Probably Stolen tips that change a run
No secret codes and no optimal build. These are the decisions that separate a shop that survives a bad week from one that does not.
Why these five
Most advice about a shop sim is either a spreadsheet from someone else’s save or a restatement of the tutorial. The habits below are chosen because they are testable in a single week and because they do not depend on a build number.
They also assume the thing the store page states plainly: rent rises regardless of how the week went, and one bad purchase or one illegal bust can be all it takes. Advice that ignores the fixed cost is advice for a different game.
- Split cash into rent, restock and gamble
Rent is collected every Sunday and rises after every rent day, paid or not. Set the next payment aside first, spend on stock second, and only risk the third bucket.
- Price the consequence, not the item
A margin that ends in a fine, a confiscation or a lost faction is not a margin. If you cannot name what a sale costs after the counter closes, do not make it yet.
- Keep one legal line and one grey line
A clean product pays the rent; a grey one pays for the growth. Running only grey means every week is one inspection away from a gap, and running only clean means the margin rarely covers a rising rent.
- Refusing is a free move
Declining a lot costs you the margin you never had. It is the only decision in the shop that generates no evidence, no reputation loss and no stock.
- Do not use the Aug policy as stress relief
The build publishes six tells and one behavioural shortcut: Augs never haggle. Use the refusal test before the gun, and remember a wrong shot is logged as manslaughter.
How to practise a habit
Pick one per session. If you are working on rent buckets, ignore growth entirely for a week and judge yourself only on whether the next payment was already set aside before you bought anything. If you are working on consequence pricing, write down the worst realistic outcome of each sale before you approve it.
The habit is not the number, it is the order. Players who do the right thing in the right order survive mistakes that would end a better-optimised run.
What not to do
- Do not restart because a week went badly. The recovery is the part of the game you have not learned yet.
- Do not copy a stock list. Your suppliers, your factions and your reputation are different from the person who wrote it.
- Do not treat the Aug policy as a mood. It is a decision with a permanent outcome and no published tells.
- Do not expand to fix a cash problem. Expansion adds a fixed cost; it does not add a customer.
Where the numbers come from
This site does not publish optimal markups, rent multipliers or drop rates, because the official material does not publish them and a guide that invents them is describing a save file. What is published — prices, dates, player counts, the specialization names — is on the sources page with a link and a date.