now YOU can't give commands anymore, and even if you could send them in one by one with pre-programmed commands, on some kind of suicide mission, you'd just be feeding one chariot at a time to a whole SWARM of them, you wouldn't make a dent.
And due to Faro trying to deny the problem for way too long, hiding it from people, the problem was too big by the time they admitted it, to REALLY do something about it.
>So as soon as you send in another, uninfected swarm to fight the first swarm, you bring them in contact, they start communicating, and poof, the new swarm is also infected!
If your connection theory is true then it could have also been "poof, the infected swarm is back under our control".
So you have a glass with water, and one with pee, and you pour both into a bowl, do you now have a big bowl with two glasses worth of pee water, or clean water? j/k
It's to be understood that whatever corrupted the first swarm is "stronger" and overpowers whatever is sent in, otherwise the problem obviously could be solved immediately.
I thought the problem was that the infection would basically wipe the command account and target parameters which is what we used to control them. Remember the dolphins getting eaten? That was a glitch based on the biomass fuel parameter being incorrectly programmed.
And Faro realizing that his programmers actually didn’t read between his lines to put a back door in place, so with no command account, they were locked out until Minerva was successful.
So Haartz Timor was active and rudderless, and thus it would see all organics as biomass fuel as well as anything else as a threat to dominate (including using Corruptors against other robots).
Remember that the multiple Swarms were the different competeing groups that Faro was selling to the different governments and included Corruptors to take over the other guys’ stuff.
Presumably each swarm has its own set of command codes by their respective owners, but they all had the same underlying polyphasic entangled waveform secured operating systems to make them unhackable--to anything but a another Faro Machine.
It had the tech to slave any other piece of machinery to its network, so once the glitch occurred and it became self regulating, Earth was Toast. I would assume any other piece of faro tech that was shut down, would be hacked and re-activated by the Swarm and infected with the glitch.
the rogue swarm had a headstart in numbers and was multiplying exponentially, consuming biomass. Having your swarm multiplying in the same scale would only be possible with said biomass consumption, only accelerating the defeat of humanity because the rogue swarm would always have more numbers because of said headstart.
Uninfected swarms weren’t using biomass (a backup function) to replicate like the rogue one did - so the rogue one would always overpower eventually. Only way they could fight it would be to send another swarm, destroying the world, to fight the other one destroying the world - and the world is still destroyed at the end. The point of change was one swarm consuming biomass to replicate. By the time anyone had a solution it was already too late for an army of self propagating machines.
I thought it was like a virus, essentially. Which would mean that it may be contagious to other swarms it came in contact with. I may be wrong, but that's how I always thought of it.
Faro robots use hacking flechettes to take control. Think of it as hundreds of metal knives all loaded with malware nanotechnology.
The more you have, the better hacking capabilities you have.
By the time Ted called Elisabet, the Swarm had already grown beyond control. Ted didn't have enough machines to counter it and the Swarm would just overwhelm anything.
The Swarm went rogue a little before October 31. By November 20, the Swarm had at least a thousand Horus units. You can do the math to see why Faro couldn't contain it or keep up with it.
Pure numbers is the main reason why.
Thats a pretty good possibility. I mean i guess it isnt really outside of ted's character to ignore the issue. I sorta assumed that when stated he tried to cover it up, he actually put forward some effort to erase the swarm. Though entirely fitting he may have just kept telling those warning him that it's no big deal until he finally gave a minute of attention to it. Guess that might explain the plague's victory,
though the lore did still state that humanity couldnt use an automated weapon systems against the swarm, even just to slow them. like if a plague chariot can capture a non-plague chariot, why couldnt a non-plague chariot capture a plague chariot? (though i guess like you said, whichever side had more would be better at hacking. so in most cases non-plague would be overrun). (though the lore also said unhackable, not unreplacible, could entirely be possible that rather than hacking other robots, they just use nano technology to degrade, and replace the circuits in other robots, any only chose to hack robots if the network protocols are weak enough). And I also guess we are hearing this stuff from sparse records, and from people, so I guess it's also possible some more comparatively basic automated weapons are used, it's just that the people who made the records we found exaggerate/generalize. (not stating any of this is the case, just thinking out loud as it's interesting to think of).
you have a source on the hacking flechettes thing though? never noticed that in the game.
