Heists & Robberies

The robbery ladder — from a quick till snatch to the Vangelico jewellery heist. Where to start, what you'll need, and how hard the city hits back.

Robbery on The Estate is a ladder. At the bottom is a nervous shopkeeper and a till full of notes; at the top is a full crew cracking Vangelico’s vault. Each rung asks for more kit, more nerve, and more people — and each one brings a harder response from anyone who notices. This page walks the ladder from the ground up.

Everything here is pure criminal activity. There’s no job, duty, or licence to unlock it — if you’ve got the gear and the bottle, it’s open to you. And it’s all validated on the server: client-side prompts are convenience only, so there’s no faking your way past a requirement.

The robbery ladder at a glance

Every location runs its own cooldown after a successful hit, tracked per character — not per account, so a second character won’t reset it. Diminishing returns discourage farming the same target back to back.

Robbing a store

Convenience stores, off-licences and vape shops across the city can be held up. Draw a weapon, target the till, and pick “Hold Up”. From there you’ve got two routes.

Snatch the till

Choose “Empty the till” for the quick option. The clerk mostly complies, animating the register open while you hold position nearby — walk off and the robbery cancels with nothing to show for it. On success a cash bag drops on the counter for you to grab. It’s a physical world drop, so anyone else standing there can grab it first.

A minority of clerks resist and pull a weapon instead. Killing a resisting clerk still gets you the cash, just the loud way — and the loud way draws far more attention.

Till cash is modest but the cooldown is short. It’s the reliable bottom rung — steady beer money rather than a life-changing score.

Crack the safe

Choose “Threaten for the safe” and, if that store has a safe worth cracking, control hands off to a fuller robbery. You’ll need a hacking device in your inventory — no device, no attempt. Cracking runs a chain of electronic lock-picking puzzles back to back in one held-open session; the number and type of locks vary by store, and higher-value shops pay more for the trouble.

Stay close. Wandering out of range mid-crack, or getting downed, aborts the whole thing — and the cooldown still applies even on a failed run. You can snatch the till and crack the safe on the same visit; they’re on separate cooldowns.

Ransacking a pharmacy

Pharmacies are a different beast. Threaten the pharmacist at the till with a weapon out and they roll a reaction — some cower and let you straight in, others fight back with a shotgun, a bat, or their fists. Either way, once the pharmacist is dealt with the ransack opens up.

Inside, work the stock points one at a time. Each takes a few seconds and yields a single grab from the pharmacy’s own loot pool — medical supplies and controlled stock rather than cash. Unlike a store safe, a pharmacy job actively calls the police at a set response tier, so the clock is against you from the moment you start pulling shelves.

The Vangelico jewellery heist

The top of the ladder is the jewellery job at Vangelico — a proper crew heist with planning, roles, a security system to defeat, and a police response that grows the longer you take. It’s soloable, but a full crew is strongly recommended.

Planning and prep

Approach the planning board near the location to open the heist menu. Select the Vangelico job, form or join a crew, and pick your role:

• Hacker — works the security panel and the vault door.
• Grabber — smashes and clears the display cases.
• Driver — stages and runs the getaway.
• Lookout — watches for the response.

Then clear the prep: scope the store, get a hacking device and a smashing tool into your inventory, and stage a getaway vehicle nearby. When prep’s done, the leader starts the job. Vangelico itself needs no special intel to run — the cooldown between attempts is measured in hours, per character.

On the floor

First, kill the store’s eyes. The hacker works the security panel through two staged hacks — cameras first, then the alarm, which only opens up once the cameras are down. Disabling the alarm is time-limited; miss the window or trip it and you escalate the police response.

With security handled, the crew works the counter and display cases: smash a case’s glass, then grab what’s inside, over and over across the shop floor. A bank vault door seals off the best cases at the back — the hacker cracks it with a simple guided hacking puzzle, and then those cases can be grabbed directly.

Loot drops straight into your inventory the instant you grab it. There’s no separate escape or payout phase — the job ends the moment the last case is emptied, and you simply walk out with whatever you’re carrying.

Cases have weight. Greed is the real enemy here — overload yourself and you’ll be jogging out of a police cordon at a crawl. Watch your carry capacity and know when to leave.

Cashing out

There’s no automatic fence at Vangelico. What you carry out is raw stock — rings, bracelets, necklaces and watches in tiered materials, plus the odd bit of loose cash. To turn it into money you sell it on afterward, most reliably through the darknet market. Wall-vault cases carry the best pieces; the small counter cases pay least. Run the job again too soon and a repeat-run penalty thins your take.

Heat and consequences

None of this is quiet. Gunfire, smashed glass, and panicking NPCs all feed the city’s general crime response — witnesses call it in whether or not you meant to be seen. Pharmacy ransacks and the Vangelico alarm dispatch police directly; the Vangelico response comes in waves that arrive bigger and faster the longer you linger.

The cash and loot you leave behind can be picked up by anyone, and getting downed mid-job hands your carry to whoever reaches your body first. Plan your exit before your entry — see Crime & Consequences for how heat, dirty money and the arrest pipeline work, and Evading the Law for keeping your face off the record afterward. If you’re running these jobs as a firm rather than a one-off, Organised Crime covers crews, banks and shared cuts.