Harbourmaster’s safe

The keys to the whole harbour, in one very heavy box.

What a run is worth

Harbourmaster’s safe costs 12 nerve, which the city gives back in 1 hour. At its base 85% success chance an attempt returns about $2,410 on average, and about $180 of that goes on tool wear — the kit costs $900 and wears out on 20% of attempts, win or lose — leaving about $2,230 net — roughly $186 per point of nerve, before mastery, crew perks, courses and equipment move it.

It cannot be attempted without Lockpick set in hand, which wears out on 20% of attempts whether the job lands or not, and a job that lands breaks one about 5% of the time on top of that.

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 40 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 9 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 Dockside pearl. About one clean job in a hundred also turns up Black tide pearl, which is the only way that piece ever enters the city.