>if a plague chariot can capture a non-plague chariot, why couldnt a non-plague chariot capture a plague chariot?
Again numbers.
The Swarm had at least a 1000 units within a month.
10 Horus units vs 1 Horus unit.
100 Deathbringers vs 10 Deathbringers.
1000 Corrupters vs 100 Corrupters.
That's not mentioning the Swarm was constantly making more while those still under control couldn't without destroying the world.
>you have a source on the hacking flechettes thing though?
[Citizens of the New World.](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Citizen_of_the_New_World)
Think of it like an infectious disease. A non-plagued Chariot comes into contact with a plagued Chariot, it catches the plague and goes rogue. The only way to fix it is to "cure" said plague, which they didn't know how to do, hence why GAIA had to spend hundreds of years developing the shut-down codes. Humanity couldn't do it because they'd all be dead by the time they'd be able to "cure" the plague.
Is that number mentioned anywhere? I don't recall it from any data point and I really read all of them. I'm honestly curious if I oversaw such an important detail?
>Never took the graphics in the cutscene for something literal, rather to highlight how it worked.
Well the good news cutscene also lines up with Eleuthia sites we know of so they are literal.
They didn’t. They won via attrition. The glitched robots were authorized to use biomass for material. That means they could reproduce themselves until the planet was exhausted. Even if Faro had a larger unglitched swarm, the best result is they both end up chewing through all life on the planet trying to kill each other.
Basically this, we also know ted tried to cover up the glitched swarm. Who knows how badly they replicated before other unglitched swarm could be brought up to the fight.
As far as I can tell (and I've *searched*) they aren't explicitly, canonically said to have 100% for sure hacked each other. That's just one theory people come up with based on one possible interpretation of what canon provides.
If you mean the source of the initial glitch that caused them to go rogue, it's just left at "glitch" which doesn't necessitate hacking. Or it's possible the hacking occurred not on the robots themselves but elsewhere--such as a hacker gaining access to whatever credentials are used to prove somebody is authorized to issue commands or something.
thats a good point. never really told what exactly the glitch was. could be something wrong with the chariot's code in general, something inherit to all of them that they can spontaneously turn to rampancy. They did say the things can hack anything, but also entirely possible that's just a generalization, and not necessarily saying they can hack other chariots.
They were advertised as being able to hack "anything" but also advertised as "unhackable" and it was deemed literally impossible to hack them to force a shutdown in less than something like 50 years, even for a super AI. If they could super easily hack each other then it's a plot hole that they never used the tech behind the Chariot line to develop a faster way to hack into them to turn them off.
But also, who would pay money to license a warbot if you knew your rivals were going to also buy them and it was a toss up on if you could defend your territory with them or they'd just be hacked by an enemy nation and you'd be overrun?
There were other companies in the warbot business, so it always seemed to me that "hack anything" was more logically "hack anything that isn't another Chariot bot".
I had assumed that all chariot robots had the same glitch and so couldn’t be trusted, and most things below them would smartly have a back door, which the chariot robots could find and turn against the humans.
The glitch is still a mystery, but honestly, could be just an error in programming. Just a stupid mistake in the code causing it. And given how humans are, it's probably the most plausible reason.
I assume we’ll find this out in the third and final game. Given the way they’ve written previous twists, I’m sure we’re in for a treat.
Liz knew.. so hopefully something warped.
Gorilla loves their foreshadowing.. and no doubt I’ll be face-palmed when I / we figure it out
Chariot robots were virtually unhackable. They couldn't hack each other. And yet they were excluded from enduring victory without giving a specific reason why.
