Rookport — Player Guide

A living guide to how Rookport plays and every feature currently in the game. Kept in step with the build; the eventual source for the public wiki. Numbers marked "(tuning)" are placeholders being balanced and may change.

Rookport is a browser-based, persistent-world mob game. You run one boss in a shared 1920s-style port city, building a criminal empire in real time alongside everyone else. The world keeps ticking whether you're logged in or not — income accrues, heat cools, wounds heal, crews get paid. Play is asynchronous and turn-limited: almost everything you do costs action points, which regenerate slowly over real time.

Play at https://rookport.com.

Getting started

• Make an account. Enter your email, click the sign-in link we send you, then pick a username and password — that's your login for good. One account, one boss. Forgotten the password? "Forgot your password?" on the sign-in screen mails you a one-time reset link that's good for an hour; setting a new password signs you out everywhere else. Your boss can only be played from your own signed-in account — nobody else can act as them.
• One boss per player. You create a single character; it persists across rounds as long as it survives. If it dies, there's a graveyard and a respawn wait.
• The goal is net worth and standing — climb the rankings by earning, owning, and outlasting rival bosses.
• New bosses spawn in Little Sicily, the newbie-safe home turf, with a starter pool of actions and no money.

Actions — your turn budget

Nearly every meaningful move — travelling, committing a crime, robbing, working out at the gym — spends action points (buying property is the exception: it costs clean money, not actions). You start each round with a partial pool and regenerate toward your maximum over real time (full regen target ≈ 36 hours). You can't stockpile past your max, so spend them.

There's a dev refill cheat during the prototype (see the end), but in normal play, actions are the throttle on how much you can do per day.

Your character

Primary stats — the four you level up (spend a point per level):

• Strength — raises your max HP and your melee attack power.
• Accuracy — your chance to hit with any weapon, plus fire rate. Some weapons need a minimum accuracy.
• Speed — movement speed, melee attack speed, and your dodge.
• Intelligence — better buy/sell prices, and part of how intimidating you are.

Respect — a separate reputation stat you don't level: it rises when you seize turf and when you down or kill a rival (a bigger name is worth more), and it falls when you're beaten to the hospital or collared by the police. It feeds your intimidation and your trade prices and gates the crew tiers you can recruit, so a losing streak genuinely costs you — and it takes a minimum Respect to found a clan as Don (see Clans — the family).

Skills — a full roster you train with a separate pool of skill points earned each level (gear can boost them too). Several already bite: Driving (drive harder — faster, cheaper trips when you're in a vehicle, up to −40%), Stealth (work quietly — less heat from every crime, harder to be caught pickpocketing, and faster heat cool-down), Killer (+melee power, less police heat to the block), Tough-as-nails (+max HP & defense), Leadership (crew command — cheaper hiring, promotions and daily wages, up to −40%), Dealer (better buy/sell prices), Heavy weapon (+ranged power), Spying (send a crew spy onto enemy turf for live intel — undetectable unless the target out-levels their Spying), and Relation (underworld & wholesaler connections — better buy/sell prices, stacking with Dealer). Two more switch on as their systems land: Security technician and Arsonist.

Secondary stats (shown read-only in the Boss panel) are derived — you don't spend points on them directly. They're computed from your primaries, Respect, and gear: Max HP, melee/ranged attack power, defense (from armor), dodge, intimidation, trade edge. Ranged attack power comes from the weapon itself — Accuracy governs whether you hit with it.

Level & XP. Crimes, fights, and the gym earn XP. Each level grants 1 primary point + a few skill points. Levels persist across rounds if you survive.

Gym. Enter a gym and work out (−8 actions) to earn XP toward your next level — you then raise primary stats by spending level-up points, they aren't ground out at the gym. Each set has a short 30-second cooldown ("catch your breath") before you can train again, so it's a low-risk head start, not something you can spam.

HP & wounds. Max HP is derived from Strength. Lose a fight and you're knocked out and taken to the hospital to heal — see The hospital. You never die to an NPC or the law; only a rival player can finish you.

The city & getting around

Rookport is a zoned port city laid out like a real one — six districts, each with its own character, buildings, and baseline police presence:

• Little Sicily — residential home turf, newbie-safe. Where you start: housing, corner stores, a gym.
• Downtown — the town centre: banks, courthouse, offices and hotels, under the heaviest police watch in the city.
• The Row — the commercial strip: bars, dance clubs, casinos, diners and shops, lit up day and night.
• Ironside — the industrial west bank across the river: warehouses, factories, workshops and chop shops.
• The Greenbelt — rural outskirts to the north: farmland (buy a plot to work it), woods and parks on the edge of town.
• The Docks — the contested waterfront: piers, storage and smuggling. The three docks are the toughest buildings in the city, and once you own one you skim an import tariff on everything the docks land — controlling the import trade pays. But taking a port is a campaign: every unowned dock is held by the Harbor Syndicate — an elite armed crew standing on the waterfront — and the deed can't be bought while any armed crew holds the tile. Beat them off first (an Attack op at the docks, or fight them in person), then pay the steepest property price in Rookport (~$18,000 clean, tuning). Clear them and dawdle, and the syndicate re-crews the docks in about a day. (Bulk storage, auto-sell contracts and the car-export racket are still being built out.)

Between the built-up blocks are parks and pocket forests (with footpaths you can walk), open farmland, a winding river you cross at bridges, and the bay to the south where the docks sit spread along the shore. There are neutral spots too, like a basketball court in the central park. The countryside is drawn as continuous ground rather than a grid of squares — woods, fields and grass run into one another, and the river is one channel with a real shoreline that you can only get across at a bridge deck.

The city is laid out like a real one. The lone courthouse sits in the heart of downtown with the big banks beside it; a police station covers each rough quarter of the city (Little Sicily has none — the law mostly leaves the home turf alone); there are two hospitals (the downtown one and Little Sicily's own neighbourhood hospital) and a single remote prison on the northern edge. Venues spread out the way they would in life — a gym a few steps from where newcomers start, corner stores rationed around every district, dive bars in the working districts, the only casinos on the Row, dealerships and gun shops where their trade belongs, and the crack houses tucked away from the main streets. No two of a speciality sit on adjacent corners.

Tiles have a front and a back. On a tile you're either outside on the block or inside the building. Some actions only work in one context (e.g. gym training needs you inside; the people you can reach depend on whether you're in or out). Toggle with Enter / Exit, and set auto-enter to walk straight in on arrival.

Travel is edge-lattice: you move between tiles, and the trip takes real time and actions to complete. The moment your countdown lands you're on the block and ready to act — the game pulls your arrival instantly and opens the block you reached in the left panel, no waiting, no extra click. Crossing policed tiles can trigger road encounters (see Heat). If you're carrying heat, pushing into a well-policed destination costs extra actions — and the trip estimate shows the true price up front.

Avoid police (a travel toggle). On the block card there's an "avoid police" checkbox. Tick it and your trip routes around the patrols — a longer, costlier detour (about 40% more time and actions) that keeps you out of the law's line of sight. In exchange you skip the wanted-heat surcharge and you won't be stopped by a road patrol on arrival — the safe way to move a hot boss or a load of contraband across town. Leave it off when you're in a hurry: you take the direct path but risk crossing a patrol. The trip estimate updates the moment you tick the box, so you can see the cost of going quiet.

The city is a 30×33 grid of six zoned districts. Not every tile is built up: there's farmland, parks and forest (with footpaths you walk), a winding river, and the bay to the south. Water — the river and the bay — is open water you can't cross, so you use the bridges; the docks sit spread along the shore. The map is a big, zoomable, pannable board (scroll-wheel or the Zoom in / Zoom out buttons, click-hold-drag to pan, ⌖ Center on me to jump back to your character) that keeps you centred as you move — and it's drawn on a single baked layer, so panning and zooming stay smooth. Hover anything for a tooltip — every button and meter explains itself; each tile is drawn in Rookport's house style — its own hand-painted building sprite sitting on the street and grounds, with rivers, parks, fields, forests, bridges and roads painted in too.

You always know where you are. The block you're standing on carries a pulsing gold ring with your avatar pinned on it, at every zoom level — one glance finds you anywhere in the city (and ⌖ Center on me jumps the view straight there).

People on the map are small colour-coded dots — the map shows you where everyone is and who you can reach, and nothing more (portraits and actions live in the side panels — see The screen below). The colours tell you at a glance who's who: yellow = neutral civilians and shopkeepers · blue = police (they flash blue/red when they're coming for you) · bright red = a rival boss · dark red = hostile muscle that attacks on sight · green = your own people (garrisoned crew, your lookouts) and anyone at peace with you · orange = someone with a special function — a stationed informant, or a venue where recruits drink (marked with a small orange corner dot). SWAT are black with a white ring. People inside a building sit up in it, people outside sit at the street edge. NPCs stroll the streets at a realistic walking pace — about the same speed you walk at 1×, quicker or slower with their own Speed — and cars roll the roads as small rectangles (a truck draws longer and wider), always lined up with their lane. Zoom far out and the traffic layer drops so the board stays readable.

The screen

The game is three panels around the map, plus a thin menu on top of it:

• Left — the selector. Everything on this block, as a tappable list you pick from: the building itself (a 🏢 row at the top), then everyone present — each person a row with their portrait, name and glance stats — plus the recruit line-up at a venue and any lookouts. Tap a row to open it in the viewer on the right, where you act on it. (Actions don't live on the left anymore — its whole job is choosing what to act on.)
• Right — the viewer. Inspects whatever you picked and carries every action you can take on it. For a person: their full hand-drawn portrait, stats and tags, and the moves — pickpocket or attack an NPC, hire or beat down a recruit, jump or finish a rival, take out a lookout, carjack a passing car. Pick the 🏢 building row (or tap a map tile) and the viewer shows the block's card — building art, owner, defense, income — with everything you do on the block: enter/exit, buy or seize it, extort, collect the safe, your hideout upgrades, storage, production, cameras, rally your crew, gym training, repairs, traps, staffing your fronts, robbing it, the market, the car dealership and your garage, gear, training, a burner phone — plus a Travel button when the block is away.
• Top menu — switch the middle display. The bar over the map swaps the centre between the Map, your Character sheet (stats, skills, respect), your Inventory (equipped gear + stash), Crew management (roster, duties, the op launcher), your Assets (your ride with its real numbers, and every building you hold — tap a holding to open its full sheet in the viewer: revenue and the safe, prosperity and what's driving it, your staff, stored goods and production, defense, security, camera, hideout status, with Travel/Map/Op right there), the City registry, Rankings (bosses, gangs, graveyard) and dev Cheats.
• It fits your screen. On a big window the game is three columns — block list, map, viewer. Narrow it and the viewer drops underneath. Narrower still — or just short, a half-height window counts — and you get a single pane with a Here / Map / Details switcher at the top. Tap someone on a phone and it takes you straight to their details.
• Key & layers. Under the map, a collapsible card holds the map key and three switches: 🔥 Heat (the red wash over closely-watched blocks), 👥 People (the coloured dots) and 🚗 Traffic. Turn any of them off to read the city underneath.

• The Action log. The bar along the bottom is a scrolling log of everything that happens to you — every round of a fight, police calls and chases, hires and sales, trips and arrivals — each entry timestamped, newest at the bottom. Filter chips (⚔ 🚔 💼 ✈) let you mute categories you don't care about, and the ▾ button collapses the log to one line when you want the space.
• The left list stays live. People come and go on the world's clock — the selector refreshes its rows in place every few seconds, so you're never tapping a ghost. If someone you're inspecting leaves, the viewer says so.
• City is a navigation table: every built-up block in Rookport, grouped by kind of place (all the banks together, all the gun shops together…) with each group sorted closest-first from where you stand — one glance finds the nearest gym or dealership. Filter by type or district with the dropdowns, or search by name or coordinates. And you can search for an item — type "pistol", "roadster", "narcotics" or "phone", or just pick anything from the item dropdown — and the tab shows where to buy it — the nearest shops that sell it, ready to Travel to. From any row you can Travel there, jump the Map to it, or open the Op launcher targeting it.

