Probably Stolen Walkthrough

Before the shutter goes up

Start on Apprentice. The 27 October news post calls it the generalist job and the best one for beginners. Water Merchant, Fence, Gunsmith, Chemist, Hydroponic Farmer, Aquafarmer, and Rat Wrangler each hand you a problem on purpose. Rock Bottom hands you nothing, and the launch post says to pair it with the hardest of the four difficulties if you want the extra challenge. The four difficulty names that circulate online are not in those posts, so this walkthrough will not pretend they are official.

If you are carrying a demo save, stop. The launch post says demo saves carry over and then asks you to start fresh so you do not miss storylines added for 1.0. The demo was removed at launch, and demo mods are unlikely to work. Patch 1.0.0.6 later changed the modding system again and warned that some mods will break until their authors update them.

A community wiki lists starting credits and weekly rent for each scenario, from 0 credits on Rock Bottom to 600 on Rat Wrangler, with rent between 200 and 250. Those figures are on the table below and tagged unverified. Do not budget a run around them until you see the lease in your own game. What is official is the lease itself: the landlord is the antagonist of the store page, and buying them out is the ending.

The counter loop

A day is a string of small decisions that compound. Call the next customer. The 1.0.0.5 patch made the counter bell rebindable, defaulting to B, and holding that bind dismisses the person at the counter the same way holding the bell does. Read the request before you drag anything forward. The store page's rule still holds: approve it, refuse it, report it, or look away.

1. Look at the object, not the speech. Cigarette packs, water, weapons, and rare goods each have an official failure mode: fakes, contamination, missing permits, and overpaying.
2. Compare the offer with what a later customer can actually buy. A valuable item that nobody in today's crowd wants is just rent you already spent.
3. Haggle when the gap is real. The store page says every bargain has a trade-off, and pushing a customer out the door is one of them.
4. If the goods are stolen or plainly illegal, decide before they hit the shelf. Clean Hands is the achievement for winning without selling stolen or contraband stock.
5. Sleep only after the counter is safe. Patch notes mention a 'go to sleep' tutorial hint that waits until you are back from an after-hours trip, so nights away from the store are a real system.

The first week

The opening is a tutorial, and First Steps is the achievement attached to it. Guides disagree about the exact trigger. One says you simply finish the tutorial. Another says the Mentor leaves on day 14 and that skipping the intro blocks the achievement. Both can be directionally true and still be wrong on the day count. Play the intro on the first save. You can skip later.

Set rent aside before you fall in love with a machine. The game will let you buy your way into a hole. Patch 1.0.0.2 cut three water prices because players were feeling that hole: Moisture Farm from 650 to 350, Water Filter from 50 to 25, and, a patch later, Water Purifier from 300 to 250. Dr. Jackson's markup on Normal dropped from 25% to 15% in the same water pass. Those are the only shop prices this walkthrough will quote as fact.

One wiki says the first rent comes due on day 7, a Sunday, and that every start receives a lease. That schedule is unverified. What you can see without a wiki is the lease document in the game and the payment date printed on it. Read that date on day one and treat the credits it names as already spent.

Inspections, bays, and Lou

Security is not a rumor. The Gunsmith pitch is 'high margins, security inspections.' The Fence pitch is stolen goods. Patch 1.0.0.1 fixed a case where items inside a Smuggler Bay were confiscated during an inspection if the bay was in the trash, and a similar case for a Mini Smuggler Bay kept behind the poster. Patch 1.0.0.5 stopped a Smuggler Bay Mod from the Underground Exchange being thrown out with the trash overnight. The practical reading is simple: a hiding place only works if the container is where the game expects it, and trash is not a hiding place.

Lou is a named character in the launch post, called a criminal mastermind, and in two hotfixes. Reporting her to Security used to drop Black Market reputation. After 1.0.0.1 it does not. After 1.0.0.2 you also cannot shoot her during a visit. Community endings describe bombs tied to her debt and to a toy box. Those scenes are unverified here. The safe walkthrough advice is the official one: do not shoot her, and do not assume reporting her is free with every faction.

Other names in the launch post are worth remembering so the story does not feel random. Eleanor has a storyline you can affect. Officer Lun and cadet Serpico have arcs that end. The wanted list has backstories, including someone called Butcher. Georgio is in the game, and the studio joked that you cannot romance him yet. None of that is a quest checklist. It is a warning that refusing the wrong person can be the story.

Pick one line and let it run overnight

Do not open every career in week one. The store page says each product line ruins you differently. Water is the most documented lane in the official notes, which is why the prices above moved so fast. A water pitcher with the filter still inside gets refused, with a spoken hint, as of 1.0.0.5. Scanners now truncate liquid volume so a reading cannot claim more than the container holds. The evaporator was leaving a microliter of water in mixed alcohol and the Chem Finisher was rejecting the batch; dry-input recipes now ignore that trace.

Weapons mean the 3D printer. The Gunsmith start now includes the printer's instruction note, which tells you the machine is meant to be read, not guessed. Community recipes for magazines and box cutters are listed on the recipes page and are unverified. Chemicals run through the finisher and want dry inputs. Farming and fish are full starts of their own: Hydroponic Farmer and Aquafarmer. Rat Wrangler is the former secret start. Beginning a run there is how players unlock We Have Rats!

Vending machines, added in 1.0, keep selling after the shutter drops. That is the first passive income the studio actually announced. It is not a substitute for rent money sitting in the till.

Buying the store

The ending the developer described is buying the store from the landlord and reading the stat screen. Keys to the Kingdom is the achievement. Prodigious is the community-agreed version of doing it before day 50. From Nothing is winning after a Rock Bottom start. From Nothing, the Hard Way is that win on a hard difficulty. The exact buyout price, and whether it climbs after day 50, comes from a single community guide and is printed on the endings page as unverified. Watch the landlord's offer in your own run. It is the only price that matters.

A mortgage payoff is also described by community wikis as a win. The launch post does not mention a mortgage. If your game offers one, treat the terms on the contract as the source, not this page. After you own the store, patch 1.0.0.5 says the Merchant still visits every Sunday. The run does not have to stop at the deed.

What this walkthrough will not fake

There is no official hour-by-hour route, no confirmed rent calendar, and no confirmed customer script. Guides that list 'on day 3, buy this exact machine' are filling gaps. Use the beginner tips for habits, the achievements list when you want a target, and the secrets page for the small interactions the patches actually documented, like turning a glass shard and a bandage into a shiv.