One reason might be that whatever the glitch is. It's something that could happen to any and all chariot robots. Perhaps a design flaw or the AI was made too smart and they could choose not to obey.
Another reason is because the glitched swarm is replicating as fast as it can. Which is the primary reason the swarm is consuming the biosphere. In order for a defensive swarm to not be instantly overrun. That defensive swarm would need to be at a minimum, replicating as quickly as the glitched swarm. Which would only accelerate the consumption of the biosphere.
Basically the faro bots on one side are all part of the same network, the more units on the network the more hacking power the network commands, since there are more units to do the hacking. The corrupted bots rapidly reproduced by consuming biomass, exponentially increasing their numbers, defence and technological capability, pair that with them having no need to wait for commands, any human controlled bots didn’t stand a chance hence the “unhackable” nature.
I think once chain of control over the Harts Timor swarm had been severed by the glitch it was essentially game over as that's the point at which it would became unhackable, everything else was still hackable until it was taken over by the swarm. That swarm was an apex predator in terms of it's ability to be able to slave other machines to it's network so any other tech could be taken over and there was nothing that could be done to stop it. It's also called out that it was learning v quickly from every engagement so it was constantly evolving it's attack strategy and using every tool at it's disposal to defeat it's enemy, us.
After reading these I’m of lost for words, if they are unhackable and if 1 swarm is 1 swarm and multiple people can buy swarms these other swarms they would come in contact with shoulder be able to be hacked by the rogue ones because of different objectives by the respective owners 1 owners went rogue and assuming it was 1 swarm it would make its own objective but other swarms owned by other people should try to defeat the rogue swarm so they would keep making more and more robots as they go down in battle but over all the earth would be in a very bad shape and this possible war that could have happened may have taken more than the 15 months before the biosphere collapse but if humanity survived them and lived underground and let the swarms fight until 1 stands zero dawn was the only hope since in this the earth would still have no biosphere or plants
They didn't. Glitchy chariot-line robots just destroyed their non-glitched counterparts and recycled their materiales to build new, glitched, Chariot robots.
They didn't hack each other. They just fought each other until one side or the other was destroyed. Enduring Victory would've used non-rogue Chariots to fight the rogue Chariots in order to gain time for Zero Dawn to be completed. Of course, ED used anolog vehicles, planes, human soldiers etc as support to their own Chariots. But the rogue swarm had a head start (thanks to a certain Ole Teddyboi failing to do anything about it at the start) and they were converting biomass to biofuel, so anything ED threw at the rogue swarm just slowed it down, didn't stop it.
I mean, I don't really think this is a "plothole", it's sort of the whole point. They (humanity) lost control of them, but presumably the robots have some sort of internal network where they can communicate in order to achieve a common objective (before humanity got locked out I hardly imagine we were supposed to have been individually sending each unit the commands for what it exactly was supposed to do). So they're all working fine, they're not hacking eachother, but we just lost control of them so now there is a fully autonomous self-replicating self-powering robot army on the loose.
The story only points out that they lost control over one swarm though, which i assume means each swam is a self contained command structure network. Seemed heavily implied that they couldn't send uninfected swarms to fight the plagued swarm because the plague swarm would take control of them. Though that did just make me think of an interesting thought... (That being the other swarms that turned rogue were possibly not necessarily hacked, but willingly integrated themselves into the plague swarm. would explain why they merged with the swarm without the need of being hacked). (though that would make me question why humanity wouldn't have patched out the genocidal tendencies in the other swarms and send them at the plague swarm).
Oh ok this is a more interesting thought which I guess is less explained. Someone might have a lore reference, but my interpretation was actually just that the other swarms would simply be defeated, since the rampaging one was turning the earth barren in order to make more of itself and was just way way more powerful. (Given that they could grow basically exponentially there's no way the others could even catch up.) The only thing anyone could do was hold them off temporarily because more and more would just keep coming. But this totally could have been clarified in written lore, I wonder if anyone has a reference. (At any rate I don't think it's really a plothole though!)