You're not alone out there. Four AI-run gangs — the Marconi Family (mafia), the Iron Hogs MC (bikers), the Strays (punks) and the Eastside Kings (street gang) — work the same city with the same tools you have. They claim and expand their turf over time, so blocks you were eyeing may already be flying a rival's colours. Watch the Rankings panel to see who's holding how much of Rookport. And they don't just hold turf — they run it: gangs collect the takings from their buildings, staff their bars and shops with real employees (someone's behind the counter of a gang joint — with all that implies), convert captured buildings into stills and drug labs you can rob, and hit back when raided — a gang you've been hitting hires extra muscle and garrisons the block you struck. (Still deepening: dealers selling their product, armed-up soldiers, revenge raids.)

Speed & vehicles shorten travel. Your speed stat helps on foot; a vehicle makes trips faster and cheaper and lifts how much contraband you can haul:

Driving is drastic. On foot a tile takes a minute; a dealership car runs 2.5–4× walking pace (time AND action cost), and even a stolen beater nearly halves a trip — with the Driving skill cutting up to another 40%. The HUD always shows whether you're 🚗 behind a wheel or 🚶 on foot (with your real trip multiplier), trip estimates on the map use your actual ride, and the Assets tab shows your car's full numbers.

Your car is cover in a street fight. When you fight out on the block (not inside a building) with your ride beside you, you fight from behind it — a defense bonus that soaks some of the incoming damage, scaled to how big the car is (a small beater or roadster gives a little, a box truck is real cover). It applies against street NPCs, recruits and rival bosses alike — and a rival defending with their own car on the street gets the same benefit. Step inside a building and there's no car cover (it's out on the street). The Assets tab shows your ride's cover value.

Your car carries the crew — a big vehicle is a war wagon. On foot, a crew operation takes at most 5 of your muscle. But send your car along on the op and it carries up to the vehicle's passenger capacity — a box truck moves the whole gang (8) on one raid, while a nippy roadster is a 2-seat strike car. So when you want to throw real numbers at a target at once, you bring the big iron: the op launcher shows how many the ride seats when you tick "send my car," and the Assets tab lists each car's seats.

Your car has a trunk — its own cargo hold. Separate from the small load you carry on your person (~15 units), every car has a trunk with its own capacity (a box truck's holds a huge 500 units, a roadster only 60). On the Assets tab you can load contraband into the trunk and take it back out — stow product there to keep your pockets free, or move a big load across town in one trip. Two things fill it for you: when you send your car on a Rob raid, the haul that won't fit your pockets overflows into the trunk (so a box truck brings back far more loot than crew on foot could carry); and the trunk travels with the car — even when you boost a new ride, your contraband comes with you (up to the new trunk's size). Note the trunk stays with a car you park in the garage, so swap that car back out to get at its load.

Getting in and out of your car. Your ride shows as a row in the left panel on the block where it sits — select it to get in or out, or to open its trunk. You only get the travel speed-up and the car's cover in a street fight while you're actually in it; step out and you're on foot, with the car left parked on the block.

A parked car really stays where you left it. Get out and walk (or ride an op, or get hospitalized) and your car doesn't follow you — it sits parked on that block until you go back and get in again (the game tells you where it is if you try to use it from afar; its trunk is over there too, and you can't lend it to a crew run or garage it without fetching it first). And a parked car is exposed: any rival standing on that block can see it in their left panel and try to boost it — an owned car is a harder crack than a random street beater (locks, an alarm), but if they pull it off the whole car is gone, trunk cargo included, and you'll find a report telling you who took it. Boosting a rival's parked ride works the same in reverse: select it, size up the odds (Driving carries the job; it's loud, and you can't do it with the owner standing right there — protected newcomers' cars are off-limits), and Boost it; your old ride goes to your garage. Parking inside a garage or dealership (the Park button) keeps a car safe — it's the one left on the street that's at risk. (tuning)

Cars take damage — and get repaired. Your ride has a condition (0–100%): raids it's sent on as cover, boosting it in, and road chases all chip it down. Above ~60% it runs fine; below that it's slower on the road and thinner cover in a fight, and at 0% it's a wreck that won't drive at all. A carjacked street beater arrives already battle-worn. Fix it at a garage or car dealership — the 🔧 Repair button quotes the price (about $9 per missing point, cash). The Assets ride card and your-ride viewer show the condition. (tuning)

Gear wears out too. Every fight chips your (and your crew's) equipped weapon and armor a little, and gear stripped off a beaten mark comes damaged — 40–80% durability, shown as a 🔩 tag in the Inventory. A worn piece gives reduced attack/defense (down to half at 0%), so fresh-bought iron is genuinely better than battle loot. Take everything to a workshop and one button repairs every worn piece you own — equipped, stashed, and on your crew (about $2 per missing point). (tuning)

Attack from behind the car. When your crew hit a building with the car sent along, they don't rush in on foot — they fight from behind the vehicle's armor. The defenders' return fire is blunted, scaled to the car's size (a beater shaves a little off; a box truck soaks a real chunk), so a raid rolled in behind big iron costs you fewer casualties. It's never quite as strong as fighting from inside a fortified building, so a well-dug-in garrison still has the edge — but sending the car turns a raid from a foot charge into an armored assault.

Buy one at a car dealership — or boost one off the street. Standing outside on a block, click a car rolling past on the map (it opens in the viewer, art and all, with the Carjack button) or select the street car row in the left panel to open it in the viewer and hotwire it: the odds ride on Driving and Intelligence (Stealth keeps it quiet), it costs actions, and it draws heat and a police dispatch like any street crime. What you grab is a beater — a real ride, but always worse than anything on the dealership lot, so it's the early-game or in-a-pinch option. If you're already driving something better, you strip the boosted car for parts and pocket the dirty cash instead.

Your garage — you can own more than one car. Buying a new ride no longer throws your old one away: it's parked in your garage, and you can swap back to it any time. At a car dealership or a garage, the block panel shows your garage — Park your current ride to go on foot, or Take out any stored car to make it your active ride (whatever you were driving parks in its place). So you can keep a fast roadster for quick trips and a big box truck for hauling contraband, and switch between them as the job needs. You can also Sell a car you don't want — a dealership model fetches half its sticker, a boosted beater a small scrap value; either way it's cash in hand, dirty (car sales on this market don't come with paperwork).

Money: clean vs dirty

Your boss holds two purses:

• Clean cash — legit-business revenue, laundered funds. This is what buys and runs legitimate property.
• Dirty cash — the proceeds of crime: contraband sales, robbery, extortion, theft, and battlefield loot. Spendable on the black market, but it can't go fully legit until it's laundered.

Where money lands:

• Dirty income: selling contraband, robbing a till, pickpocketing, looting a defeated NPC, street crimes, theft.
• Clean income: collecting the safe from a legit business you own, and laundered money.
• Black-market spending (gear, vehicles, contraband buys, crew hire & wages, bribes, cameras, phones, informants, converting a facility) draws dirty money first, then clean.
• Laundering turns dirty into clean over time — that's what legal businesses with employees do (below).

Your net worth (the rankings score) counts both purses, plus contraband you're carrying and the value of buildings you own.

Making money — the criminal ladder

Early game — rob and shake down. With little to your name, the fastest money is street-level: pickpocket, rob or attack the civilians and shopkeepers on a block, and rob small shops for their till and stock.

Three ways to take from a person. Select anyone on the block and you get three moves. Attack (−15) skips the talking — straight into a real-time fight; put them down and everything they have is yours. Rob (−12) is the shakedown: an intimidation check comes first — if they fold they hand over their whole inventory (wallet, phone, worn gear, pocket goods) with no fight and less heat; if they don't, it turns into the same fight. Pickpocket (−8) is the quiet option: you slip into their pockets and take one chosen thing — their wallet, their phone, or a loose item they carry (the viewer lists what's in their pockets; people carry the odd pack of cigarettes, a bottle, worse in rougher company). Worn gear can't be lifted — that takes a fight. Stealth keeps a pickpocket quiet; a botch against someone who fights back can hurt.

Intimidation. When you rob an NPC, they may just fold — handing over their cash, phone, and gear with no fight and less heat — if you sufficiently out-menace them. Your menace comes from your fighting stats and level, your equipped weapon (weighted heavily), and your escorting crew; their nerve rises if they're armed or fight back. Unarmed civilians fold easily, and a weapon makes robbing them near-certain — this is the reliable early-game income loop. Armed marks and tougher NPCs are more likely to swing back, and police and SWAT never fold. The same weighing decides a robbery of a defended place: a building with guards inside, its owner standing there, or police on the block can only be robbed if you out-menace the whole defending force at once — and if they don't fold, a real-time fight breaks out then and there (you and your escort against all of them, behind whatever cover the building gives them), with the till and stock going to whoever wins. An undefended shop is still a clean walk-in. The game shows this before you commit, as an Intimidation gauge on the Rob button: it pits your side's total fighting power — everyone's HP + attack + defense — plus your intimidation stat against the defenders'. They fold only when you reach about 135% of their force; below that they'll fight even a battle they'd lose, so raw superiority isn't enough on its own — your intimidation stat is the lever that tips a close standoff into a fold. Police never fold. (Numbers are tuning.)

Street crimes. Quick jobs for dirty cash and XP, at rising cost and heat (tuning):

Trading off real shelves. Every shop's counter now sells real stock off real shelves: the corner store carries cigarettes, liquor and sundries; the gun shop guns and ammo; the bar drinks; the diner hot meals; the gym supplements; the dealership auto parts; the farm cheap produce at the source; ports and warehouses hold the big import stacks. The counter shows how many are on the shelf — buying draws that stock down for everyone, and a shop can genuinely be sold out until supply comes back. Selling puts your goods onto that shop's shelf — including stolen stock you're fencing.

Where the goods come from. The city's supply chain is real: factories turn out cigarettes, sundries and auto parts (and sell wholesale at the gate — cheapest in town after the source), farms grow produce, and the port lands imports off the boats — foreign liquor, cigarettes, guns and worse. Producer sites build up stock over the day, waiting for delivery runs — or for you to buy bulk cheap and haul it to where it sells dear. At the top of the price ladder sit the service venues: hotels (room service and the bar), casinos (comped drinks and smokes) and offices (the supply closet) pay the city's dearest prices for their stock.

Delivery trucks — watch the roads. When a shop runs low, a delivery truck loads at the nearest stocked producer and drives the streets to restock it — you can see the amber freight trucks driving the streets on the map, following the roads and turning at corners. Hold one up: catch a truck crossing your own block, click it, and stick it up — it costs actions, adds heat and draws the police, but the load is yours up to what you can carry. A robbed run never arrives: the shop it fed stays dry. That's the squeeze — starve a rival's front by hitting its suppliers, or camp the routes for freight worth stealing. (For goods without a local producer chain — drinks, meals, ammo — shelves still restock on their own over the day.)

Shortages move prices. A shop with bare shelves charges more for what little it has (up to about +60%) and pays over the odds for stock brought to its counter (up to about +30%) — so hauling goods into a starved shop is a real trade. And a shop that has nothing to sell earns its owner less until supply returns — cutting a supply line hits the owner's pocket, not just the shelf. (All numbers tuning.)

