The queue is decided before you open
The customer queue is fixed when you open the shutter. Restocking the display case at midday does not change who is coming; it only changes what they find when they arrive. This single rule turns the shop from a reaction game into a preparation game.
The display case decides who walks in, not what you sell. It is a filter: contraband in the case attracts a security inspection, and a clean case brings a quieter, poorer crowd. So the case is a promise about the kind of shop you are, and the queue is the reply.
Practically, that means the last thing you do before opening should be checking the case, not the price list. If the case says “grey goods, high margin”, expect buyers with money and a security officer with a notebook. If it says “water and cigarettes”, expect a queue you can serve with one hand and a margin you can defend.
Four customers the store page names
The official description gives three examples and one category: a security officer fishing for evidence, a revolutionary looking for leverage, a fallen elite testing whether you are useful, and the Augs — people taken over by a rogue AI chip who look like everyone else until they do not.
Read them as four intentions rather than four costumes: enforcement, politics, status and predation. An enforcement customer is buying evidence as much as goods. A political customer is buying capability. A status customer is buying a story about themselves. A predatory customer is buying access to you.
That framing matters because the same item has a different value to each. A weapon sold to a status customer is a trophy; sold to a political customer it is capability; sold to enforcement it may be a trap. The item did not change. The consequence did.
Approve, refuse, report, look away
The four verbs are the game. Approve is the default and generates the most downstream effects. Refuse is the safest and costs you the sale. Report is the only move that converts a customer into reputation with one faction at the expense of another. Look away keeps the sale and the relationship but leaves a record you did not write.
A useful discipline is to decide your default before the customer arrives. If your default is approve, you will approve under pressure. If your default is refuse, you will refuse profitable business. Pick the default that matches the run you are trying to have, and treat every exception as a decision you have to justify afterwards.
The four verbs also carry different evidence costs. Reporting writes a line in your favour and a line against you. Looking away writes nothing, which is not the same as writing nothing down — the sale is still in someone’s ledger.
Reputation has two ledgers
Six factions track you from −200 to +200: Lower Levels, Upper Levels, Security, Black Market, Revolution, and the Sector 13 Cartel, which only the Chemist start opens. Reaching −100 with four of them ends the run — and the endings differ: a mob, a bomb, an arrest, or a Cartel retirement.
That is not flavour, it is the shape of the system. Every faction you please is a faction whose rivals now have a reason to watch you, and every report is a deposit in one ledger and a withdrawal from another. You cannot max all six; the design does not allow it.
The practical implication is to pick a lane before the run forces one on you. A shop that reports consistently has protection and a thin, legal, low-margin stock. A shop that never reports has good suppliers and a growing file. Both are playable. A shop that alternates is a shop nobody protects.
Three hard cases
The obvious plant. A customer asks for something specific, pays without haggling and lingers. The temptation is to over-serve them because the transaction is easy. Complete the sale normally and change nothing else: no extra stock on display, no comment about suppliers, no second meeting.
The regular who is short. A discount that is recorded as a discount is a business decision. A discount hidden inside a mislabelled item is evidence you generated for free.
The elite who wants counterfeit. This is the highest-margin, highest-variance request in the game: the store page explicitly invites you to profit from arrogant elites by selling them fakes. The risk is not the sale, it is the discovery — and the crime file remembers.
Lower Levels Ledger. “What to do with the person at the counter.” Last updated 2026-10-29. https://probablystolen.games/lore/customers/