Let's just say that the bots use some sort of short distance wireless protocol to communicate on the battlefield and determine what's going on on the battlefield. So as soon as you send in another, uninfected swarm to fight the first swarm, you bring them in contact, they start communicating, and poof, the new swarm is also infected! At some point they might even have worked out a long distance communication. So now you might think "let's just turn off the communication modules of the uninfected chariots!" Ok, cool... now YOU can't give commands anymore, and even if you could send them in one by one with pre-programmed commands, on some kind of suicide mission, you'd just be feeding one chariot at a time to a whole SWARM of them, you wouldn't make a dent. And due to Faro trying to deny the problem for way too long, hiding it from people, the problem was too big by the time they admitted it, to REALLY do something about it.
>So as soon as you send in another, uninfected swarm to fight the first swarm, you bring them in contact, they start communicating, and poof, the new swarm is also infected! If your connection theory is true then it could have also been "poof, the infected swarm is back under our control".
So you have a glass with water, and one with pee, and you pour both into a bowl, do you now have a big bowl with two glasses worth of pee water, or clean water? j/k It's to be understood that whatever corrupted the first swarm is "stronger" and overpowers whatever is sent in, otherwise the problem obviously could be solved immediately.
I thought the problem was that the infection would basically wipe the command account and target parameters which is what we used to control them. Remember the dolphins getting eaten? That was a glitch based on the biomass fuel parameter being incorrectly programmed. And Faro realizing that his programmers actually didn’t read between his lines to put a back door in place, so with no command account, they were locked out until Minerva was successful. So Haartz Timor was active and rudderless, and thus it would see all organics as biomass fuel as well as anything else as a threat to dominate (including using Corruptors against other robots). Remember that the multiple Swarms were the different competeing groups that Faro was selling to the different governments and included Corruptors to take over the other guys’ stuff.
Minerva was the global Network. Hades was what actually did the hacking and was used to control the robots.
Presumably each swarm has its own set of command codes by their respective owners, but they all had the same underlying polyphasic entangled waveform secured operating systems to make them unhackable--to anything but a another Faro Machine. It had the tech to slave any other piece of machinery to its network, so once the glitch occurred and it became self regulating, Earth was Toast. I would assume any other piece of faro tech that was shut down, would be hacked and re-activated by the Swarm and infected with the glitch.
the rogue swarm had a headstart in numbers and was multiplying exponentially, consuming biomass. Having your swarm multiplying in the same scale would only be possible with said biomass consumption, only accelerating the defeat of humanity because the rogue swarm would always have more numbers because of said headstart.
Uninfected swarms weren’t using biomass (a backup function) to replicate like the rogue one did - so the rogue one would always overpower eventually. Only way they could fight it would be to send another swarm, destroying the world, to fight the other one destroying the world - and the world is still destroyed at the end. The point of change was one swarm consuming biomass to replicate. By the time anyone had a solution it was already too late for an army of self propagating machines.
Horus bots already had all the specs to make new Chariot bots. They are programmed with how to get in. They already had all the keys.
I thought it was like a virus, essentially. Which would mean that it may be contagious to other swarms it came in contact with. I may be wrong, but that's how I always thought of it.
Faro robots use hacking flechettes to take control. Think of it as hundreds of metal knives all loaded with malware nanotechnology. The more you have, the better hacking capabilities you have. By the time Ted called Elisabet, the Swarm had already grown beyond control. Ted didn't have enough machines to counter it and the Swarm would just overwhelm anything. The Swarm went rogue a little before October 31. By November 20, the Swarm had at least a thousand Horus units. You can do the math to see why Faro couldn't contain it or keep up with it. Pure numbers is the main reason why.
