Beginners income guide

As a new player, generating income is one of the most important steps towards growing as a player. This guide aims to help teach players the best ways to make money early on, including Heists, Careers, Street Intel, Smuggling and selling Black Market consumables

First is Careers. Using your energy on careers is the most important and reliable source of income for new players. Each career has 5 ranks After your first promotion in each career, you also unlock Overtime Shifts, which offer three times the usual rewards for double the energy cost. Since the first few career paths cost so little energy, its best to do OT shifts whenever possible.

Its also a good idea to stick with one career at a time until you have been fully promoted, as you gain bonus rewards for "Streaks" by successfully completing multiple shifts of the same career in a row

One important perk is the Supplier perk for the Street Hustler career. This gives the player a -10% discount in the Black Market, which will be very helpful in making income.

The black market sells limited amounts of consumables for both gold and cash. You can only buy a certain amount of each item per week with each currency. (Example, you can buy 15 nerve tonics with gold, and 15 with cash) The black market refreshes every monday, allowing you to buy more consumables for the week.

Older players will often buy these consumables, mainly Nerve Tonics, Energy Drinks and Adrenaline Shots. There are buyers for other consumables, but the Energy/Nerve ones are the most sought after. Use cash on Black Market items, then resell them to players through Trade Chat or as part of Buy Orders on the Item Market. This will give you a very good amount of income starting out that can then be reinvested elsewhere.

Along with Careers is Street Intel, which uses stamina to do different tasks that reward cash and sometimes useful items.

Like career shifts, there is no limit to how many Intel jobs you can do daily, so active players will want to do as many as possible in order to earn as much money, xp and useful rewards as you can.

Smuggling is the next important income source. New players that only have access to the Downtown District buy goods that they then sell to buyers who randomly appear in Downtown. Accept every profitable offer and restock immediately after.

After you unlock the Strip, you will have to travel between districts for smuggling, buying stock from one district that you sell in others. You may have to wait for the price to update to something profitable, so patience is important. There is a limit to how much profit you can make daily, and you should aim to reach that limit every day.

Lastly is Heists. Heists cost larger amounts of nerve then crimes but offer much larger rewards. You unlock new heists as you level up, each costing more nerve and offering a higher payout range. You can only do 6 heists a day, so its important to make the most out of your attempts.

Each heist has a certain amount of Stages to complete, but players are allowed to "cash out" at any stage, keeping any rewards earned so far.

Passing a stage adds money to the heist earnings and advance you to the next stage, while failing a stage will lose everything and land you in jail. Every stage has a chance to fail that gets higher as you complete more stages.

The smart choice is to cash out of a heist when your chance to fail reaches 30-40% or more. Full completions are very rare and youll lose out on a significant amount of rewards when going for them. Instead, find a sweet spot in each heist that you Cash Out at, ideally rewarding you a majority of the heists potential earnings while keeping your chance of failure as low as possible.