Contraband trading. The classic loop: buy cheap, move it, sell dear. Import hubs (ports, warehouses) price goods low; demand points (stores, crack houses, gun shops) price high. Black-market goods — cigarettes, bootleg liquor, narcotics, firearms, stolen phones — trade in dirty cash, and travel + crime add heat along the way.

Wholesale hubs — your supply line. The port and warehouses are wholesale vendors for contraband: because they import continuously, their black-market stock is deep — always available (you're never turned away by a bare shelf the way you are at a retail counter), and buying by the crate (10 at a time) gets you a wholesale discount (about 15% off). That makes the docks the reliable way to keep a street dealer stocked — far steadier than hoping robbery turns up product. Buy cheap in bulk at the hub, haul it to a demand venue or your dealer's corner, and sell high. The shop counter shows a 📦 Wholesale hub banner and a Buy 10 (bulk) button when you're at one.

Legal goods trade clean. The consumer goods (sundries, produce, meals, supplements, ammo, auto parts) are over-the-counter: legit counters take clean cash only and pay you clean when you sell. That opens honest buy-low/sell-high routes — farm produce to the diner, port sundries to the corner store — with no heat on the goods themselves.

Carrying & storing stock. On foot you can only carry a small load (~15 units) — you can't move much product on your person. A vehicle lifts that a lot (its carry bonus rides on top of your on-foot limit). Your car also has a trunk — its own separate hold (see Vehicles) that you load and unload on the Assets tab — good for moving a big load across town without a building. To hold real quantities, store goods in a building you own: deposit contraband into its storage (which holds far more than you can carry) and withdraw it later up to your carry room. Stored stock is robbable, so a stash worth keeping wants a guard on the block.

Production facilities. Own a building and convert it into an illegal facility that brews/cooks contraband into stock over time — then collect and sell the product at a demand venue. The rackets on offer depend on the building — you set up what fits the place:

• Moonshine still → liquor (~$2,000) — a bar, restaurant, hotel, dance club, casino, corner store, house or warehouse can run one (the speakeasy back room)
• Drug lab → narcotics (~$3,500) — a warehouse, workshop, house, restaurant, hotel, dance club, casino or gym (the gym as a juice/steroid lab)
• Chop shop → auto parts (~$2,500) — a garage, car dealership, warehouse or workshop strips cars for pieces
• Gunsmithing bench → firearms (~$4,000) — a workshop, garage or warehouse turns out illegal guns
• Bootleg-cigarette room → cigarettes (~$1,500) — a corner store or warehouse runs untaxed smokes

(Costs are tuning.) You can only set up a racket that suits the building — you can't put a chop shop in a bar. Converting a legit front lets its legal staff go (they don't run a lab). Station crew on worker duty at a facility to boost its output (+50% each — see Crew).

Protection rackets. Instead of taking a shop over, you can extort an unowned NPC business on your tile for protection money — a daily dirty cut (a share of its prosperity-scaled income) that you skim for as long as you hold the racket, without owning or running the place. A more prosperous shop pays a bigger cut, but extorting it also slows its prosperity growth (you're bleeding its profit). Player-owned businesses are immune — you can't run a racket on another boss's front. To hold a racket against rivals, station a guard (a crew member on guard duty) on the block: their presence blocks other players from robbing or muscling in on it. Without a guard, a stronger rival can take the racket over. Claiming the building outright ends any racket on it and switches you to its full clean income.

Like a robbery, a shakedown targets the owner: an undefended or cowed owner pays up on the spot, but a defended business — a rival's criminal guards, a bank's armed guards, an armed gun-shop owner — will fight back, and the racket is yours only if you win. The intimidation gauge on the Extort button tells you which it'll be before you commit (criminal guards and police never fold, so those are always a fight).

Legal businesses & laundering. Own a legit-front building (bar, casino, restaurant, hotel, convenience store, gym, car dealership, garage, or workshop) and staff it with civilian employees (up to 4 per building). Each employee, per day (tuning):

• draws a wage (~$50),
• adds clean income to the building's safe (~$130),
• and launders dirty money into clean, up to ~$220, minus a 15% cut.

Miss payroll and the staff walk. This is the front-end that turns a pile of dirty money legit — collect the clean income from the safe like any owned building.

A straight life — legal work

You don't have to be a criminal. You can hold down an honest legal job for a steady, clean paycheck — lower than crime, but no heat and no risk.

• You start employed. A fresh boss already holds a convenience-store clerk job near their spawn — enough to cover the starter apartment's rent. To change jobs: step inside another legal venue (convenience store, bar, restaurant, hotel, casino, bank, gym, garage, workshop, factory, warehouse, farm, gun shop, car dealership, office…) and hit Work here. The convenience store hires anyone; better-paid jobs need a minimum stat — brains (Intelligence) for a bank teller, muscle (Strength) for labour, quickness (Speed) for service work, and so on. Salaries run from about $120/day (clerk) up to $300/day (bank teller).
• Clock in. You earn only while parked inside your workplace during the day shift. The city runs a 12-hour day / 12-hour night on New York time — you're paid from 6am to 6pm NY, nothing overnight. Your status bar shows 🌞 day / 🌙 night and your job. Leave the building, travel away, or let night fall and the salary stops; come back and clock in again.
• Switch jobs any time by applying somewhere else, or Quit to go unemployed. You hold one job at a time.
• Apply from your phone. With a burner, the phone's Legal jobs list shows the nearest opening for every job you qualify for — get hired from anywhere in the city without walking in. You still have to travel to the venue and clock in on the day shift to earn, and you can Quit from the phone too.

Your home is a real block. Everyone lives somewhere, and your residence is an actual housing building on the map — you start in a cheap unit on the nearest housing block to your spawn. Stand on any housing block and the block card shows how many units it has, how many are taken, and what a unit costs; if there's one free you can 🔑 Move in (4 actions plus the first day's rent) and that becomes home. There are three grades:

Rent scales with the district on top of that — ~$60/day in the greenbelt, ~$80 in Little Sicily where you start, $180 downtown. You can ⬆️ move up a grade any time you're standing in your own place and can pay for it.

The home locker. Your place holds goods off your body — stow them from the block card. Anything in the locker is safe from a street death, where a killer strips only what you're carrying. (An eviction, though, hands the lot to your landlord.)

Cover at home. Get jumped inside your own place and the walls count: a better grade adds real defense to the fight.

Rent, arrears and eviction. Rent comes out of your clean cash over time. What you can't cover doesn't vanish — it piles up as arrears, shown on your cash line and the block card. One day behind and your landlord sends word. Three days behind and you're evicted: the unit goes to someone else, everything in your locker is forfeit, and you're at 🏚 no fixed address until you sign a new lease. Your entry-level clerk job more than covers a starter unit, so an honest civilian life pays its own way — it's living beyond your means that gets you thrown out.

The city is full of tenants — and you can be the landlord. Every housing block holds civilians: a few families in a Little Sicily row house, a couple in a greenbelt farmhouse, and dozens in the skyscraper apartment towers downtown. They all pay rent to whoever owns the building. Buy a housing block and that rent lands in its safe every day — the quietest income in Rookport: no shelves to stock, no staff to pay, no heat. A full downtown tower is one of the better earners in the game, and nobody comes looking for it.

You're protected until your first crime. A brand-new boss who hasn't committed any crime yet can't be attacked by other players — a grace period to find your feet, earn a stake, and learn the ropes. The protection ends the instant you commit your first crime (a shakedown, a fight, a robbery, a pickpocket — anything), and there's no going back: once you've stepped into the underworld, you're fair game. Your status bar shows 🕊️ protected newcomer while it lasts.

It's the safe way to build a starting stake — and the honest path if you'd rather run a clean life than a criminal one.

They ring you back. Applying by phone doesn't hire you on the spot: you put an application in and wait for the call, and the better the pay the longer they take about it (tuning) — a dish pit gets back to you in minutes, a bank job keeps you hanging the better part of an hour. When they call, it lands in your 🔔 Alerts and the offer sits on the phone under Applications with Take it or Pass. Leave them waiting too long (about six hours) and the position goes to someone else. You can have several applications out at once; taking one closes the rest.

Buildings & property

Materialize and interact with the building on your tile:

• Buy an unowned, claimable venue from the city outright with clean money (price scales to its earning power, minimum $500). What you buy is a legitimate, legal building — there's no free "take it over" claim any more. You then turn it into an earner by converting it (below). The other ways to acquire property: shake down an NPC business with protection extortion for a daily cut without owning it, or take a rival's tiles after eliminating them (see below).
• Seize a beaten rival's tiles. A rival's property only opens up once you've permanently killed the owning player's character for the round (a kill, not just a wounding — while that boss is alive or recovering, their tiles stay theirs). Even then it isn't free: you buy the eliminated rival's building at a discount (about 40% off the city price, clean cash). And their leftover defenses are still live — any garrison the fallen owner stationed there still holds the block, so you clear the guards first (an Attack op, or take them out in person) before the deed will change hands. Once seized it's a normal holding of yours: convert it, guard it, upgrade it. (Traps and bombs left on a seized tile come with the demolition/explosives work.)
• Convert a legal building into an illegal racket / production facility suited to its type — e.g. turn a warehouse into a drug lab, and other type-appropriate operations (a still, etc.). This is what turns a legit front into contraband income (dirty). See Production below.
• Demolish & rebuild. On a tile you own you can tear a building down and rebuild it as a different type — expensive, but it lets you repurpose a plot into whatever you need.
• Collect the accrued safe income from a building you own (legit racket income is clean).
• Rob a building's till + shelf stock (15 actions). This is loud — it spikes heat and local police presence, and the loot is dirty. You haul off as much of the shelves as you can carry, and the shop is genuinely emptier for every shopper after you; its till refills after a cooldown (~45 min) and its shelves restock gradually. If the place is defended — an armed guard or the owner inside, or police on the block — the robbery isn't free: you either cow the whole defending force into standing aside, or it turns into a real-time fight (you and your escort against all of them) and you only haul the loot if you win. An undefended shop is a clean walk-in. You can't rob a building you own — or one you run protection on: you don't shake down the places you're already skimming, so the rob option won't appear there.
• Install a camera (~$750, tuning) on a building you own for standing vision of that tile (you still need a phone to watch the feed remotely).

Plain houses yield no passive income — you have to convert them to earn.

Prosperity. Every income-earning building you own carries a prosperity multiplier on its income that climbs the longer it runs undisturbed (up to ×3.0), and gets knocked back when it's robbed or attacked. A business you hold safe for a long stretch earns far more than a fresh one — so protecting your places (and hitting your rivals') matters. The owned-building panel shows the current multiplier and effective income. (Numbers are tuning.)

Your staff are real people. A staffable storefront (bar, casino, restaurant, hotel, corner store, gym, dealership, garage, workshop) is run by named employees who physically stand in the building — you'll see them among the people on the block, and yes, someone can rob the till past them or even kill your employee (you lose the worker).

