In Probably Stolen, you need to keep your store running and bringing in more customers every day. But you also need to keep an eye on your stock so you don’t run out halfway through the day. If you aren’t making many sales during the day, you can also sell at night after shutting down the store. One way to do that is to install a vending machine with readily available goods for sale.
You can obtain a vending machine quite early in the game, or get it later once you are more established. After owning a vending machine, you also need to learn the right way to use it, how to maintain it, and how you can turn this simple machine into a money-making device early on.
How to Get a Vending Machine
There are three ways to get a vending machine in Probably Stolen:
- Get the vending machine perk.
- Purchase it from Joe Wild’s Network.
- Accept the Landlord’s offer.
I recommend that you use up 2 of your skill points at the start of a new game round and get a vending machine. That way, you won’t need to purchase it later on. In case you did hop into the game without the vending machine, then you need to purchase it from the Network store for 1200 favor.
Later on, you could also strike a deal with your landlord to have your rent hiked in exchange for a free vending machine installation. For me, I got this interaction sometime after day 40, but it could happen a bit later in the game too. But you have to pay an extra +150 credits in rent per week, and if you have the funds for it, then this could be a pretty good deal too.
How to Use a Vending Machine
After obtaining a vending machine through any of the methods above, you need a battery to make it work. Once the vending machine is up and running, it will use up two energy per night to run, and for each upgrade, it will take up 1 extra charge. Now, all that’s left is to stock it up with items in the inventory slot and wait for it to sell throughout the night after ending the day.
The items that you put in the vending machine have a random chance of getting sold out, and you will find out about it when you open the shop the next day. You can then restock the items for the next night too, and also transfer the funds from the vending machine to your account during this time.
There are several factors that will affect how an item sells once placed in the vending machine. Some of these factors are:
- Machine attractiveness.
- Item price.
- Type of item sold.
Earning Through the Vending Machine
Your vending machine starts at 15 attractiveness, and maintaining your machine regularly and supplying enough power will keep it in that range of attractiveness. As for the items that you place in the vending machine, some items sell better than others based on the multiplier. Food, water, and other consumables are cheap to purchase and will always be in high demand. They also offer a 1.5x multiplier per unit when sold.
The more expensive items, like luxury goods, won’t have a day-to-day requirement, and you might find those sitting in your vending machine for several days. The only plus side to adding luxury items is the higher credit cost that will be tallied to your payout, since they will sell for quite a lot of money. I suggest adding low-cost, high-demand items initially, then working your way through luxury goods after earning a substantial amount through the vending machine.
Besides consumables and items that cost less than 100 credits, all other items will give you the least amount of multiplier if they get sold. The multipliers will range anywhere between 0.5 and 0.165. Even so, you are restricted to what items you can and can’t place.
Why Items Don’t Sell
Items that you don’t actually own, mislabeled goods, contraband, other machines, containers, and illegal consumables can’t be used here. If you do add them to the vending machine, then your reputation will be at stake, and you might have to pay a certain fine, depending on the item sold. Duplicates of the same item also have a chance of not selling, so keeping your stock unique is one way to go about it.
Upgrading the Vending Machine
Like most devices in Probably Stolen, you can upgrade the vending machine to further improve it and use it to sell more items. There are two upgrades available for the Vending Machine.
Improving Attractiveness
Improving attractiveness depends on the number of electronic parts being added to the machine. You can purchase electronic parts from the vendor. Adding these to the vending machine core will increase the attractiveness level by 5 per electronic part.
The max upgrade level for this is 17 levels. Since you start at 15 attractiveness already, you can add an extra 85 attractiveness, bringing the total up to 100 attractiveness. Upgrading attractiveness will also improve the selling multiplier, so I recommend focusing more on this during early gameplay.
Improving Storage
To upgrade storage for the vending machine, you first need to craft several metal ingots at the furnace. Visit the vendor in the game and purchase scrap parts to melt at the furnace and turn them into metal ingots. You can then drag the metal ingot from the output section of the furnace and add it to the vending machine core.
This will give you an extra 8 inventory slots per ingot used. You can add a max of 10 storage slot rows. Adding extra slots will also increase battery consumption to one per inventory row added. If you are confident enough later in the game, adding more slots will allow you to place bigger and higher-quality items to sell throughout the night in Probably Stolen.
