Cyberpunk 2077 has dozens of different phenomenal ways of making Night City feel like a real living and breathing place, but my personal favorite is the fact that sometimes the best and coolest rewards are found in the most unlikely places. A great example of this is the optional side job Kold Mirage, which is a total “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” type of gig with an absolutely amazing reward.
That amazing reward depends upon the choices you make, of course. This is Cyberpunk we’re talking about, after all. Make the wrong choice, and Kold Mirage is just a fun little world-building adventure. Make the right choice, and you’ll walk away an absolute powerhouse or extremely rich, depending on your preference.
Read on for a walkthrough of the Kold Mirage side job and how you can save the data on Bartmoss’ cyberdeck for a huge reward.
Cyberpunk 2077: Kold Mirage walkthrough
There are two possible ways you can start this job: You can speak to Nix in the Afterlife, which will start the job Spellbound. A short while after completing Spellbound, Nix will offer Kold Mirage. You can, however, skip the middleman by stumbling upon a random cooler in a junkyard that contains a priceless artifact. If you don’t want to stumble upon this cooler by chance, read on to learn its location.
The cooler that starts Kold Mirage is located in a junkyard east of Night City, and it will actually be marked by an unnamed Side Job indicator. Conveniently, this means that you can track the location of the cooler.
Head to the Side Job icon to start Kold Mirage, which will lead you to a cooler next to the corpse of a certain dead someone (I’m leaving out the name of the character for the sake of spoilers, but if you’ve completed the Konpeki Plaza heist, you’ve been here before in a cutscene).
Johnny will egg V on to open the cooler, and doing so will actually reveal the corpse of Rache Bartmoss.
Rache Bartmoss was a legendary hacker dubbed “the man who destroyed the net.” Basically, he is the father of Netrunning in Cyberpunk 2077. Years ago, he mysteriously disappeared. Well, you just solved that mystery! He was rotting in an ice cream cooler this whole time.
Search Bartmoss, and you will find his cyberdeck—which is an absolutely huge deal in the Cyberpunk universe. When you tell Nix, he jokingly compares it to finding Alan Turing’s personal logs (the father of modern computing and creator of the famous AI Turing Test).
You’ll receive an objective to bring the cyberdeck to Nix, and at this point, the job is basically finished. However, you’ll have one decision to make back at the Afterlife with Nix that is extremely important for the quality of your reward from Kold Mirage.
Cyberpunk 2077: How to save the data from Bartmoss’ cyberdeck
Back at the Afterlife, Nix will attempt to hack into Bartmoss’ cyberdeck and see what secrets are stored within. While he is doing so, something will go terribly wrong, and V will have to save Nix’s life. There are two ways this can be done:
- By turning the power off from the switch near the door
- By jacking into the terminal near Nix and finishing the decryption yourself
If you turn the power off, Bartmoss’ cyberdeck will be wiped, and you will miss out on five different Tier Five Ultimate quickhacks as a reward. Not the Crafting Specs, the actual Quickhacks.
If you jack into the terminal and pass the Breech Protocol, you will save the data on Bartmoss’ cyberdeck, and receive five Tier Five quickhacks.
There is no Intelligence requirement to jack into the terminal, so no matter what this is the option you should choose. If you kill the power, you’re missing out on one of the absolute best rewards in all of Cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk 2077: Kold Mirage job rewards
If you save the data on Bartmoss’ cyberdeck by jacking into the terminal instead of killing the power, you will receive:
- Tier Five of the Ultimate quickhack System Collapse
- Tier Five of the quickhack Reboot Optics
- Tier Five of the quickhack Short Circuit
- Tier Five of the quickhack Sonic Shock
- Tier Five of the quickhack Memory Wipe
If you’re a netrunner, you just became damn near the most powerful version of yourself possible. If you’re not, you just made well over 50,000 eddies. Either way, the reward is unbelievable, especially for such a simple job.