• The former owner comes with the deed. Buy an operating business and its old owner stays on as your first employee — they know the trade, and their stats show it. They're usually the best hand you'll have early.
• Every trade wants something different. The panel tells you what — muscle for the gym, brains at the casino, quick feet behind the bar. Every person has a work efficiency for that trade, derived from their stats: it sets how fast the business's prosperity grows. A well-suited crew compounds your income; a bad hire has negative efficiency and actively drags prosperity down until you let them go.
• Two ways to hire. Hire off the block takes whoever's standing there — unvetted: you never saw their stats, so their fit is a gamble you discover on the job. Or post a hiring ad (small clean fee): locals visiting the venue apply for the job, and each application shows the stat sheet — judging whether those stats fit the trade is on you. Posting an ad always turns up at least one good prospect, and each applicant's fit for the trade is colour-coded — green for a good fit, red for a poor one that would work at a loss — so you can tell at a glance who's worth hiring (on the block panel and in the phone inbox alike).
• Wages still rule — and track quality. Staff draw daily wages (miss payroll and the whole staff walks), earn the front clean income, and wash your dirty money — as before. A hire's wage now reflects their quality: a star worker demands more, a poor fit at least comes cheap (the panel shows your real daily bill). Fire anyone by name from the panel; they shrug off the apron and melt back into the crowd.
• Hiring by phone. Carry a burner phone and the floating 📞 handset opens your hiring inbox: every application pending across ALL your businesses, each with the trade's demands and the applicant's full stat sheet — hire or pass from anywhere in the city, no trip back to the shop. (No phone? Corner stores and gun shops sell burners for $200.) Your phone is an item you equip in the Inventory tab: buy or lift one to own it, then equip it to switch on its feeds and the 📞 handset — unequip any time to put it away (you keep it).

Crew

Hire muscle at underworld venues — bars, casinos, gyms, and crack houses. There's no roster cap: the only limit is the daily wage bill you can afford. Hiring checks you can pay the fee and still cover a full day of your whole crew's salary; overreach and you'd miss payroll on the next tick and the crew would walk.

There are no fixed archetypes — every recruit is an individual with their own name and their own rolled stats. What you see at a venue is that night's line-up of specific people, each showing their ⚔ attack, 🛡 defense, ❤ health, a one-time hire fee, and a daily wage — and the fee is set by how good their stats are (better crew cost more). Hover any stat for a plain-English tooltip. The line-up refreshes over time, and once you hire someone they leave it. You don't have to be standing there to look: click any recruit venue on the map and the viewer previews that night's line-up — portraits, tiers, attack/defense and hire fees — so you can spot a venue worth the trip, then tap a face to route straight over (you still hire once you're on the block).

Quality tiers & portraits. Every recruit and crew member has a quality tier — Common, Rare, Epic, or Legendary (shown as a coloured badge). The tier sets how strong they are as a share of your own stat budget at their level: a Common is built to about 70% of what a player has at that level, a Rare ~85%, an Epic ~100% (a match for you), and a Legendary ~120% (sharper than you). It also drives how rare they are to find (Legendary are extremely rare) and their hire fee and daily wage. Their points always land as a sensible fighter's spread — a solid base across Strength, Accuracy and Speed, with the odd one specialising (a real bruiser, or a sharp negotiator) — never dumped into a single useless stat. Gear stacks on top of all this. Classier venues turn up rarer crew — a back-alley crack house is mostly Common street muscle, while the casino and gym draw the sharper, tougher set. Each block shows just one or two recruits at a time (the line-up refreshes over time), so shopping around venues matters. Each tier has its own hand-drawn portrait that evolves across the ten levels, getting visibly richer and more dangerous as it rises.

Who you can command. Two gates on hiring: you can't recruit anyone above your own level, and better tiers need Respect — a bigger name commands better crew. Roughly, Rare wants a little Respect, Epic a solid reputation, and Legendary a serious one; below the bar the hire is refused, and the recruit's card shows exactly how much Respect the tier needs (and how much you have). Build your reputation — win fights, take turf, kill rivals — and the higher tiers open up.

Recruits are full characters. Every recruit carries the same four primary stats you do (Strength, Accuracy, Speed, Intelligence), shown on their card, and those four primaries drive their fighting numbers exactly the way yours drive yours — a high-Strength goon hits harder and carries more health, a high-Speed one dodges and soaks better, and their weapon and skills factor in on top. So a crew member is a genuine fighter, not a flat stat line, and the ⚔/🛡 you see on their card is the real power they bring. Their card also shows your boss's level next to theirs, so you can see at a glance whether you're allowed to hire them.

They come equipped. Higher-tier, higher-level recruits arrive already wearing gear and carrying some pocket cash — and the hire fee prices all of it in. So there's no free lunch in buying someone and stripping them: you paid for the kit (which you can take back to your stash) and you pocket their cash when you hire them. Their card shows exactly what they carry before you commit.

Some recruits are veterans who've already leveled up, arriving with higher primaries and level for their tier. Combat contribution: a crew member's attack adds to yours when you strike and their defense soaks damage when you're hit (escorting crew only — garrisoned crew hold their block instead) — all derived from their own four primaries plus their gear and skills, so who you hire genuinely shapes how they fight. Crew are fighters in their own right: many come with their own combat skills (Killer, Tough-as-nails, Heavy weapon), shown on their card, that raise the damage they add and soak — better-tier, higher-level recruits come better trained, and promoting a crew member sharpens their skills too.

Your bodyguards take the hits for you — and they can be wounded or killed. In any fight, incoming damage lands on your escorting bodyguards before it reaches you — they have to be cut down before an enemy can touch you (which is why bodyguards are worth their wage). A crew member who's beaten down is hospitalized: they can't fight or shield you and stop adding attack/defense until they heal back over time on the world-tick, just like you do. A hard enough blow — or bad luck on a knockout — kills them outright: they're gone from your roster for good and any gear they were wearing is lost with them. So a geared-up crew is a real investment you can lose in a bad scrap, and a wounded escort is temporarily off the board until they recover. Your crew panel shows who's recovering and your escort's current fighting bonus reflects only the crew fit to fight.

Duties — assign each crew member a job:

• Bodyguard (default) — escorts you; their attack/defense add to yours in your fights, and they bank XP from those fights.
• Guard — garrisons the tile you're on: adds to that building's defense, relays you vision of the block, and blocks rival players from robbing or muscling in on a business you own or extort there.
• Worker — staffs a production facility you own on the tile, boosting its output +50% each.
• Dealer — sells your stored contraband for you, over time, for dirty money. Stock them at an owned building that holds product (they auto-draw from its storage and refill as they run low, up to a working quantity you set). Dealing inside your matching demand venue (narcotics in a crack house, liquor in a bar/casino, etc.) is safe; dealing on the street (any owned block that isn't the matching venue) pays a higher price per unit but is dangerous — a street dealer draws heat and can be robbed, arrested, or killed. A crew member's Intelligence (plus the Dealer and Relation skills) is street-smarts here: it lifts a dealer's take (up to +40%, the same trade-edge you get on your own deals), so a brainy hire is the one to put on a corner — where a Strength/Accuracy/Speed bruiser is wasted, an Intelligence/Dealer/Relation specialist finally earns their keep.

Manual promotion. Crew earn XP two ways: bodyguards bank extra from your fights, and every crew member gains XP over time for whatever duty you've put them on — a guard watching a block, a worker running a still, a dealer working a corner all get better at the job just by doing it (rates are tuning). When one has banked enough, you can promote them for a cash tribute — raising their level, lifting their daily wage, and advancing their portrait to the next look in their tier. You assign every point they earn — a promotion banks both a stat point (a +STR / +ACC / +SPD / +INT picker) and a skill point (pick a skill) on their card, and you decide where each goes. Nothing auto-assigns. That's why hiring a level-1 recruit is the most valuable: you shape their entire build from scratch. A veteran you hire already-leveled just arrives with those earlier levels pre-spent (their backstory) — you build them only from where you found them.

How fast points come depends on their tier, so they hold their share of a player at every level: a Legendary earns about 1.2 of each point per promotion (most levels, occasionally two at once), an Epic exactly one, and a Common about 0.7 — roughly a point every one-and-a-half levels, banking the leftover toward the next. Their card shows the rate and how many levels until the next point.

Crew skills. Skill points go into the same skills you train, limited to the ones that actually help a crew member. A crew member's skill mirrors what it does for you, minus the part that can't apply to a subordinate. So far that's: Killer, Tough-as-nails and Heavy weapon (their fighting); Dealer and Relation, which — with Intelligence — lift a crew member's take on dealer duty (the same trade-edge you get on your own buys and sells); and three more:

• Stealth — their crimes make less heat, and a street dealer with Stealth is harder to catch (fewer busts, robberies and killings out on the corner).
• Driving — the best driver aboard sets the car's speed. A skilled wheelman in your escort makes your own trips faster even if you can't drive a lick, and a good driver sent on an op makes the detachment arrive and return quicker (when you lend it your car).
• Leadership — on any tile, the single highest-Leadership friendly organises the defense, hardening every other friendly's defense by a set % per their Leadership level (no stacking — only the best leader's aura counts). It works for your escort in a fight, a garrison holding a block, and an op detachment alike. (For you, Leadership still also trims crew hiring, promotion and wage costs.)

Every crew skill now has a real effect. You choose who to invest in and always assign the points yourself — and you can also park crew at a gym to level them up hands-free over time (see "Train crew at a gym" below).

Give your workers an escort. A crew member working out on the map — a dealer on a corner, a guard on a block (and soon a spy on enemy turf) — can be handed a retinue of your other crew plus a car, right on their card. Pick free bodyguards to protect them and assign a car from your garage. The retinue means: they're far harder to rob, bust or kill while working; when trouble does come, a bodyguard takes the fall (wounded, or killed on bad luck) instead of you losing the worker; the best driver aboard speeds them (and their car) around; and the whole team carries much more — each bodyguard adds carrying capacity and the car's trunk stacks on top, so a guarded dealer holds a far bigger working stock between refills. Disband the detail any time and everyone returns to your side (the car back to the garage). It costs you nothing extra beyond the crew's usual wages — but those bodyguards are off escorting you while they're on the detail, so you're a little thinner at your own side.

Send a spy onto enemy turf. Any free crew member can be sent to spy on a tile you don't own — select the enemy block on the map, then hit 🔍 spy tile on the crew member. They travel there and relay that building's live intel back to you in real time — its defense, how many guards, its till cash, stored goods and what it's producing — right on their crew card. A spy auto-returns to HQ 22 hours after you send them (if you gave them an escort, the car and bodyguards pick them up at that exact moment — a safe ride home), then rests 2 hours before they can go out again. Detection is absolute: your spy is invisible unless the tile's owner — or one of their guards — has a higher Spying skill than your spy, so a maxed-out spy can never be spotted (and a high-level guard on your own turf is how you catch theirs). A detected spy is exposed and can be jumped — which is exactly when the escort earns its keep, taking the hit so your spy limps home instead of being lost. Build a crew member's Spying skill to make them a better, harder-to-catch spy.

Rig traps on your turf (Security technician). If you — or a guard you've stationed on a block you own — carries the Security technician skill, you can rig traps on that building's card, and they defend it against a raiding crew op. Different traps do different things: a spring-gun charge hits the raiders for damage, a tripwire alarm braces your guards (a stiffer counter-attack) and sends you a louder warning, and barricades & caltrops bog the raiders down and blunt their attack — with more kinds to come. Detection is absolute, like a spy: an attacking crew only spots and disarms a trap if their own Security-tech is higher than the trap's level, so a max-level trap can never be beaten (and the trap's level is set by the Security-tech of whoever rigged it — build it high on a guard and your turf becomes a fortress). And disarming takes time: while the raiders work the wires, a garrison that can still shoot keeps firing on them, so a higher-level trap they can beat still bleeds them — traps and stationed guards are far nastier together than either alone. Seize a block and you clear the old owner's traps with it.

Salaries are paid every tick from your cash (dirty first). Keep the money flowing or the crew walks.

Burn a rival's building down (Arsonist). Bring a crew member with the Arsonist skill on an Attack or Rob op and they'll torch the building as they go through — real structural damage (more the higher their Arsonist level). Every building has a structure bar (shown on its block card): a fire-damaged place earns less and defends worse until it's fixed, and at zero it's gutted. It's the way to grind a rival's turf down instead of just skimming it — soften a fortified block over a couple of raids, then move in. Arson is only set on Attack and Rob, never on a Capture (you want the place standing when you take it). If it's your building that got torched, Repair it back to full on its block card for cash — the sooner the better, since it's bleeding income while it burns.

