Shady Deals v0.6 Sneak Peek

The v0.6 update is mostly about expanding two features that used to be pretty lame: Crypto and Cars. Well, I’m not gonna claim their expansion is something nobody would call lame - but at least now they’ve got some progression and actual links to other parts of the game.

Preliminary Changelog

Rework of the crypto:

The mining farm is no longer just a passive money laundering tool. Now, it actually mints (in-game, of course) crypto coins for every successful cycle. There are five different coins.

• You can trade your crypto for clean cash on a new PC page: the Crypto Exchange.

• Each coin has its own upper and lower price limits.

• Prices for each coin change daily - and each one moves differently.

• Every coin has its pros and cons: some mint quickly but are volatile, others are more stable but slower. A few can be traded in bulk without heavy losses from dumping, whereas others are much more sensitive to each trade. And some are easy to manipulate with your actions, while others don’t react to player activity at all.

  • For example, CartCoin (CTC$) - the Cartel’s coin - can be boosted by trading with the Distributor. But its price tanks if you pull a heist on their warehouse or trade on the Landing Strip.

  • There’s an in-game hint that explains all the coin types in detail, of course. I’ve learned from my mistakes.

• Also, all orders on the Landing Strip now have crypto investors. Completing these orders will raise the value of the investors’ coins on the exchange.

Mining

• You can choose which coin your farm will focus on minting. Slower coins require up to 3 kits’ worth of power daily, while faster ones can be minted using just a single kit. And yes, you can only focus on one coin at a time. Maybe i’ll add more flexible mining options later.

• Farm maintenance now costs dirty money - and quite a hefty amount. You can still pay with clean cash, but the “laundering” aspect remains.

• The mining farm now has a wear stat. If wear reaches 100%, you’ll lose a mining kit.

• To prevent farm condition loss, you can hire Hardware Engineers NPC as a technicians who maintain your farm. Each technician can handle 5-6 farms. The maximum number of technicians you can hire depends on your basement size.

• And, well, you can now remove extra kits from your farming setup if the such need arises.

Cars collections and cars dismantle.

• There are now 8 types of car collections - basically shipments of different cars.

• Car collections boost the price of the cars included by 75%.

• You don’t craft these collections though, you just need to have the required cars in your garage to sell the collection to Romano.

• A new NPC job has been added: Mechanic. You can hire mechanics to work in your garage, where they’ll dismantle cars. The maximum number of mechanics you can hire depends on your garage size.

• Car dismantling uses a priority system that you can configure in the garage by assigning numbers in the funny priority numberboxes.

  • Setting a priority determines the order in which your mechanics will dismantle vehicles. If a vehicle type has a higher priority than others and it's available in the garage, it will be dismantled first. If the highest-priority vehicle isn't available, the next one in line will be selected. If multiple vehicle types share the same priority and are present in the garage, one will be chosen at random. If a vehicle type has a priority of 0 or lower, it won't be dismantled at all.

  • Dismantling will yield electronic components and some clean cash from selling extra parts.

  • You need to buy a specific garage upgrade before you can start dismantling cars.

• New gang position: Booster. This is the person who handles everything related to car theft. Well, basically just car theft... Any thief can be assigned as a Booster, but their driving skill determines how quickly they can stalk and steal cars. Like all gang members, Boosters improve their skills passively over time - in their case, it’s their driving skill that gets better.

Other changes

• Electronic components are now much pricier because there are more alternatives to obtain them.

• You can now see your accomplices’ driving skill in the contacts list.

• Car prices have been changed. They still scale with the player’s cunning, but the system is now more streamlined and divided into tiers.

• All gang members with assigned positions now require a basic gang member payment in addition to their job-specific payment.

In the pipe

Hey, remember when i said i was tired of writing in the previous “In the pipe”? Yeah, that’s why there’s no smut in the preliminary changelog. Yet. So here’s what i want to finish:

• Gloryhole upgrade for the player’s nightclub.

• A “test-drive” of a girl you can hire from the gangs - if I find something good enough. Otherwise, I’ll throw in something else.

• Probably time to add more "useless" gigs on the gig.gles that could lead to something interesting.

• I still haven’t worked on the whiteboard’s UI, and I can already imagine it’s going to be tough.

• Also, I’m planning to revisit all the suggestions from the forum and see what I can add without huge time investments before the update. There are at least a few potential QoL improvements that would be nice to include.

When? Idk, prolly 3 more days. Maybe i’ll leave some rough edges like UI and formatting for smaller patches.