The Lab

Almost everything worth owning in this game belongs to a crew — turf, venues, the treasury, the upgrades. The Lab is the first thing that is yours.

You pay for a place, and it stays in the city you bought it in. Then you buy materials, put a batch on, and it is waiting for you when you come back.

What it is not

It is not passive income. Nothing accrues while you are away. A lab you never touch produces exactly nothing — and risks exactly nothing.

The part people get wrong

Product is worth nothing in the city it was made in. Nobody buys where you cook, which is the same rule the Corner has always had. Making it is half the job; the other half is a drive.

Storage is also finite. A full lab cannot start a batch, so product has to be moved out, and moving it means being there.

Getting raided

There is exactly one moment anything can go wrong, and it is taking a batch off the bench. That is when people are coming and going and there is product on the table.

The odds come off your Heat and nothing else — there is nothing you can buy to make raids rarer. What you can buy is security, which cuts how much a raid takes when one happens.

A raid takes a share of everything on the premises, not just the batch. If you have been stockpiling, you have more to lose.

What you can improve

Four things, and they do different jobs. The building decides what you can make and how much you can hold. Speed takes time off a batch, quality gets more out of the same materials, and security costs the police their haul.

None of them ever stops being worth buying — there is no point at which another level does nothing.

People

Upgrades are bought once. People are paid every time you put a batch on — and they do more than an upgrade level does.

That is the whole choice: a place you work every evening wants people, and a place you touch twice a week wants upgrades. A manager takes money off the whole wage bill, which is what stops a big payroll being a tax on running the place at all.

The wages come out with the materials when you start a batch. If you cannot cover them, the batch simply does not go on — there is no debt and nothing ticks while you are away. Letting somebody go is free.

How many people you can employ depends on the building. A back room with a fan in the window does not employ nine people.

Rivals

The same window that lets the police in lets a rival in.

While a batch is running, anybody standing in your city can see that somebody is working, and can come and ruin it. What is on the bench goes in a skip; what you have already put away is out of reach.

While nothing is running, nobody can touch the place at all — the same rule as the raid, and it means the exposure is always a window you opened.

If somebody does get in, they will be named, and nobody else will try again for a while.

You do not need a lab of your own to wreck somebody else's. That is deliberate: the counterplay to a big producer should not be available only to other big producers.

Not your own side, though. A crewmate's lab, or one belonging to a crew you are allied with, is not a target and will not appear on the list. Leaving a crew does not open its labs to you straight away either — there is a cooling-off period, the same one that applies to collecting a bounty on somebody you were just standing next to.