Razed to the ground. A Destroy op that drives a structure to zero doesn't just gut it — it levels the place. A razed building is a smoking ruin (its block card shows a 💥 RAZED banner): it earns nothing, produces nothing, its shelves stay empty, its staff are gone — and every upgrade, trap and camera it had is lost in the blast. NPC businesses rebuild themselves in about a day (police stations, hospitals and the like faster — the city looks after its own), and the AI gangs patch their sites up too. But a player's ruin never comes back on its own: the owner has to stand on it and pay to 🏗️ Rebuild (clean cash, scaled to the building's size) — and then buy back every upgrade from scratch. Leveling a rival's fortified hideout is the most lasting blow you can land on their operation.

Train crew at a gym. Stand at a gym and a free crew member gets a train here button — park them there and they work out and level up on their own over time, no fights and no promotion fee needed. It's slow, and the levels they earn still bank their stat and skill points for you to assign (you always choose the build), so it's the patient, hands-off way to raise a recruit while you're busy elsewhere. The catch is they're exposed while training: a rival can send an Attack op at the gym to jump your trainees. If that happens, the crew member being hit and every other crew member you have training at that same gym fight back together as a group. Gyms are shared ground — you might find a rival training right next to you, and it's up to each of you whether to leave it be or start something. Pull a trainee off any time by reassigning them (escort, guard, etc.).

Operations — send a crew raid

You don't have to be standing on a tile to hit it. From the Crew panel you can dispatch a detachment of your escorting crew — up to five — to any tile as a timed operation. They march there on their own, and when they reach the target the raid plays out as a real fight over several turns — no more instant result — trading blows a beat at a time until it's decided, then the op reports the outcome (a live Operations tracker in the left column counts the trip down and then follows the fight to its result). You stay put and keep acting while they're away — but the crew you send are off escorting you until they get back, so you're less protected in the meantime.

Pick the target tile by tapping it on the map (the launcher targets your currently selected tile), choose the crew to send, pick the op type, and launch. Mounting an op costs you actions scaled to the distance. Only crew on escort duty and fit to fight can go — garrisoned, working, dealing, wounded, or already-deployed crew can't. If you own a car, tick 🚗 Send my car to hand it to the detachment: they drive, so the run arrives faster, a Rob hauls more (overflowing into the car's trunk), the ride can carry more crew (its passenger seats become the detachment cap), and the crew fight from behind its armor on the raid — the defenders' return fire is blunted, scaled to the car's size. Your car can only be out on one op at a time.

The operations you can run:

• Redeploy — march the detachment to the tile and dig them in as guards there. This is how you position auto-defense on a block you care about without walking over yourself.
• Scout — send crew to quietly case a building and slip back. They bring home its defense, how many guards are on it, its till cash, stored goods and what it's producing — recon before you commit real muscle to a raid. No fight, no heat.
• Attack — hit whoever holds the tile. If a rival is standing there, your crew beat them down into the hospital — but a crew-only op can never finish the kill: permanently killing a player still requires you to be there in person for the finishing blow. If no rival is present, your crew rout the owner's garrison (sending their guards to the hospital) and rough up the block's trade.
• Rob — crack a building for one resource — money (its till cash) or goods (contraband) — and haul it home. If the place is guarded, your crew have to beat the garrison first, or they're driven off empty-handed.
• Capture — beat the building's defenders and seize it outright: it becomes yours and the surviving crew stay to hold it as its new guards. An unowned spot falls easily; a rival-held one is a real fight against its defense and garrison.
• Destroy — beat the defenders and wreck the place: your crew steal the cash on the premises (cash is stolen, never burned), burn the stock, and do heavy structural damage — far more with an Arsonist on the crew. Drive the structure to zero and the building is razed (see below). The loudest kind of raid: double heat and police presence.
• Massacre — people over property: your crew fight everyone on the block — the garrison, the staff, the street — and finish the ones who go down. Rival crew are killed outright (not wounded), NPCs and staff die, and the business is left reeling. A boss caught in the middle is only ever hospitalised — a crew can never permanently kill a player. As loud as it gets: double heat and police presence, and your name gets heavier for it.

How they mean to fight — the engagement. An Attack now asks how, not just where:

• ⚔ Storm it — the standard raid: hit the block head-on the moment they arrive.
• 🌒 Ambush — don't storm it, lie in wait. Your crew hide on the block for about 45 minutes and jump the first enemy who walks in, with the element of surprise behind them (a big attack bonus). It's the quiet play: no heat at all until it springs. If nobody comes, they give up and come home empty-handed. Pair it with a rival's known route — or with the block you know they have to come back to.
• ⛓ Siege — ring the block for about an hour instead of storming it. Nothing gets in or out: anyone walking in is fought at the line, and so is anyone trying to leave — a boss caught inside can't just travel away. While the ring holds, the building earns its owner nothing. It's the loud play: the owner is warned the moment it goes up, and the law notices.

Take the back streets. Tick it on any op and the crew route around the patrols instead of straight through: the run takes about 40% longer, but the job draws roughly 70% less heat and police attention when it goes down. The patient way to hit something without bringing the city down on you.

Know before you go. The launcher tells you what you actually know about the target — live intel if you have eyes on it, your last-known picture with its age if you don't, or a flat warning that you've never scouted it. If the numbers are too old to bet men on, send a Scout first (see "Vision & intel").

The family fights together. If you're in a clan, the launcher also lists your family's operations in flight. Check some crew and hit Send men to reinforce a made man's job: your detachment travels from where you are, and if it arrives while the fight is still on, it joins the attack mid-fight. If the fighting is already over, they dig in and hold the block instead.

The detachment's strength is the attack and gear of the crew you send, weighed against the target's defenses — so send enough muscle. Whoever loses the exchange takes wounds and deaths of their own (the same crew-combat rules as any fight). Survivors then walk back home — a trip as long as the way out — and while they're returning they're not at your side: they can't escort you, hold a block, or be sent out again until they arrive, and the Operations tracker shows how many crew are heading home and when they'll be back. (The exceptions are a won Capture or a Redeploy — those crew hold the ground they took instead of coming home.) So sending crew on a long op leaves you thinner for a while. An op is loud — it raises your heat and the target block's police presence.

Your turf fights back — garrison auto-defense. The flip side: when a rival sends an op at a building you hold, the guards you've stationed there defend it automatically — they bring their own attack to bear on the raiders (on top of the building's defense bonus), so a well-garrisoned block is genuinely hard to crack, and your guards can hospitalise attackers just as they can be hospitalised. Whatever the outcome, a defense report lands in your left-hand panel — telling you who hit which building, whether your garrison held, and what your guards or your property lost — so you find out even if you were offline when it happened. Dismiss the reports once you've read them. Stationing crew as guards on your earners (the "guard here" duty) is now real protection, not just a defense-stat bump.

And now you see it coming. When a hostile crew op is on its way to a building you own, a live ⚠️ Raid inbound alert appears in your left panel — who's attacking, which block, how many raiders, and a countdown to impact. One tap on Send guards redeploys up to five of your free crew to that block (or Pick crew to choose the detachment). If they land before the raid, they're stationed in time to reinforce the garrison — a fatter defense at resolve. And since raids play out over several turns, crew who land while the fight is already raging rush straight into it — they join the defenders' line mid-fight (in front of the building itself), so even a late rally can turn the tide. You get the warning because it's your own turf; you don't have to be standing on it.

Call in everyone — the emergency rally. When "Send guards" (your handful of free crew) isn't enough, hit 🚨 Call ALL units on the raid alert — or 🚨 Rally all crew here on any block you own — and you phone every crew member you can reach and rush them all to that block at once: guards pulled off other blocks, dealers off their corners, crew training at a gym, your escort, everyone. Each one travels from wherever they are, so the crew nearby arrive first — and whoever beats the raid's countdown garrisons the building and stands in the defense, while those farther out straggle in behind it. It's a real scramble: crew already away on an op, walking home from one, or in the hospital can't answer, and everyone who does answer drops what they were doing (a dealing corner goes quiet, a training grind pauses, another block loses its guard) — so it's the button you mash when a block truly matters, not a routine move. You need a phone to make the call.

The AI gangs raid too. The four rival gangs don't just buy turf — they send their own crews out on the same raids you can, hitting buildings you (or a rival gang) own near their territory. So the threat is real even before another human comes after you: hold property near a gang's turf and you may get a defense report saying their crew tried to rob or seize it. Your garrison defends against them exactly as it would against a player. The gangs leave the newbie-safe blocks around the spawn alone, so a brand-new player's first place is safe.

And they hold grudges. Hit a gang's turf and expect an answer: a raided gang muscles up, re-garrisons the block you struck — and sends a revenge crew at YOUR nearest holding, reaching further than their ordinary raids. (Gangs avenge each other's raids too, so gang-vs-gang wars flare up on their own.) Their soldiers now come armed off the same gear tables your crew uses — pistols, kit, their own combat skills — so gang muscle hits noticeably harder than it used to. And their rackets actually run: a gang still or drug lab gets a street dealer stationed on the tile, pulling the product and selling it for the gang's war chest — find the dealer, hit the site before it's sold out, or cut the racket down entirely.

Gear & equipment

Wearable gear modifies combat across five slots — head, chest, vest, legs, weapon. Buy at the relevant shop — the stock shows up right in the On this block panel while you're standing there — loot it off defeated marks, keep it in your stash, then equip it (from Inventory & gear) or hand it to a crew member. You can also take a crew member's gear back to your stash or move it between them — each equipped piece has a take button on the crew panel — so you can kit out whoever's riding with you. Catalog (tuning):

A weapon is the single biggest early-game upgrade — it makes robbing unarmed marks far safer.

Combat

You can attack NPCs (civilians, shopkeepers, gangsters, police, SWAT) and rival players on your tile — tap their row in the left panel, or click their dot right on the map when they're on your own block: either way they open in the viewer, portrait and stats and all, with everything you can do to them — pickpocket or attack a street NPC, jump or finish a rival, take out a rival's lookout. (The ones you see are the ones you act on.) Roughly (tuning):

Every fight — a rival boss, a street NPC, a recruit brawl — plays out as a multi-round engagement: a blow-by-blow exchange shown round by round, not one swing. Street marks can bolt mid-fight when they're hurt (a beaten recruit who flees leaves the venue's line-up), and any fight can end with you in the hospital. Your weapon decides how you fight: a gun (Pistol, SMG) fights ranged off Accuracy; a melee arm (Baseball bat from a corner store, Trench knife from a gun shop) or bare fists fight Strength-driven melee.

• Each round you strike and, if they're still standing, the target strikes back — so jumping a rival is a real risk: a bad fight can put you in the hospital too. Bodyguards earn their keep here (they soak hits and must be cut down before anyone reaches you).
• Attacks can miss. If your best weapon is a gun you fight ranged — your Accuracy vs their dodge decides the hit (bigger damage, more misses); otherwise you fight melee, which is Strength-driven and reliable.
• A hurt loser can flee and get away — a fast, high-Speed boss (helped by Driving) slips the fight more often, and the rival you jump can bolt too, so a knockdown is never guaranteed.
• Rough numbers (tuning): offense ≈ melee Strength×4 + level + weapon or ranged weapon + Heavy-weapon, + Accuracy, plus escorting crew; defense ≈ armor + Speed×2 + level (+ Tough-as-nails); Max HP = 30 + Strength×6 (+ Tough-as-nails).

