The day in six beats
A day in Probably Stolen runs in a fixed order: morning report, open the shutter, serve one customer at a time, close, an optional night trip, overnight services, sleep, autosave. That is the whole spine. Everything expensive happens inside it, and almost everything that goes wrong on day one comes from treating the shutter as a break rather than a decision.
The queue is fixed the moment you open. Restocking the display case at midday will not change who is coming; it only changes what they find when they arrive. So the useful question before the shutter is not “what do I want to sell today” but “who is already outside, and what do they want from me”.
The display case decides who walks in, not what you sell. It is a filter, and a loud one: contraband in the case attracts a security inspection. A clean case brings a quieter, poorer crowd. A case full of grey goods brings buyers with money and a queue that includes people taking notes. Both are legitimate openings; only one of them is survivable on day one with no cash buffer.
Pick a start that matches your patience
Nine starting scenarios are playable: Apprentice, Water Merchant, Fence, Gunsmith, Chemist, Hydroponic Farmer, Aquafarmer, Rat Wrangler and Rock Bottom. The start screen shows twelve rows; three are locked and labelled Work In Progress, and two more exist in the files without being selectable. “Twelve specializations” is a menu count, not a fact about what you can play.
Apprentice is the recommended first run. On Normal it opens with 550 credits against a 200-credit first rent, plus a storage bay and a stock of household goods and food. That ratio — roughly two and a half weeks of rent in hand — is the tutorial. Gunsmith is the opposite lesson: 150 credits against 250 rent, with a Class I permit and stock you cannot legally sell to everyone who asks.
Rock Bottom gives you the store and nothing else: no credits, no kit. It is a second run. Aquafarmer and Rat Wrangler are production starts with their own setup costs, and Hydroponic Farmer starts with equipment and a higher rent line. If you want the quietest opening, take Water Merchant: a product you can test, a filter to sell against, and a customer base that does not require you to lie.
The first three sales
Your first sales should be boring. Buy small, buy what you can verify, and price at something you could defend out loud. Cigarettes are inspected visually before resale, water is tested and filtered, weapons need permits and modifications, chemicals run on recipes, and rare goods need appraisal — which is a separate, fee-based service, not a button.
The second lesson is that the customer is part of the item. The store page names a security officer fishing for evidence, a revolutionary looking for leverage and a fallen elite testing your usefulness. Three people, one box, three different transactions. Every sale is a four-way decision — approve, refuse, report to Security, or look away — and the game is explicit that someone is always taking notes.
The third is the aftermath. Reputation moves, the crime file grows, stock gets confiscated, or nothing happens. If you cannot name the likely consequence of a sale, you are not ready to make it. That sounds slow. Closing on day nine because a cheap unlabelled lot turned out to be exactly what it looked like is slower.
What ends a first run
The most common ending is economic. Rent is collected every Sunday and rises after every rent day whether you paid or not. Miss it and the shop loses attractiveness, fewer customers walk in, revenue drops, and the gap widens. There is a grace mechanic and a mortgage branch, but both are ways of paying later, not ways of paying less.
The second is a misjudged item: suppliers overstate value, contraband carries problems you only see after the deal, and a failed inspection turns stock into a fine. The third is a misjudged person: reporting the wrong customer, selling a counterfeit to the wrong elite, or shooting someone who was not an Aug. That last one is logged as manslaughter.
The fourth is drifting into a trade you cannot support. A gunsmith needs permits and clients who expect modifications. A chemist needs recipes and a tolerance for what addiction does to the customer base. Choosing a product line is choosing which inspectors, creditors and angry regulars you will spend the run managing.
A first-week checklist
Before you buy anything, look at the rent line, count what is left after it, and decide how much of that remainder you are willing to lose. Then buy only what you can inspect, price only what you can defend, and keep a note of who you refused and why. Refusal is free, and it is the only decision in the shop that produces no evidence.
At the end of the week ask three questions. Did the shop clear more than the rent? Did anything I sold create a cost I have not paid yet? Is there a customer I cannot afford to serve again? If the answer to the second or third is yes, fix that before expanding.
Everything else — starts, factions, Augs, appraisal — is detail on top of those three questions. The archive goes through each in turn, but none of it matters more than the habit of pricing the consequence and not just the item.
Lower Levels Ledger. “Start here: what to do on day 1.” Last updated 2026-10-29. https://probablystolen.games/lore/start-here/