The Wire

The Wire is an NPC job board — villains run crimes, heroes run responses to them, and the outcome is always decided against the city itself, never another player. No PvP, no enrollment requirement, no gate of any kind: it's open to every player from level 1, reachable any time from the City map or the Watchtower.

How a Job Works

Pick a job from your alignment's board, pick a district to run it in, and queue it — that's the entire interaction to start. The job then runs on a real-world timer (15 minutes to 90, depending on the job) with no need to sit and watch. When it wraps, the payout lands straight in your bank, not on-hand cash, so a job that finishes while you're offline is never at risk of being robbed before you even see it.

You can only have one job running at a time — queue another and it'll tell you to wait for the current one to wrap up first.

Not every job succeeds. Higher-tier jobs carry a real chance of coming back busted — zero payout, no street finds, just a setback — and leaving a mid-job interference unhandled too long will fail the job outright. See the sections below for both.

Daily Limit

You get 5 completed jobs per day, reset at midnight alongside every other daily pool in the game. There's no way to buy or exchange for more. Since only one job can run at a time, those 5 slots are really 5 sequential runs, not 5 you can stack at once.

Only a job that actually pays out counts against the 5 — a busted job or one that fails from a missed interference check-in doesn't touch your daily count at all. Failing costs you the time you put in, not one of your slots, so you can queue right back up and try again as long as the board isn't closed for the day.

The Jobs

Five jobs per alignment, mirrored in duration, payout scale, and risk so both sides feel like an equally real ladder from a quick, almost-guaranteed errand to a real gamble. Payout shown is the base amount before your level, the outcome roll, any territory bonus/penalty, and your response-speed bonus are applied — your actual payout is base × your level × outcome × territory × response speed, or $0 if the job busts or you never get back to it. See "Response Speed" below for that last multiplier.

Villain Jobs

Hero Jobs

Mid-Job Interferences

Every job gets at least one required "handle it" moment, landing somewhere between 40%–70% of the way through its duration. When it triggers, you'll get a notification and the job's card on the board swaps its countdown for an urgent prompt — a witness walking in, a rival crew muscling in, the target trying to bolt, whatever fits your alignment and the moment. Click through it and it's resolved instantly, always successfully — no stat check, just flavor confirming you handled it. The job's countdown then continues exactly as if nothing happened.

This has a real deadline: the job's own finish time. If you haven't clicked "Handle It" by the time the job would have wrapped up, it resolves as a failure instead — $0 payout, no street finds, and its own "you never got back to it" flavor line. You still get the job's full remaining duration to respond (no rush timer shorter than that), but leaving it forever is no longer free.

The two highest tiers — Extortion Racket / Protect a Target and Elimination Contract / Protect the Politician — get a second, independent interference moment instead of just one: the first lands roughly 25%–40% into the job, the second roughly 60%–75% in. Both are required; missing either one fails the whole job the same as missing the only one on a lower tier. The board shows each as its own card ("check-in 1 of 2" / "check-in 2 of 2") when both happen to be pending at once.

Response Speed

How fast you click "Handle It" after it triggers now matters too, not just whether you eventually do. The board's countdown will tell you exactly how much time is left for a bonus once interference lands. On the two-beat jobs above, your overall response speed is the slower of your two check-ins — answering the first one instantly and then sitting on the second for half an hour still only counts as the slow response.

In minutes, that's:

The fast tier's bust-chance reduction is a real safety net, not just a bigger number on a win — the same roll that would've busted a slower response can come back a win instead. This stacks on top of the normal Clean/Lucky/Close Call outcome roll below, so the fastest, luckiest run and the slowest, unluckiest one are further apart than they used to be.

Outcome Roll

Every completed job (that doesn't bust) rolls one of three win outcomes, each with its own flavor line and payout multiplier:

These three keep their same relative 70/20/10 weighting no matter the job's tier — the bust chance above (adjusted for response speed, see above) is carved out of the total on top, so a riskier job doesn't just add a bust chance to the same odds, the whole distribution shifts. A busted job pays $0 and skips street finds entirely, with its own flavor line explaining what went wrong.

Territory Ties

Running a job in a district your faction currently controls (see Exploring and The Watch Tower for district control) pays +25%. Running one in enemy-held territory pays -15% instead. Contested or unclaimed districts have no effect either way. A bust or an ignored interference still pays $0 regardless of territory — the bonus only applies once a job actually wins.

Street Finds

A job that wins (isn't busted or ignored) also rolls a chance at a few bonus finds, same as regular Exploring:

• Scraps — a 35% chance of 1–7 scraps (50% on a fast response).
• Food — an 8% chance of a Snow Cone or The Last Slice, added straight to your Lunchbox (13% on a fast response).
• Rare pets — a small district-specific chance at a Raccoon, Crow, Police K9, Iguana, Parrot, Black Cat, or Fox, provided you have an open pet carrier slot. Response speed has no effect on pet odds — those stay exactly as district-based as always.

The Ledger

Two live leaderboards — Top Villains and Top Heroes — ranked by total lifetime earnings from completed jobs, with a jobs-completed count alongside. Busted and ignored jobs still count toward jobs completed, they just contribute $0 to the earnings total. A short preview sits right on the job board itself; the full Top 20 for both sides is one click away.

Tips

• The lowest two tiers are nearly risk-free (2% and 6% bust) — good picks when you'd rather grind steadily than gamble.
• The top tiers pay the most but bust up to roughly 1 in 4 times — decide how much of a swing in outcome you're comfortable with before queuing one.
• Don't queue a job and then ignore it for hours — if interference lands and you don't get back to it before the job's own finish time, you lose the whole thing.
• Favor your own controlled districts when you have the choice — the +25% territory bonus is free money for zero extra effort, but only on jobs that actually win.
• Keep an eye out for the interference notification and answer fast — the +35% fast-response bonus (plus safer bust odds) is the single biggest lever on your payout, bigger than territory or the outcome roll.
• The two top tiers need TWO fast responses, not one, to earn the full bonus — pace yourself for a second check-in later in the job instead of relaxing right after the first.