Dumpster diving

One cat’s trash. Your next payday.

What a run is worth

Dumpster diving costs 3 nerve, which the city gives back in 15 minutes. At its base 93% success chance an attempt returns about $62 on average — roughly $21 per point of nerve, before mastery, crew perks, courses and equipment move it.

It needs no tools, so nerve and patience are the only inputs.

When it goes wrong

Some failures slip away with no cell, and more of them as your mastery climbs. Either way a job gone wrong costs you some of your feel for it: the job's mastery slips back, never more than a rank at a time and never for a cat under level 5, and the surer the job and the more you had mastered it, the further it slips. The rest mean 5 minutes in the cells, multiplied by your heat — a cat at 80 heat serves nearly twice as long. Bail is $50 a minute times your level, up to level 20, and a press here leaves about 2 heat in its district, less by the quiet way in and more by the loud one; heat cools by one point every five minutes, and above 80 a district still takes the job but pays half the XP and turns no clean job at all.

Clean jobs

A clean job — the critical outcome, whose odds rise as you master the crime — pays one and a half times the cash and the XP and turns up a Lucky fish bone. About one clean job in a hundred also turns up The Alleys glass eye, which is the only way that piece ever enters the city.