House Burglary

Case a house, break in, loot it, and fence the take before anyone comes looking.

House burglary targets a specific kind of building: NPC-owned houses that staff have set up around the city as robbable locations. This is completely separate from player housing — you can never break into another player’s rented or owned home, and nothing here works on it. If you’re after that side of things, Property & Housing and Home Security & Access cover owning and defending your own place.

Finding a House to Hit

Robbable houses aren’t marked on your map or listed anywhere in an app — you find them by exploring. Not every house in the city is one, and which ones are active, how well-stocked they are, and whether they’re occupied all varies house to house. Treat scouting the city as part of the game.

Casing the Property

Before you commit, you can case a house from an outside vantage point near it. Standing and observing quietly gives you a rough read on what you’re walking into — roughly how much is inside worth searching, whether the door’s likely to be unlocked this time round, and a hint at whether someone’s home. Casing isn’t mandatory, but it pays off twice: it tells you whether the job’s worth the risk, and a cased entry is quieter than blundering straight in, which matters a lot once you’re through the door.

Casing wears off after a while, so don’t case a house and then wander off for the evening — come back reasonably soon or do it again.

Breaking In

Three ways in, each with its own trade-offs:

Picking is the flexible option — it works regardless of the door’s current state, but it’s a genuine skill-check and a failed attempt can snap your pick, costing you the item on top of the failed try. For the fundamentals of picking locks, see Lockpicking. Smashing a window always works and needs no tools, but it’s loud by nature — expect it to draw attention unless you’ve got nobody around to hear it. Finding the door already unlocked is pure luck, but it’s the cleanest entry going: no noise at all.

However you get in, forced entry always leaves something behind for anyone who comes looking afterwards, even if nobody heard a thing at the time.

Inside the House

Once you’re in, work the containers — search them for whatever loot the house has stashed, and look out for specific bits of furniture flagged as worth taking; those come out as sellable items in their own right rather than needing to be broken down.

Some houses have someone home. An occupant can be asleep, pottering about, or ready to challenge you the moment they clock you — and if they get the chance, they can fight back or get on the phone to report you. A call in progress can still be stopped if you deal with the caller fast enough, but don’t count on that being your safety net; loud, unsuppressed gunfire will wake the place up and spook anyone nearby regardless of what else is happening. The quieter and better-cased your entry, the less likely any of this becomes a problem.

Every container you search adds to the trail you’re leaving. A clean casing job with a lockpick is a genuinely different risk profile from putting a window through.

Getting Out & Cooldown

Once everyone clears the house, it locks itself back up on a cooldown before it’s live again. If you’re still inside — or you get back to it — while that cooldown’s running, you can walk straight back into the same loaded house you already breached. Show up after it’s reset, though, and you’re starting from scratch: cased or not, locked or not, all over again.

Selling What You Took

Burglary loot doesn’t sell through any system this resource runs itself — everything comes out flagged as stolen goods, and the only place that shifts is a Pawn Shop Fencer’s deal counter. Walk up to one, open the deal, and haggle: he opens low, you can push back once or twice, and depending on how hard you push you’ll land somewhere in the middle, get his final number, or blow the deal entirely. Push your luck and lose, and he’ll remember you specifically for a while. This is the exact same fence Street Crime uses for pickpocketed and mugged goods, so a big burglary haul and a heavy day of pickpocketing both feed the same counter — and the same fencer, the same daily mood, and the same softening prices if you keep dumping the same category of stuff on him.

Police Response & Risk

Quiet, cased, or genuinely-unlocked entries don’t trigger anything on their own. Cross a noise threshold — smashing your way in, or hitting a house with heavier alarm coverage — and on-duty police get a dispatch alert with a map blip straight away. On top of that, a forced entry always leaves an evidence trail regardless of how loud it was, and so does every container you search — both feed into whatever investigative work comes afterwards. An occupant phoning it in is its own separate risk on top of your entry noise, not instead of it. See Crime & Consequences for how dispatch, evidence, and the wider consequences chain fit together, and Evading the Law for counterplay once you’re out.

Getting Better at It

If the lockpicking skill under Skills & Progression is something you’re levelling, burglary lockpicks lean on it directly — more skill means a friendlier minigame and picks that hold up better, plus experience toward that skill on a clean pick. None of it is a hard requirement to burgle a house at all; it just makes the lockpick route steadily less punishing the more you do it.