Star Wars Outlaws slicing puzzle explained
Slicing in Star Wars Outlaws can be great fun once you understand what the mini-game entails, but if it's left you feeling a bit too puzzled, here's an explainer of the rules.
"Slicing" is Star Wars lingo for hacking, and in Star Wars Outlaws, our hero Kay Vess is the kind of scoundrel who spends a lot of time merrily trying to get her hands on other peoples' property which — you guessed it — is often protected by electronic terminals that are perfect targets for a bit of slicing.
Various video games set in the Star Wars universe have put their own spin on slicing over the years, and in Outlaws it takes the form of a reasonably standard hacking mini-game with a bit of a twist. Instead of joining up a series of tubes before the timer runs out, you'll be playing a game that somewhat resembles Wordle, but which real oldies will recognise as a variant on an old-school code-breaking board game called Mastermind.
Still confused? Not to worry, because we'll explain the Star Wars Outlaws slicing puzzle in more detail below.
Star Wars Outlaws slicing mini-game explained
The slicing puzzle in Star Wars Outlaws is effectively a guessing game: you're faced with a grid with three boxes to a row (or four once you've unlocked advanced slicing later in the game), and tasked with working out which symbol belongs in each box before running out of guesses. Hence its resemblance to Wordle.
After submitting a guess, a correct symbol in the correct place is shown in blue, an incorrect symbol is shown in red, and a correct symbol in the incorrect place is shown in yellow. Symbols that have turned red can no longer be selected from the list of possibilities, helping you to keep track and narrow down your subsequent guesses.
Blue symbols should therefore be kept in the same space for your follow-up guesses, while yellow symbols need to be shifted into the remaining boxes until you identify their correct placement.
However, unlike Wordle, there's no pre-existing set of rules (like "five-letter words in the English language") to help you narrow down the pattern; it's completely random, although you are helped along by the fact that unlike in Wordle (or Mastermind, for that matter), the same symbol can't appear more than once in a solution.
Star Wars Outlaws also features an accessibility option that allows you to switch out the abstract symbols for numbers, which might potentially help you to visualise the problem a bit better.
For more underworld dealings in Star Wars Outlaws, see our guide to whether or not you should sell Gorak's Ring, or our explainer on how to earn Credits fast.