Inventory & Storage
Everything you carry, wear, stash, and hand off — how the grid, hotbar, and world storage actually work.
Nearly everything you do in the city passes through your inventory at some point — your cash, your ID, the tools of whatever job or trouble you’re getting into. It’s worth understanding properly on day one.
The grid, weight, and your hotbar
Press Tab to open and close your inventory. Items live on a grid, each one taking up one or more cells depending on its size, and you can rotate awkward items to make them fit. Drag items around to reposition them, split a stack into two, or merge matching stacks back together. Every change is checked by the server as it happens, so what you see on screen always matches what you actually own — even if your connection is having a bad moment.
You’ve also got a carry weight limit. Push much past around three-quarters of it and you’ll notice hunger and thirst creeping down faster than normal — the game’s way of saying you’re overloaded. Training at the gym raises your ceiling a little over time; see Fitness & the Gym.
Rotate before you panic-drop. A bulky item that won’t fit one way often slots in fine turned sideways.
Five hotbar slots sit below your grid for anything you want quick access to. Drag an item down from the grid, then:
- 1–5 draws that slot’s item into your hands
- Press the same number again to use whatever’s drawn
- Press the slot of your currently-drawn weapon to holster it
Leave something drawn and just stand around long enough and it’ll holster itself automatically — the game doesn’t let you wander the city eternally brandishing a sandwich.
Using, throwing, and dropping items
Right-click an item (or hit its hotbar slot) to trigger its main action — eating, drinking, patching yourself up, reading a document, pulling on a mask, drawing a weapon. Some items have extra actions tucked into the right-click menu beyond the obvious one — a lockpick, for instance, offers more than one option depending on what you’re trying to get into. Anything you “use” takes a short beat to complete server-side, so trying to spam actions faster than the game allows just gets you flagged rather than getting you an edge.
Hold G to aim whatever’s currently in your hands and let go to throw it. Lighter items sail further and faster; heavier ones lob in a short arc. If you’ve got a weapon drawn, hitting the throw key holsters it first so the follow-up throw lands correctly.
You can drop an item straight to the floor or toss it out as a thrown world prop. Either way it becomes a pickup that anyone nearby can grab — first person to reach it gets it cleanly, with no fighting over who “really” got there first. Drop a few things at once near each other and they’ll bundle into a single ground bag rather than littering separate piles.
Giving, searching, and combining
Handing something over
Open the give option on an item, pick a nearby player from the list, and send the offer. They’ll see a small card pop up and can accept with E or wave it off with X — ignore it too long and it simply expires. A short handover animation plays for both of you when it goes through. There’s a brief cooldown between offers so you can’t spam someone with requests.
Searching a player
If someone’s stood with their hands up or is downed and helpless, you can 3rd-eye target them (see Controls & Interface) to open a live search over their pockets — their held weapon and worn apparel are fair game, though jewellery stays with them either way. You’ve got a short window to go through what they’re carrying before it auto-cancels — if they get back up, stop surrendering, or you wander too far apart, the search ends on its own. Anything you take is logged against you with both names attached, so this is very much a “know what you’re doing” mechanic — it’s as much a robbery tool as it is a legitimate check, and there’s no rule saying only police can use it. See Street Crime for where this fits into the wider criminal picture.
Combining items
Drag one item onto another and, if a recipe exists for that pairing, they’ll combine. The clearest example is vaping gear — fitting a pod or tank onto a device assembles it into a finished kit, swapping in a battery gives it a fresh charge, and refilling from an e-liquid bottle locks in that bottle’s flavour and strength until it runs dry. See Drink, Smoke & Addiction for the rest of that loop.
Vehicle trunk and glovebox
3rd-eye any vehicle to pop its trunk or glovebox as its own storage grid. How much it holds depends on the vehicle — sports cars and bikes barely fit a bag, while vans and trucks can haul a serious amount. You’ll need to be close to the vehicle and it has to be unlocked to get in, so a locked car is a genuine barrier to whatever’s riding in the back. Full detail on locking and vehicle security lives in Ownership, Keys & Security.
Stashes, safes, and shared storage
Properties, businesses, gangs, garages, and a handful of other systems each register their own named storage hosted on the same underlying grid — a property stash, a shop’s backroom stock, a gang’s shared supply, and so on. Who’s allowed in is entirely down to whichever system owns that stash (renting the property, being on shift, holding gang rank), not inventory itself — it just guarantees that if two people open the same stash at the same moment, nobody duplicates an item between them. See Home Security & Access for property stash permissions specifically.
You can also buy a placeable safe, drop it somewhere, and rotate it into position to create your own fixed stash — it becomes a real object other people can stumble across and potentially crack open, unless you’ve locked it with a PIN keypad. Get the PIN wrong too many times in a row and the keypad locks you out for a while. A placed safe can be picked back up later if you want to relocate it.
Dumpster diving
Bins and dumpsters scattered around the city can be searched at close range for a small random chance at loot. Each one refills on a slow cycle rather than being an infinite tap, and there’s a soft daily-ish limit on how many fresh searches any one character can pull in. It’s not a reliable income source, just a nice bit of pocket change while you’re out and about — some jewellery pieces nudge the odds toward better rolls if you’re wearing them.
Quality tiers — common through to legendary — roll on most items you pick up or buy, affecting things like resale value or how well the item performs. Currency and documents never roll a tier.