I’ve been in love with my HTC Vive and Virtual Reality in general these last few weeks, to the point where I spend most of my computer time using Virtual Desktop and a virtual 4K display via a headless “monitor” adapter. I’ve also been getting pretty good at VR Paintball.

While trying to maximize my “skill” in Rec Room on the HTC Vive, I ended up discovering a small trove of exploitable goodies that are demoed above. Hopefully the developers don’t see it fit to ban me since the game itself isn’t competitive and I’m posting this for them to fix it (and to have a bit of fun of course). If I do get banned, oh well. It was fun!

So lets walk through the exploits I found in Capture the Flag Paintball (the most played game in Rec Room as far as I can tell) that flat out breaks it and makes it very annoying for everyone. They’re in order below, from least to most game breaking, with the time in the video in parenthesis.

Weapon Upgrade (3:06)

It started out with this. I realized that you could start with two pistols if you grabbed one in your base as the the game started. This was far from anything serious, and it didn’t really help much other than saving a small bit of time. If the game was competitive, this could have been a big deal on its own. I knew about this for some time, then it was only last night after playing for weeks that I realized — you can leave your starting area before the game begins. Naturally, I got curious and tried this with other things — Sniper Rifles, Shields, Shotguns, Grenades — they’re all accessible with this exploit. The shield is particularly useful, and in maps like Quarry they’re great in combination with the Sniper Rifle in your base to gain a decent edge in the beginning.

Keep-away the Flag (3:26)

Against Gravity fixed an exploit a while ago where you could clip through walls by walking into them in your real life space (into the virtual walls obviously) and fire by just reaching out with your gun. Well, sorta. You’ve always been able to do this and still can, but you can’t fire without your entire hit box being outside of an object. This meant you could still camp inside areas and jump out without being seen. While this alone is nice and actually a decent edge, it allows you to lock out a game all by yourself. In the video it’s shown combined with a floor clip (“Fix Floor” with your controllers above your head so it puts you under the floor), but that’s not necessary. You can simply grab the flag and step out of bounds. Even if someone comes after you by also clipping — no one can shoot outside of bounds — essentially locking the game. If you combine this with the Instant Flag Capture below, you can lock out a game within 30 seconds of it beginning and guarantee your team a win. It’s pretty bad. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. Why lock the game and force a 10 minute wait, when you can literally just win in 30 seconds?

EDIT: It appears the “Out of Bounds” bug can only be exploited in certain areas, while others WILL actually tell you to get back into bounds before respawning you. Unfortunately I’ve still found far too many places it does work.

Instant Capture the Flag (3:26 / 1:44)

I didn’t set out to find this game breaking bug, but when a friend mentioned if I had tried the Weapon Upgrade exploit with the flag, I immediately thought “there’s no way, the flags don’t spawn until the game even begins”. I was too curious to not give it a shot. Well, it actually works. There’s two parts to this bug, and the second one is arguably far worse than the first. 3:26 in the video shows two exploits combined — this flag grab exploit at the start of the game — and the Out of Bounds “bug”. I didn’t have to keep the flag away — I could have immediately grabbed their flag at the start of the game and then captured it, starting off with a 1–0 lead for my team. Pretty ridiculous, right? We could just turtle our flag and guarantee a win! Well, yes — or you can repeat this immediately and just win. Starting at 1:44, I do this with the “mid-game” version of the exploit. When you connect mid-game, you can step out of the spectator area without being assigned a team for several seconds. While in this mode, you can instant teleport. That includes teleportation into any base with a flag. Then all you do is wait until your team is assigned, and the second before you teleport, grab the flag. Yes. If you started a game in “River” after doing the start of game version of this exploit, you can immediately quit and rejoin the same game, then do this exploit ad nauseum by grabbing the flag as you are changed from a spectater to your team color but right before you are teleported. How do you know what team you will be on? Check the scoreboard, chances are you’re gonna be on the team with the least players. If it’s tied, take a gamble. You can always just rejoin and try again immediately.

Fixing all three bugs

This should be surprisingly easy from an outsider point of view. All three bugs essentially exist under a couple of premises:

Items are spawned before the game begins. The flag is allowed to exist outside of game bounds. You are assigned a team before being spawned at your base. There’s a small window that allows action before being teleported.

Items are spawned before the game begins.

This is done purposely — for practice. However, instead of being despawned between the end of practice and the start of the round, you are just forced to drop them. This would be fine if it wasn’t for 4. This could be fixed by despawning items entirely then respawning them immediately after the game begins, but this isn’t necessary if you fix 4.

The flag is allowed to exist outside of game bounds.

Fixing 4 won’t fix this one. There are already checks that disable guns if they are outside of the game’s bounds. This should be enabled for flags in that you should drop the flag if you go into a wall. The unfortunate side effect of this would be flags would get dropped when just moving past tight areas since the flag is tall. Alternatively, if your character is detected outside of bounds, the timer could start like it does when you are under the floor, causing the flag to drop to the nearest inside of bounds area if the timer runs out.

You are assigned a team before being spawned at your base.

Another issue that is fixed by changing 4, but the alternative would be to simply wait until you are spawned at a base before actually assigning your team, making you unable to grab a flag since you’d still be a spectator. Fairly simple.

There’s a small window that allows action before being teleported.

I don’t know why this happens. Oddly enough, when you are hit and considered “dead” — before you respawn — you can NOT pick things up when you are about to be respawned. This seems to be the only time the pickup exploits don’t work no matter how many times I try to grab my weapon after dying. This leads me to believe this would be a simple fix since there’s already a “teleport soon” + “no action” state used in the game.

All in all, I can’t see why these bugs can’t or shouldn’t be fixed fairly quickly. I’m hoping this disclosure gets them fixed soon. If there was a bug bounty, I’d have submitted this there, but writing this first would surely disqualify me from it either way. Oh well. Thanks for the great game!

Please don’t ban me.