Talking about wastes of time, I’ve been building a hacking simulator where I try to totally recreate the rules of the original hacking minigame.
So yes, I do wish to spend time thinking where the node can be, as I’m trying to get perfect understanding of this minigame.
And generally the core is 8 steps away, unless the start point is somewhere in the middle and thus closer than 8 steps to the majority of nodes.
What I do not know yet is at exactly which moment the game switches from using the rule of 8 to random placement.
So far my theory is that it happens when the amount of valid candidates is ‘too low’ where ‘too low’ is at least 2, but could be more.