Win and you can loot the loser's cash (dirty), phone, and gear, and you earn XP scaled to how hard the fight was — a tooled-up gangster or SWAT trooper is worth far more than a soft civilian. Killing police or SWAT is loud and piles on heat. Lose a fight and you don't die — you go to the hospital (see below); only a rival player, present in person, can finish an already-downed boss for the kill. Some NPCs fight back and some don't — and robbing a defended place (guards, the owner, or police present) means cowing them all at once or fighting them right there.

Fights play out live. When you start a fight — jumping an active rival player, a street NPC, or a recruit — it no longer resolves in a flash — it opens a ⚔️ Fight panel that plays out a turn every ~5 seconds, streaming the blow-by-blow as it happens: your side (you + your bodyguards) against theirs, HP ticking down, crew dropping. You can hit 🏃 Flee on any turn to try to break off — a fast, high-Speed boss (helped by Driving) slips away more often, and a failed try just costs you that turn. A fresh rival can still only be beaten to the hospital this way; the kill needs a separate finishing blow once they're down. It cuts both ways: if a rival jumps you, the same panel appears and you choose to flee or ride it out.

(Every fight now plays out in real time in the ⚔️ Fight panel — player-vs-player, street NPCs, and recruit brawls alike — a turn every ~5 seconds, with Flee available on any turn. An intimidation shakedown, which ends with no fight at all, still resolves at once.)

Surrender instead of taking a beating. In a fight against another boss, the Fight panel gives you a 🏳️ Surrender button next to Flee. Throw in the towel and the fight ends at once — you're taken alive as a prisoner rather than risking the hospital or, if you were already down, a finishing blow. It's the sensible play when a fight's gone against you and you'd rather lose some cash than your character.

Getting captured. When you surrender to a rival, they haul you off to a holding — a purpose-built holding installation or a bunker brig if the fight was fought at one (tough to escape), otherwise their own hideout back room (easier). While you're held you can't act on the world — no travelling, crimes, or ops — but a 🔒 panel shows your options: try to break out, or deal over ransom. No one holds you forever — there's a hard max hold (currently ~48h) after which you're automatically let go.

Ransom. Your captor can put a price on your head (paid from your dirty cash). It's a real negotiation: they demand a number, and you pay & walk, counter with your own figure, or refuse outright — a counter bounces the decision back to them. The moment both sides agree, the money changes hands and you're released on the spot. Holding a prisoner? Your 🔗 Your prisoners panel is the other side of the same deal — demand, haggle, settle, or just let them go.

Breaking out. You don't have to wait for a ransom. From the captive panel you can spend actions on an escape attempt three ways — 💪 Fight out (Strength + Killer), 🤫 Sneak out (Stealth + Spying), or 🏃 Bolt (Driving + Speed) — each showing your live odds, which get worse the tougher the installation, the more guards are posted, and if the captor is there watching. 🔎 Scavenge first to turn up a shiv that boosts your next break. A failed attempt costs you a little HP and tips off your captor, and there's a short cooldown between tries — so pick your moment.

Springing an ally. Captives can be rescued from the outside: send a crew raid (Attack/Rob) at the block where they're held, and winning it frees everyone held there. A prisoner stashed in a well-guarded installation is hard to reach; one in a lightly held back room is a softer target.

(This capture-and-ransom system is the same "confinement" machinery the future jail will run on — surrender/escape/rescue will all work the same way when the law starts locking players up.)

Hurt marks run. A street NPC or recruit you're beating down doesn't politely wait for the end — once they're badly hurt (roughly under a third of their health) they break for it and try to flee on their own, and a mark who slips away keeps whatever you were hoping to take. Corner them fast or watch the loot run off (tuning).

You can also jump a recruit instead of hiring them. Every person at a venue is real — the crew line-up shows an Attack button next to Hire. Beat one down and you take their gear and pocket cash and earn XP (they fight back, and they leave the line-up once beaten). Handy if you'd rather rob the talent than pay for it.

Heat & the police

Two linked pressures:

• Personal heat — your wanted level. Rises with crimes; a hot boss can't move through policed districts unnoticed. It cools on its own over time — a full 100 clears in about a day — and the more points you've put into Stealth, the faster it fades.
• Zone police presence — shared, per-tile, rising with loud crimes on that tile and cooling back toward the district's baseline.

Heat is shared across your gang. Your crew's crimes are your crimes: when a crew member does something loud — a street dealer working a corner, a crew raid on a rival — the heat lands on you (the shared pool that draws SWAT) and on that crew member too, equally. And a crew member's own heat has a bite: a hot street dealer is easier for the law to catch — more likely to be robbed or arrested working the corner while blazing. Their heat cools on its own like yours (at your Stealth's pace), so if a dealer's running hot, recall them off the street for a while to let it settle. The phone's CREW list flags a 🔥 next to anyone who's running hot.

Road encounters. Crossing a policed tile in transit can trigger a stop, scaled by that tile's presence and your personal heat:

• Slip — you duck them, no harm.
• Tailed — a patrol follows you; heat ticks up.
• Shakedown — dirty cops squeeze you for a "toll" (paid from any purse, dirty first).
• Search — they seize a chunk of the contraband you're carrying; heat spikes.

SWAT raids. Run scorching hot (personal heat roughly 70+) and the law stops waiting for you to slip up — it comes to your door. Over time a very hot boss draws automated police/SWAT raids, even while you're offline, and the hotter you are the more often they hit. A raid is a bust: they seize a chunk of the contraband you're carrying and a cut of your dirty cash, which discharges most of your heat — and if you're truly blazing, SWAT don't negotiate: they take you down by force and haul you to jail hurt, on the longest sentence (they can rough you up, but the law can never permanently kill you). Don't sit on a mountain of heat and product.

Your hideout. Designate a building you own as your hideout (there's a button on the block panel when you're standing on a place you own). When you're inside your hideout lying low, your personal heat cools twice as fast — the active way to go to ground after a hot job, and it stacks with Stealth. You only have one hideout at a time; setting a new one moves it.

Upgrade your hideout (clean cash). Standing on your hideout, the block panel offers a paid upgrade tree:

• Fortifications (3 tiers) — reinforced doors, window bars and a panic room. Each tier adds +3 defense and +1 security to the building, so rival crews and gang raids bounce off your bolt-hole.
• Medical ward — a stocked back-room clinic. Once built, step inside and patch yourself to full HP at home for a fraction of hospital rates and with no ambulance call-out fee — the cheap, from-your-own-turf way to heal, whether you're hurt-but-standing or laid up.
• Personal doctor — a doctor on call. You slowly recover HP over time even while active, not just when you're laid up in hospital — the only way to heal on your feet without paying per visit.
• Armory — a locked weapons room. Store spare gear at your hideout, off your body, so a street death can't lose what's locked away.

The stash (dirty cash). Your hideout is also a vault. Standing on it, deposit your dirty cash into the stash and it's off your person — so if a rival kills you out on the street, they can't strip it off your body (only the dirty cash you're carrying is looted). It's not untouchable, though: a rival who robs your hideout cracks the stash too, so it's worth fortifying and guarding. Withdraw it whenever you need to spend.

Every crime calls the police. The moment you pull a job, the nearest patrol cars are alerted and start driving to your block from wherever they are — so how long you've got depends on where the law actually is, not a fixed timer. A violent crime pulls more units. You can watch them close in on the map. Get moving before a car reaches you — if one catches you still out on the street it's an arrest: they seize the contraband and a cut of the dirty cash on you, and you do jail time (see Jail & doing time below — your arrest stance sets how it goes). Hit-and-move is the rhythm of crime here.

Fleeing and losing them. If a patrol has eyes on you it gives chase, following you from block to block (the cars chasing you flash red, and a WANTED banner shows how many are after you). To shake them you have to break their line of sight and go to ground: get out of their view and duck inside a non-hostile building. Sit tight with no police sighting you for about a minute and they call off the chase. Stay out in the open where they can see you and they'll run you down.

Drive off while they're hunting you and it becomes a road chase. Gun it in a working car with the law on your tail and the pursuit turns into a real fight between the moving cars, on the same ⚔️ Fight panel as everything else: a pursuit cruiser fronts their line with officers firing from behind it, and your own car fronts yours — their fire hits the ride first, chewing its condition down (the driver just drives; it's your passengers who shoot back, so riding crew matters). Your ways out: hit 🏃 Flee to try to break away — the roll rides your car's speed and the best driver aboard, so a fast ride and a good wheelman slip free where a shot-up beater gets run down — or hold on until the chase burns out (~8 turns) and you lose them in traffic. Shoot the cruiser and its officers off the road and you're free but marked (a big heat spike). Get everyone downed and they drag you from the wreck — jail, hurt, on the resisting sentence. Every scratch the chase puts on your car lands on its real condition afterward — a ride shot to a standstill is a wreck. On foot, the old shake-the-dispatch rules still apply. (tuning)

The chase is driven on real streets. A pursuit isn't just a card — it has a route, and both cars are on the map driving it, yours in green and theirs in red, with the road they're following dotted out ahead. Every turn both cars move at their own speed: a roadster really does pull away from a cruiser, a rusted beater really does get run down, and a car that's been shot up slows as its condition drops. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows the live gap in blocks, and that gap is the chase:

• Open four blocks of clear road and they lose you at the corner — no roll, no button. Just a faster car and a straight run.
• Let it close to nothing and they're alongside you, shooting into your windows — their fire gets sharper at point-blank.
• 🏃 Flee is a burst of speed, not a coin flip: put your foot down and you gain real distance (how much rides on the car and the wheelman). If it's enough to open the gap, you're gone; if not, you've spent the turn and they're still there.
• Reach the end of your run still in front and the pursuit peels off — you made it.

It isn't only the law that chases you. Drive off a block where a hostile rival boss is standing and — if there's blood in the water — they may come after you. The trigger is weakness or notoriety: you're under 60% health or carrying 40+ heat. A boss in good shape and out of the spotlight usually drives off unbothered; a bloodied one gets followed. The keenest rival present (the highest-level one with a working car) pulls out behind you, and it plays out as the same road chase on the ⚔️ Fight panel — except nobody's taking you to jail. Both cars come out of it wearing the damage, the loser wakes up in the hospital, and you'll get an alert naming whoever came after you. Your own family and any clan you have a peace treaty with never give chase, and a brand-new player who hasn't committed their first crime is never hunted.

Ambulances on the street — and what you can do to them. When somebody is beaten down, the city sends a wagon from the nearest hospital to collect them. It's a real object: you can see it on the map within your vision (a white wagon, flashing while it's carrying somebody), driving out to the scene a block at a time and driving back. Click one on your own block and you can run it off the road — and when you do it changes everything:

• On its way OUT (empty, racing to a pickup) — the collection never happens. The patient lies where they fell and stops healing for about five minutes while another wagon is arranged. They can still pay for private care to get out of it.
• On its way BACK (carrying somebody) — you drag the patient out onto your block, still down and in no state to argue. That's exactly the window a finishing blow needs, if that's the sort of thing you do.

Wrecking a wagon costs 8 actions, adds 8 heat, and dispatches the police to your block fast — it is a loud, ugly crime. You can't wreck the wagon coming for you.

You always know where the hunt stands. The banner tells you exactly which state you're in: "They can SEE you" — break their line of sight, put blocks or a building between you — or "Out of their sight — stay hidden ~Ns more" with a live countdown to them giving up. And hot ground shows on the map: any block you can see (your own eyes, a camera, or an informant's) glows red with police presence — the redder, the hotter — so you can pick a route around trouble before it finds you.

Keep heat down by laying low (especially at your hideout), avoiding hot tiles, offloading contraband, and letting time cool you off.

