Cyberpunk 2077 can now serve daily word puzzles thanks to a mod called Gonkle, and the answer’s probably choom

The word choom gets on my nerves a bit, to be honest. Probably because it feels like it’s said every five minutes in Cyberpunk 2077. There’s now a mod which might persuade me to reverse my stance, though. It’s called Gonkle and allows the game to serve you daily Wordle-style puzzles which might improve your Cyberpunk vocabulary.

“GONKLE brings daily word puzzles to Night City,” modder MisterChedda wrote of their latest creation, which you can find in the dairy aisle of Nexus Mods. “Every 24 hours (specifically midnight UTC), you’ll get a new puzzle delivered as a text message on your phone – same word for everyone, so you can compare results with others.” Yep, Wordle, but for Cyberpunk.

As such, the modder’s made sure the terms you’ll have to guess if you sign up to the in-game text service which delivers these little puzzle boxes to you daily are suitably Cyberpunk, having thumbed through the game’s sourcebooks to add a bunch of universe-specific lingo to a manually-collated eligible word list. That means streetslang and jargon like chromed, eddies, ripperdoc, and of course choom can pop up as the thing you’ve got to guess. Gonkle’ll automatically track your correct solve streak and progress auto-saves, meaning each daily puzzle will be ticked off as done across all of your saves when you complete it in just one of them.

To get a bit more in-depth as to how the mod works, its application programming interface-based innards sound similar to one MisterChedda previously set up to serve daily cat facts in Cyberpunk. “The mod makes a single API call to fetch today’s puzzle (the word, date, etc), but it doesn’t send any personal data back. There’s no tracking or telemetry. Your guesses, stats, and progress are saved locally on your machine,” MisterChedda outlined.

“One GET request is sent to a custom API endpoint I made for this mod when you open the game,” they continued. “This retrieves information about today’s puzzle. Nothing about you, your game, or your V leaves your computer. The mod uses an open source http client called ‘RedHttpClient’ to execute this, so anyone can verify the source code. The API endpoint is also open source.”

As well as RedHttpClient, Codeware, RedData, RedFileSystem, and redscript are all requirements to get Gonkle up and running.

I’m not sure the puzzles are something that’d stay a priority in any Cyberpunk playthrough of mine once the initial novelty wears off. If nothing else they’re an optional roleplaying aid for folks who go all-in on netrunning, but quickly realise the cyborg boffin they’ve created is far too cool to be accepted into the wider deckhead community. Deckhead, of course, being a bit of cyberslang I’ve accidentally ended up reminding myself of while writing about embiggening cybervocabularies. Also, an alternative netrunner term for the real world is apparently to dub it ‘the meatspace’, which somehow feels less appropriate to deploy in serious situations than choom.