Crimes, jail, and the rank ladder

There are ten tiers of crime, from petty theft to a full organized job. Each tier pays more, runs a longer timer afterwards, and is harder. Locked tiers stay visible, so you always know what you are working toward.

Every crime runs on its own timer. A long clock on the truck job never stops you picking a pocket, so a settled player has several rungs of the ladder cooling off at once and works whichever is ready. The upper jobs are priced for that: they run for hours and pay a lot per attempt, while the rungs below keep producing a trickle forever.

What stops the ladder becoming a treadmill is XP rather than time. A crime stops teaching you anything once you have unlocked the job two rungs above it — the money still comes, but the rank does not. So the crime just above your level is still usually the right one, because it is the one that is still making you better.

How likely you are to succeed

Success chance comes from the crime's own difficulty plus how far you have progressed toward the next tier. The closer you are to unlocking the tier above, the better you are at the one you are on.

It is capped below certainty. Nothing in the game is a sure thing.

Jail

Failure can mean a timed sentence, and how likely that is comes off the same number as the job: the surer the job was, the likelier you walk away from a botched one. The same rule runs everywhere in the game — a car you know, a block on a getaway, a load of goods, a heist — so reaching up is what actually gets you booked, and a bold approach costs you both a longer sentence and a better chance of one.

When a sentence does land you can pay bail, priced per remaining minute, or wait it out. Other players can attempt to break you out — and if they fail, they usually go in instead, which is what makes it a favor worth remembering.

Ranks

Fourteen ranks, from Associate to Padrino, earned through crime experience. Rank is standing and it gates things — most importantly, equipment. It is deliberately separate from your battle stats, which have no ceiling and are what actually decide fights.

So there are two ladders: one that says who you are, and one that says what you can do to people. See combat.

Heists

Some work needs more than one person. Heists are crew jobs with a planning timer, a payout paid to every member, and — unlike a solo crime — a stake you put up before it runs.

There are four, from a two-person smash and grab you can reach in your first day or two, up to a bank vault that needs four people and a day of planning. One of them, the family job, is only for people in a family; the rest are open to anyone on the heist board, whoever they run with.

Putting a job up takes a record — the bigger the job, the more of one. Taking a seat on somebody else's takes only the stake. A crew can carry anyone they are willing to have, however new, which is what the public board is for; what stops a stranger sitting down at a bank vault is that the seat costs nineteen thousand dollars and burns if the job goes wrong.

The stake is the part to understand. It leaves your pocket the moment you take a seat. You get it back if the job pays, if you walk away before it runs, or if the crew never fills. If the job goes wrong, the police keep it — on top of a beating, and a cell for whoever they get their hands on. That last part is rolled for each of you, so a crew can walk out of the same disaster into different rooms. That is what makes turning up matter.

Heists run on their own clock, not the crime timer, so being on one never costs you a solo attempt. You can be on one public job at a time, and there is a small daily limit on how many you can take.