Jail & doing time

Getting caught by the law now means a real arrest and jail time at the county prison on the city's northern edge — not a quick rough-up.

Your arrest stance decides how it goes. While the police are after you, the WANTED banner carries a stance toggle — set it before they reach you:

• 🙌 Surrender (the default). Take the arrest quietly: you're booked in uninjured, on the short sentence (~2 hours real time — tuning). The low-cost option.
• 🥊 Resist. The arrest becomes a real-time fight against the responding officers (more and harder officers for a worse scene) — it plays out on the ⚔️ Fight panel like any other, and you can still try to flee mid-fight. Beat them and you stay free — but you're a marked fugitive: your heat spikes and a harder wave comes for you. Lose and you're dragged in hurt, on the long sentence (~4 hours).
• SWAT never negotiate. A heat-driven SWAT raid ignores your stance entirely — they take you down by force: hurt, maximum security, the longest stretch (~8 hours). The law can never permanently kill you.

Either way the arrest seizes the contraband and a cut of the dirty cash you're carrying — and settles your heat (the bust discharges most of it).

Life inside. While jailed you can't act on the world — no travel, crimes, or ops — but the 🔒 panel shows your situation and your ways out. The prison runs on the city's day/night clock (6am–6pm New York is the day shift): at night you're locked in your cell and can only wait; daytime opens the risky moves. The jail's own medical ward quietly heals you the whole time you're inside — go in beaten, come out patched.

Getting out:

• Serve your time — the sentence ticks down in real time and you're released automatically.
• 💵 Post bail — clean cash (the courts don't take crime money), priced by how much sentence is left. Walk out immediately.
• ⚖️ Bribe the judge — your lawyer walks an envelope of dirty cash to the courthouse and a chunk of your remaining sentence disappears. Relation makes the envelope smaller and the cut deeper. One envelope per stay — the judge won't risk a second.
• Break out — the same escape play as a captive (see Surrender & capture above): fight, sneak, or bolt past the guards, day shift only, with live odds. Make it out and you're free — but a jailbreak makes you a fugitive (a big heat spike; the law will be looking for you).
• Get sprung — allies can raid the prison block to break you out. Everyone freed in a jailbreak walks out a fugitive too.

Vision & intel

The map has fog — you see your own tile and anything you have eyes on. Extend your sight:

• Burner phone (~$200, from convenience stores and gun shops) — required to receive any remote feed. Can also be activated from a stolen phone in your stash. The phone opens on your feeds: every camera, informant, spy and garrison in one list, each with what it can see right now and whether it's live or dark, and a tap to jump the map there.
• Cameras — install on buildings you own for standing vision of that tile.
• Informants — pay to station a lookout on a block (up to 8):
• Street kid (~$400) — watches just that block.
• Fixer (~$1,200) — watches the block plus one tile in every direction.
• Garrisoned crew relay vision of the tile they guard.

• A listening device ($1,500, 12 actions) — see below.

All remote feeds need a phone in your pocket to receive.

What you know is only as fresh as the last time you looked. Rookport doesn't hand you live numbers on blocks you aren't watching. Open a block you have no eyes on and the card is stamped "🕵 last seen 40 min ago — these numbers may be stale": the defense, guards, till, stock, structure and traps you're reading are the picture from the last time you really saw the place, and the world has moved on since. Never been there at all? It reads "never scouted" and you're going in blind. A block you do have eyes on reads "👁 live", and it tells you why — standing there, your property, your camera, your informant, your spy, your bug — and looking refreshes your memory of it.

That's what makes intel worth paying for: scout it with a crew op, station an informant, or plant a bug before you commit to a robbery or a raid.

Bugging a rival's place. Stand on any building that isn't yours and plant a listening device ($1,500, 12 actions, burner required). It gives you a live feed of that block for about a day with nobody exposed on the ground — the cheapest way to watch a rival's warehouse before you hit it. Planting is a crime (a little heat), and it's a roll of your Spying against the block's security: get made and the owner is told exactly who was fitting a wire in their bar.

Sweeping your own. On a building you own, 🔎 Sweep for bugs. Like traps, it's absolute: you only find a device your Security technician level strictly beats — so a master's bug survives an amateur's sweep, and a clean sweep result doesn't prove there's nothing there. Pull one and the person who planted it gets told you found it.

Informants are real people on the block — and killable. The hireable street kid and fixer stand on the block as tappable characters: open one in the viewer to see their portrait, price and coverage before you pay, and hire straight from the card (or the row's button). Once on your payroll, your lookout lists there in green with what they cover. A stationed lookout shows up as its own coloured dot on the tile (orange for a rival's — the special-function colour — green for your own). If you're standing out on the street where a rival has a lookout, you can take them out from their row or dot via the viewer (a cheap move, −12 actions) — you run them off, pocket their small day's cash, and their eyes on that block go dark (the owner loses that vision). It draws a little heat. You can't touch your own lookouts.

Clans — the family

Rookport's endgame is played in families. The Clan tab is where it all runs.

Founding one. Once the city Respects you — a minimum Respect of 10 (tuning), earned by seizing turf and beating and killing rivals — you can found a clan as its Don: pick a family name and a short [TAG]. A clan holds at most ten made members — a deliberate cap, so no single family can swallow the city.

Getting made. The only door in is an invitation: an officer invites a boss by name, and the invitation lands on that boss's own Clan tab (it stands for 48 hours). Accept and you're made — seated at the bottom of the table as a man of honor.

The hierarchy. The roster is the classic family table: the Don, his one right hand, consiglieri, capos, and men of honor. The Don alone hands out the chairs. Rank matters: consigliere and up can extend invitations; the right hand and the Don handle discipline.

Joining is binding. Membership is a round-long commitment — you can't leave, and you can't be thrown out, until the round ends. No clan-hopping, no joining a rival family to spy for a week. The one exception: a member who goes dark for 36+ hours (long enough for a full action meter to sit idle) is dead weight, and the Don or his right hand can cut them loose. Death also ends a membership — a dead boss's chair is cleared, and a family whose last member dies is gone.

The stronghold. Three fortress bunkers stand on the rough edges of town — Ironside, the Docks, and the Greenbelt — the toughest private ground in the game. The Don can buy one as the clan's base ($25,000 clean — a clan-scale purchase; stand on the bunker and claim it from the Clan tab). A based family moves faster: every member's action meter refills ~10% quicker (tuning). And the bunker is real territory — garrison it, fortify it, and defend it, because rivals can raid it like anything else you hold.

The family vault. The stronghold opens the common vault — the clan's pooled war-chest, clean and dirty money tracked separately. It's a real room at the base: you deposit and draw standing on the bunker, not from an app. Everyone can pay in; what you can draw per day depends on your chair — the Don draws freely, his right hand a lot, a fresh man of honor only a little (the trust ladder is the point: anyone the Don seats high enough can spend the family's money). You can also set a daily tribute — a standing $/day paid automatically into the vault, crime money first. Two big consequences: your deposits survive your death — the one hedge against losing everything when a boss falls — and the vault is only as safe as the bunker around it: a robbery cracks half of it, a wrecking crew takes all of it, and losing the bunker loses the war-chest.

The family's stores. Money isn't all a family can hold. At the stronghold there's also an armory (pool your gear), a garage (hand over a car, or take one of the family's out), and property in the family's name — stand on a building you own and deed it to the clan: its takings run straight into the vault, every member's guards defend it, and it stops being yours to lose when you die. Anyone can pay into the stores; drawing out is capped per day by your chair — the Don takes what he likes, a man of honor can only give. Only the Don or his right hand sign property back out to a member.

Name your own chairs. The five ranks and their powers never change, but the Don can rename them — call your capos Skippers, your right hand the Underboss, whatever your family sounds like.

Treaties — the one formal instrument between families. A Don can propose a peace treaty to another family; their Don signs it. While it holds: neither side's ambushes, sieges or crew operations touch the other — you literally cannot launch a job on their property until you tear it up — and the Don or right hand can move money from vault to vault, which is how families fund each other. It is deliberately not a merger: no shared vault, no combined ops, and both families stay capped at ten. Tearing one up tells both sides instantly, so there's no free first strike.

Family standings. The Rankings screen now carries a family table under the personal one, scoring each clan on its living members' combined net worth plus what the clan holds in its own name — the vault and any property deeded to it. Pooling doesn't hide how heavy a family really is.

When the round turns over. A family doesn't quietly roll into the next round with everything it had. At the reset the material goes the way of everyone else's — the vault is emptied, the armory and garage are cleared, the stronghold is lost, and standing peace treaties lapse with the round that made them. What survives is the family itself: its name, its tag, and its Don (if he didn't make it, the most senior survivor takes the chair).

Everyone re-ups by choice. Membership binds for a round, not forever, so the roster is re-formed, never rolled over. Every other member wakes up a free agent holding a standing re-invitation from their Don — accept it and you go straight back into the rank you held, decline it and you walk away clean. You have a week to answer.

The top ten families collect a head start for the new round (tuning):

The seed and the action bump are paid the moment the round turns; the cheaper bunker waits on the Clan tab until your Don actually buys one, and is spent the first time he does. Like every head start in Rookport it's a fast start, not a lead you keep — the seed can be robbed out of the vault by day two.

Chat — talking to the city

The floating 💬 button opens the chat panel, with four channels:

• 🌍 Global — the city-wide room: trash talk, market chatter, finding a clan. Everyone reads it, and it's flood-limited (a line every couple of seconds, a cap per minute) so nobody can drown it out.
• 📍 Local — the room for the district you're standing in, and only that one. The Docks talk about the Docks. Walk across the bridge and you're in Ironside's room instead, and the conversation you were in is behind you — so it's the channel for what's happening here, now: who just rolled through, whose crew is massing, who's buying.
• 🕴 Clan — the family's private channel. Only made members read it; it's where ops get planned and the vault gets argued over.
• ✉️ DMs — private messages with any boss, by name: diplomacy, threats, ransom negotiation, the quiet word before the loud move.
• 🔔 Alerts — the city telling you things. See below.

Ransoms are negotiated right in the DM. When someone takes you prisoner — or you take them — the demand lands in the conversation between you as a deal card: the figure, whose move it is, and Accept · Counter · Refuse on the card itself. Counter with your own number and it becomes their move; the superseded offers stay in the thread, so you can read the whole haggle back. Accept and the money changes hands and the cell door opens on the spot. (The captive panel still carries the same deal — it's one negotiation, seen from two places.)

A red dot on the 💬 button means something new came in. And you're in charge of your own feed: mute any boss (their lines vanish from your channels everywhere, and they can't message you privately) and flag any message.

Alerts — knowing while you're away

Rookport runs 24/7 and crews travel on timers, so the important things happen whether or not you're watching. The 🔔 Alerts channel is your record of them, newest first:

• A raid inbound at a block you hold — the warning fires the moment the crew leaves, with how long you have before it lands. That's the whole point: enough lead time to rally guards, call all units, or move what matters. The 💬 button pulses red for these.
• A raid that already landed on your turf, and how your garrison did.
• Capture and ransom — being taken, the demand, every counter-offer, and a prisoner trying to break out of your holding.
• The law — being booked into jail, and when you're due out.
• The family — an invitation to a clan.
• Your parked car being boosted off the street, and who took it.
• A private message from another boss.

Tap 📍 on any line to jump the map to where it happened, and ⚙ to choose which types reach you: every type can show in the feed, and the serious ones can also email you so an attack finds you when the tab is closed. (Email goes out once the game's mail service is switched on; the in-game feed works today.)

