Part 5/13:
Interestingly, the network data appears as a series of garbled bytes, some changing slightly over time, hinting at simple or perhaps insufficient encryption mechanisms. The game’s functions named encrypt_buff and decrypt_buff perform exclusive-or (XOR) operations on data buffers with a mask that increments slightly each cycle, but with notable flaws such as partial encryption—since XOR all zero results in the same value, certain bytes are effectively left unencrypted.