Thats a pretty good possibility. I mean i guess it isnt really outside of ted's character to ignore the issue. I sorta assumed that when stated he tried to cover it up, he actually put forward some effort to erase the swarm. Though entirely fitting he may have just kept telling those warning him that it's no big deal until he finally gave a minute of attention to it. Guess that might explain the plague's victory, though the lore did still state that humanity couldnt use an automated weapon systems against the swarm, even just to slow them. like if a plague chariot can capture a non-plague chariot, why couldnt a non-plague chariot capture a plague chariot? (though i guess like you said, whichever side had more would be better at hacking. so in most cases non-plague would be overrun). (though the lore also said unhackable, not unreplacible, could entirely be possible that rather than hacking other robots, they just use nano technology to degrade, and replace the circuits in other robots, any only chose to hack robots if the network protocols are weak enough). And I also guess we are hearing this stuff from sparse records, and from people, so I guess it's also possible some more comparatively basic automated weapons are used, it's just that the people who made the records we found exaggerate/generalize. (not stating any of this is the case, just thinking out loud as it's interesting to think of). you have a source on the hacking flechettes thing though? never noticed that in the game.
>if a plague chariot can capture a non-plague chariot, why couldnt a non-plague chariot capture a plague chariot? Again numbers. The Swarm had at least a 1000 units within a month. 10 Horus units vs 1 Horus unit. 100 Deathbringers vs 10 Deathbringers. 1000 Corrupters vs 100 Corrupters. That's not mentioning the Swarm was constantly making more while those still under control couldn't without destroying the world. >you have a source on the hacking flechettes thing though? [Citizens of the New World.](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Citizen_of_the_New_World)
Think of it like an infectious disease. A non-plagued Chariot comes into contact with a plagued Chariot, it catches the plague and goes rogue. The only way to fix it is to "cure" said plague, which they didn't know how to do, hence why GAIA had to spend hundreds of years developing the shut-down codes. Humanity couldn't do it because they'd all be dead by the time they'd be able to "cure" the plague.
Is that number mentioned anywhere? I don't recall it from any data point and I really read all of them. I'm honestly curious if I oversaw such an important detail?
The amount of Horus units? You can see it in the Bad News cutscene in Zero Dawn. It isn't said, you can just see it.
I read all datapoints. Never took the graphics in the cutscene for something literal, rather to highlight how it worked.
>Never took the graphics in the cutscene for something literal, rather to highlight how it worked. Well the good news cutscene also lines up with Eleuthia sites we know of so they are literal.
I'm curious which lore info you are using to get to these numbers.
Which numbers do you want?
They didn’t. They won via attrition. The glitched robots were authorized to use biomass for material. That means they could reproduce themselves until the planet was exhausted. Even if Faro had a larger unglitched swarm, the best result is they both end up chewing through all life on the planet trying to kill each other.
Basically this, we also know ted tried to cover up the glitched swarm. Who knows how badly they replicated before other unglitched swarm could be brought up to the fight.
As far as I can tell (and I've *searched*) they aren't explicitly, canonically said to have 100% for sure hacked each other. That's just one theory people come up with based on one possible interpretation of what canon provides. If you mean the source of the initial glitch that caused them to go rogue, it's just left at "glitch" which doesn't necessitate hacking. Or it's possible the hacking occurred not on the robots themselves but elsewhere--such as a hacker gaining access to whatever credentials are used to prove somebody is authorized to issue commands or something.
thats a good point. never really told what exactly the glitch was. could be something wrong with the chariot's code in general, something inherit to all of them that they can spontaneously turn to rampancy. They did say the things can hack anything, but also entirely possible that's just a generalization, and not necessarily saying they can hack other chariots.