Getting away — and the cars you can take

Pull a job and you can't just floor it. For a stretch after any crime — a few seconds after a lift, more than a minute after something loud — you can't drive off. Keys, traffic, the crowd. You can always walk immediately, which is slower but instant, and that trade-off is the whole point while the law is converging on the block. Every point of Driving cuts about four seconds off the wait, which is exactly what a wheelman is for.

And Driving decides what's worth stealing. A novice hotwiring a street car gets whatever rustbucket is at the kerb. As Driving climbs, the roster opens up — better sedans, a stolen coupe, a lifted delivery wagon with real cargo room — so the skill pays twice: you get clear faster, and in something better.

Rebuild the block

Stuck with a building you don't want? On any block you own, you can tear it down and put up something else — sixteen types, from a bar to a warehouse to a casino. It costs two and a half times what that new building would cost to buy, in clean cash (construction is legitimate work), and everything the old place held goes with it: stock, staff, upgrades, production, its racket, its structure. But it turns a dead block into the one you actually needed there.

The docks — the city's warehouse and its way out

A port is the toughest ground in Rookport and the most expensive deed in it, and once you hold one it's a business in three parts:

• The deep hold. An ordinary back room stores about 200 units of goods. A dock holds 2,000 — ten times over. That's half the reason to own one: it's the only place in the city you can really stockpile.
• A standing export order. Pick a good and the longshoremen ship it out of the hold around the clock at a wholesale price, with no further input from you — contraband pays dirty, legal freight pays clean. Set it and go do something else.
• The car export racket. Drive any car onto a wharf and it goes in the export lot for the next boat (they sail about every half hour). The economics depend on whose wharf it is: bring one to your own dock and you're paid nothing up front — you take the full shipping margin when it sails. Sell into someone else's and you're paid on the spot, in dirty cash, while the wharf's owner takes the bigger cut when it leaves. So a port owner makes money on everyone else's stolen cars, and an owner can bar a rival by name from ever unloading there.

A family can buy one together. Standing on any unowned block, a clan officer can buy it in the family's name straight out of the vault — which is realistically how anyone affords a dock. It then earns for the vault, and every member's guards defend it.

Contest it — you were standing right there

Rookport settles races by first grab wins. But if a rival takes money off a block while you're standing on it — collects the safe, cleans out a till — you don't have to just watch. A ✊ Contest it? card appears with the amount, and one tap calls them out: a real fight, right there. Win and the money comes out of their pocket into yours. Lose and they keep it.

The window is short (about three minutes) and it dies the moment either of you leaves the block — so it's a decision you make on the spot, not a grudge you file. Your own family and treaty allies never raise a claim on you, and pocket change isn't worth a street fight.

Rankings & net worth

The leaderboard ranks living bosses by net worth: clean + dirty cash, plus the value of contraband you're carrying, plus your buildings (their safe balance and a few days of income). Every earning system feeds it, so there's always a number to move.

The hospital

Getting beaten unconscious doesn't kill you — losing to an NPC or a rival's crew, or botching a pickpocket, lands you in the hospital. (The law doesn't hospitalise you any more — a police takedown means jail, which has its own ward.) While you're laid up you're out of action: you can't work, fight, or travel until you're back on your feet. There are three ways out:

• Wait it out (free). Your HP heals back over real time on the world-tick — roughly a couple of hours from near-zero to full — and you're auto-discharged the moment you hit 100%.
• Check out early (free). Once you've healed to 50% you can walk out at your current HP and get straight back to work.
• Pay for treatment (clean cash). Private care patches you to full and discharges you immediately. The bill scales with how much HP you're missing, so the worse the beating, the steeper the cost.

A wagon comes for you — and someone can stop it. The moment you go down, the city dispatches an ambulance from the nearest hospital to your block. It's a real vehicle driving real streets, and a rival standing on its route can run it off the road. If they wreck it on the way out, nobody collects you: you lie where you fell and your recovery is frozen for about five minutes (the hospital card tells you so — paying for private care still works). If they wreck it on the way back, you're dumped onto their block, still down — which is how a finishing blow finds you. Nothing you can do about it while you're out, but it's worth knowing why the healing sometimes stops: someone wanted it to.

Call an ambulance from your phone. With a burner you can call paramedics to your block for clean cash — a dispatch fee on top of the care — and they patch you all the way to full. Crucially, this works even while you're still on your feet: it's the only way to heal a hurt-but-standing boss who was never knocked out (and it saves you waiting it out when you're laid up). Handy after a rough fight you won but limped away from.

Manage your crew from the phone. The burner also has a CREW section: it lists your whole roster and what each one is doing right now — at your side, guarding a block (with the coordinates), working a facility, dealing, away on an op, walking home from one, or laid up in hospital. You can Recall any one of them back to escort you, or hit Recall all crew to pull everyone who's out guarding, working or dealing back to your side at once — the panic button for when you need your muscle around you fast (a raid warning, a rival on your block). Crew who are away on an op or still walking home can't be reached until they're back.

Your contacts. The phone also keeps a searchable contacts list of everyone you know — your crew (with what each is doing right now, and a Recall for any out on a duty), your stationed lookouts (and which block each watches), and the manager running every legal front you own. Type a name or a role in the search box to filter, and hit 📍 Locate on anyone to jump the map straight to their block — handy for finding where your muscle, your eyes, or your businesses are across the city.

The hospital is the floor — nothing an NPC or the law does can kill you outright. The only way to actually die is a rival player landing the finishing blow while you're already down (below).

Death & the graveyard

Death is players-only: if a rival catches you already wounded on their tile and lands a finishing blow, your boss is gone — recorded in the graveyard with an obituary (name, title, level, cause, killer, place and date). Skills and levels only persist while you're alive, so surviving compounds. (Lose to the city itself — NPCs or a botched job — and you go to the hospital; get taken by the law and it's jail. Neither is the grave.)

The killer loots the body. Landing the kill lets you strip what the victim was carrying: their dirty (street) cash, their carried contraband (as much as your own pockets/trunk can still hold — the rest spills in the street), their gear (what they had equipped plus anything in their stash, all into yours), and the car they were in if you're not already driving one. What's not on the body is safe from the strip: their clean/banked money and everything held inside their buildings — those you'd have to take separately. So a fat, well-carried rival is a tempting kill, and travelling light is a way to die with less to give away.

The respawn window — your next boss arrives ~24 hours later. A permanent death opens a respawn window on your account (about 24 real hours — shortened while the game is in preview). Trying to create a new character during it shows your fallen boss's obituary and a live countdown on the creation screen instead. Meanwhile the dead boss's empire sits exposed: the killer already stripped the body, and any rival can seize the fallen buildings at a discount during the window. When the clock runs out, you name a new boss and start over — fresh level, fresh stats — and whatever property nobody seized passes to your new character: the one inheritance from the old life. (There's no paying to come back sooner — the wait is the price of dying.)

Rounds & fresh starts

Rookport is played in rounds of a fixed length. A countdown in the top bar shows which round you're in and how long is left ("Round 1 · ends in 12d 4h").

When a round ends, the world resets — and this is the heart of what makes your character matter:

• Material wealth wipes. Cash (clean and dirty), gear, vehicles, crew, contraband, buildings and territory all reset. Everyone starts the next round materially even, so the standings stay a real contest and nobody snowballs forever.
• Your character's mastery carries over — if you survive. A boss who is alive at the reset keeps their level, primary stats, skills and Respect into the next round. That veteran progress is the one thing that compounds across rounds.
• Die and it's gone. A character killed before the reset does not carry over — their mastery dies with them. Surviving to the end of a round is what banks your progress. (The graveyard remembers the fallen either way.)
• Fresh city. You start the new round back on the newbie-safe spawn with a starter apartment and clerk job, and the criminal AI gangs re-form their turf.

• The reset fires itself. When the countdown hits zero, the round ends automatically — no operator needed. The ended round's final standings go on permanent record (the AI gangs place on it too, though only real players collect prizes).
• Finish top 10 and start ahead. Survive AND place in the round's top 10 and you open the next round with a head start: the champion gets a full action meter, $3,000 clean, a Pistol and Kevlar vest, and a Sedan waiting at the curb; #2–3 get 75% actions, $1,500 and the gear; #4–10 get half a meter, $800 and one starter piece. It's a fast start, not a locked-in lead — everything awarded can be robbed, boosted or lost like anything else, and it's all first-pass numbers. (tuning) (While the game is in dev preview, the Cheats tab has a 🏆 1st-place reward button that grants the champion's package instantly, for trying it out.)

Roadmap — planned features

These are designed and queued, not yet in the game:

Raids & operations — send crew (and cars) to hit a target tile, on the spot or automated in advance so it runs while you're offline: attack a building from outside with your car as cover, or rush in; defenders with guns shoot back; you haul off cash and any items you have room to carry. Crew fight, carry gear, and can die like you. Heat is shared across your whole gang.

Defense — garrisoned crew auto-defend your tiles even while you're away, and when you're online an inbound raid now warns you with a live countdown so you can rush crew to the block and reinforce the garrison before it lands. High-heat gangs draw automated police SWAT raids. (Deeper ways to spy on rivals' plans come later.)

Deeper skills — Driving and Stealth grow beyond their current effects, and the rest of the skill tree arrives. Driving will also unlock higher-tier vehicles you can steal as you level and shorten the getaway delay after a crime. Stealth will lower your chance of being caught pickpocketing, cut the heat you gain on every criminal action, and make your heat cool off faster on its own. New skills join them — Killer, Tough-as-nails, Leadership, Relation, Dealer, Spying, Security technician, Arsonist, Heavy weapon — each a different way to build your boss.

Recruits as full characters — crew become near-players. Each has a level (1–10, shown on their card — and your boss's level is shown too), the same primary stats and skills you have, and a quality tier: common, rare, epic, legendary. Tier scales their power against a player — common is ×0.7, rare ×0.85, epic equal, legendary ×1.2 — and drives their hire fee and daily wage. Higher tiers are rarer to find, need more Respect to recruit, and you can never hire someone above your own level. Each block shows 1–2 recruits that fit the place (a gym tough is stronger and higher-level; a park face is low). Better tier/level crew carry better gear — and since every person in the world is real, you can beat and loot them instead of hiring, earning XP for every win (more for tougher fights).

A living map (more of it) — the map is now fully click-to-reach: pickpocket or attack a street NPC straight from its dot, carjack a car driving past your block by clicking it, and click any recruit venue from across the city to preview who's drinking there and route straight over to hire (see Combat, Vehicles and Crew above).

A living economy (more of it) — real shelves, real producers, visible robbable delivery trucks and shortage pricing are all live (see Trading above). Coming next: the docks import market as the contested top of the supply chain, trucks driving proper road lanes, and goods flows for the rest of the city's venues (hotels, casinos, offices).

Evolving portraits for NPCs & bosses — recruits and crew now carry hand-drawn tier portraits that advance as they rank up; still to come is that same treatment for street NPCs and every boss avatar (made from a description or by uploading your own photo to be "gangsterified" into the house style).

Longer-horizon backlog — deeper on-foot/vehicle movement, looting parked cars, playing as a cop, and a UI overhaul.

Dev cheats (prototype only)

While Rookport is in preview, cheat endpoints help testing (disabled for real rounds):

• Refill actions, god mode, reset heat, reset map heat, travel-speed multiplier.
• Give cash — grant clean and/or dirty cash.
• Advance the world clock — fast-forward time to exercise income, production, laundering, and salaries without waiting.
• End round — end the current round immediately to test the reset: material wealth wipes and the next round begins, while surviving characters keep their level, stats and skills.

Feature-complete as of the economy/crew rework (clean/dirty money, crew duties + promotion, legal businesses + laundering). This guide is updated as the game grows.