Car Boosting

Steal to order off a darknet contract board, break the car open, then choose how you cash it out — clean and quiet pays best.

Getting a BOOST OS laptop

Car boosting runs entirely through BOOST OS, a darknet contract board loaded on a tablet-style device (the “boostpad”). There’s no NPC fixer to find and no chat command to learn — get hold of a boostpad, use it from your inventory, and your character pulls out the device and gets to work. Closing the laptop (ESC or the in-app close button) hands the prop away and drops you back into the world.

You’ll need a loaded character for the device to do anything — trying to use it before your character’s spawned in just fails silently.

The laptop’s on-screen cash balance can lag behind reality — don’t panic if it reads oddly. Crypto payouts show live; cash payouts still land correctly in your account either way.

Browsing and taking a contract

The board lists a rotating handful of procedural contracts, refreshed on a timer or manually for a small fee. Each one shows:

• a tier — Petty, Street, Premium, or Exotic
• the target vehicle’s class (think everyday hatchbacks at the low end, up to serious performance iron at the top)
• a reward band and a deadline
• an output path for where the car needs to end up

Accepting a contract reserves a real target vehicle and starts your clock. A few limits apply: you can only run one active contract at a time solo (a crew widens the board, not your personal limit), and there’s a short cooldown between accepts so the board can’t be spammed.

Finding the car

Once accepted, the game either drops a marked target vehicle at one of a network of theft locations around the city, or — if every marked spawn for that tier is already in use — asks you to tag a nearby eligible car instead. Either way, the target is checked server-side to make sure it isn’t a real player’s owned vehicle before it’s ever handed to you. If that check can’t be confirmed, the job simply won’t hand you a target rather than risk stealing someone’s actual car.

Breaking in

Every contract runs the same break-in sequence, in order:

1. Lockpick the door. A lockpick minigame, consuming a lockpick item on a failed attempt. See Lockpicking for how picks, tiers and skill affect your odds.
2. Bypass the immobiliser. A hacking minigame using a hacking device — the same kit used for darknet work; see Hacking & the Darknet. Success gets the engine turning over.
3. Disable the tracker — Premium and Exotic tiers only. A harder second hacking minigame. You don’t have to attempt it, and failing it doesn’t fail the job outright, but skipping or losing it puts a live BOLO on you: your wanted level jumps and a real dispatch callout goes out to on-duty police for several minutes.

You need to be close enough to the car and not moving too fast for any of this to register — the whole sequence is checked server-side, not just animated on your screen.

Petty and Street jobs skip the tracker step entirely — a good place to learn the ropes without inviting a BOLO.

Cashing out

Once the car’s yours to drive, the contract tells you which of three delivery paths it wants:

• Sell to a buyer — drive to a drop-off and hand it to a waiting contact. Paid out based on the car’s condition and however much heat you picked up getting there.
• Fence through the gang — the same idea, but you need to be in a gang to take this path. The payout splits between you and your gang’s shared account, with most of it going to the gang.
• Strip at the chop shop — hand the whole car straight into a chop shop’s strip loop instead of selling it. BOOST OS pays nothing itself for this route — the reward is whatever the parts economy gives you there.

Drive carefully: hard impacts during the getaway pile on heat, and heat quietly eats into your payout on top of any BOLO risk. A clean, careful run always beats a reckless one. Deliveries check your proximity and the car’s real identity server-side, so parking a different car nearby won’t fool anyone.

Running it with a crew

A few players can team up on a single contract, taking driver, lookout, or second-boost roles. A filled crew widens the contract board for everyone in it, adds a bonus to the shared payout pool before it’s split, and gives the lookout an early warning of nearby police. It’s the more forgiving way to run Premium and Exotic jobs where a BOLO is one bad hack away.

Reputation and risk

BOOST OS tracks a persistent profile — lifetime boosts completed, total earned, and a reputation tier — alongside a server-wide leaderboard. Completing boosts earns reputation XP, more at higher tiers, building toward named tiers on your profile. Relevant progression perks in the criminal pool can shorten how long a BOLO or tracker exposure sticks to you, though it’s a convenience rather than something you need to boost at all.

Keep the risk side in mind before you take on Premium or Exotic work: a tripped BOLO is a real police callout, not a cosmetic warning, and everything you do in the break-in and delivery is re-checked by the server — there’s no faking your way past it. For the wider picture on heat, evidence, and what the police can pin on you afterwards, see Evading the Law and Crime & Consequences.