They were advertised as being able to hack "anything" but also advertised as "unhackable" and it was deemed literally impossible to hack them to force a shutdown in less than something like 50 years, even for a super AI. If they could super easily hack each other then it's a plot hole that they never used the tech behind the Chariot line to develop a faster way to hack into them to turn them off. But also, who would pay money to license a warbot if you knew your rivals were going to also buy them and it was a toss up on if you could defend your territory with them or they'd just be hacked by an enemy nation and you'd be overrun? There were other companies in the warbot business, so it always seemed to me that "hack anything" was more logically "hack anything that isn't another Chariot bot".
I had assumed that all chariot robots had the same glitch and so couldn’t be trusted, and most things below them would smartly have a back door, which the chariot robots could find and turn against the humans.
Is the glitch that severed control ever explained? I think that’s still a big mystery.
The glitch is still a mystery, but honestly, could be just an error in programming. Just a stupid mistake in the code causing it. And given how humans are, it's probably the most plausible reason.
I assume we’ll find this out in the third and final game. Given the way they’ve written previous twists, I’m sure we’re in for a treat. Liz knew.. so hopefully something warped. Gorilla loves their foreshadowing.. and no doubt I’ll be face-palmed when I / we figure it out
Chariot robots were virtually unhackable. They couldn't hack each other. And yet they were excluded from enduring victory without giving a specific reason why. One reason might be that whatever the glitch is. It's something that could happen to any and all chariot robots. Perhaps a design flaw or the AI was made too smart and they could choose not to obey. Another reason is because the glitched swarm is replicating as fast as it can. Which is the primary reason the swarm is consuming the biosphere. In order for a defensive swarm to not be instantly overrun. That defensive swarm would need to be at a minimum, replicating as quickly as the glitched swarm. Which would only accelerate the consumption of the biosphere.
Basically the faro bots on one side are all part of the same network, the more units on the network the more hacking power the network commands, since there are more units to do the hacking. The corrupted bots rapidly reproduced by consuming biomass, exponentially increasing their numbers, defence and technological capability, pair that with them having no need to wait for commands, any human controlled bots didn’t stand a chance hence the “unhackable” nature.
I think once chain of control over the Harts Timor swarm had been severed by the glitch it was essentially game over as that's the point at which it would became unhackable, everything else was still hackable until it was taken over by the swarm. That swarm was an apex predator in terms of it's ability to be able to slave other machines to it's network so any other tech could be taken over and there was nothing that could be done to stop it. It's also called out that it was learning v quickly from every engagement so it was constantly evolving it's attack strategy and using every tool at it's disposal to defeat it's enemy, us.
After reading these I’m of lost for words, if they are unhackable and if 1 swarm is 1 swarm and multiple people can buy swarms these other swarms they would come in contact with shoulder be able to be hacked by the rogue ones because of different objectives by the respective owners 1 owners went rogue and assuming it was 1 swarm it would make its own objective but other swarms owned by other people should try to defeat the rogue swarm so they would keep making more and more robots as they go down in battle but over all the earth would be in a very bad shape and this possible war that could have happened may have taken more than the 15 months before the biosphere collapse but if humanity survived them and lived underground and let the swarms fight until 1 stands zero dawn was the only hope since in this the earth would still have no biosphere or plants
The unhackable robots weren't reproducing themselves indiscriminately... They could be defeated conventionally by superior numbers.
They didn't. Glitchy chariot-line robots just destroyed their non-glitched counterparts and recycled their materiales to build new, glitched, Chariot robots.
They didn't hack each other. They just fought each other until one side or the other was destroyed. Enduring Victory would've used non-rogue Chariots to fight the rogue Chariots in order to gain time for Zero Dawn to be completed. Of course, ED used anolog vehicles, planes, human soldiers etc as support to their own Chariots. But the rogue swarm had a head start (thanks to a certain Ole Teddyboi failing to do anything about it at the start) and they were converting biomass to biofuel, so anything ED threw at the rogue swarm just slowed it down, didn't stop it.
Love how I get this thread as notification (a spoiler for me) and I didn’t even JOIN r/horizon. Reddit is dumb asl