Overclock

Overclock icon

Overclock is a special way to hack a Portal using AR, leveraging Lightship's VPS (Visual Positioning System) which was introduced to the Niantic Lightship platform with the help of the data collected by Agents with Portal Scans.

Indication

Portals with Overclock enabled are displayed on the Scanner with an octahedral "Overclock Crystal" above the Portal.

If Overclock is enabled on a Portal, an Agent may enter Overclock with the icon if they are within the Overclock range of 20 meters. This is a reduced range from the Scanner's normal range of 40 meters. At this point, the Overclock Crystal on the map will visibly turn into a tesseract if the Agent is close enough.

Operation

The Agent selects the "Overclock" option in the Portal view. After that, the Agent will need to view their environment with the camera in their Scanner device. The Agent's Scanner compares the input to data accumulated from the Scans of the environment that were previously submitted to the Portal Network before the Portal was Overclock enabled. This process, called "Localization", is meant to verify that the Agent is at the location. If localization cannot be achieved, the Agent is given the option of a reduced Overclock experience which counts as a single Hack.

An Overclock Hack is performed by deploying a Glyph Terminal and transcribing the 3D Glyphs which will be presented into 2D Glyphs before time runs out.

Once completed, the Agent's Scanner performs up to four Hacks on the Portal with the bonus percentage gained during the Hack applied to their rewards. If the Agent has less than four Hacks to burn out the Portal, then the Overclock will multiply by the number of Hacks left to Burnout. Just like a Glyph Hack, extra bonus percentage is given for speed if the sequence is correctly entered on time, but a small amount is granted for each correct Glyph entered if the sequence is not correctly entered on time.

Overclock can advance progress on the Hacker- and Translator Medals. Successfully completing an Overclock sequence will result in the number of Translator points associated with the number of Glyphs in the sequence, multiplied by the Overclock multiplier. A successful Overclock on a L8 Portal (15 Translator points) with a 4x multiplier will result in 60 Translator points. Failing to complete the sequence will still count as four Hacks on the Agent's Hacker Medal, but no points toward the Translator Medal.

Interaction with Portal Scan

The aim of this feature is to "close the loop" around VPS, showing Ingress Players what their Portal Scans are useful for, but also to finally be able to test the AR positioning in-game so that Ingress Developers will be able to experiment with it.

This feature is only available on VPS-enabled Portals. If a Portal is not VPS-enabled, Players are able to scan it several times to enable VPS and to unlock Overclock. After enough Scans have been collected and Niantic has processed them, Overclock will become available.

Enabling VPS

Enabling VPS, or "activating the Overclock feature", must be manually requested from either the Wayfarer-app or the Lightship website.

Activating an Overclock requires ten high-quality Scans of the Portal from various lighting conditions. The first Scan and the last Scan must be more than five hours apart, to ensure this variation. The Lightship website breaks the Portal status down into many brightness conditions. It prefers to have at least this many number of Scans from each condition:

• 5 Scans during daytime (8 am–4 pm) count
• 5 Scans during dusk (4 am–8 am) and dawn (4 pm–8 pm)
• 1 Scan during nighttime (8 pm–4 am)

After an activation is requested, Niantic processes the Scans by trying to mash the many Scans together into a coherent model of the Portal. If the VPS quality ends up as "Experimental", the Portal will remain unavailable for Overclock; more Scans and another activation request is needed to raise it to "Production" quality, which allows Overclock.

The VPS model is available for viewing on the Lightship website and the Wayfarer app. An Agent can use the model to figure out where to Calibrate and Scan during an Overclock.

Possible errors when requesting an activation include:

• Rate limit exceeded: each account can only request a 20 activations per day. Time to save it for tomorrow.
• Unable to request a Vps Activation: could mean a number of things. If other people are having the same issue, the activation queue is likely full. Come back a week later – maybe the backlog has cleared by then.