Probably Stolen Rat Farming: Trap, Feed, Breed, Butcher
Live rats have almost no buyers; the money is in the meat. Trap them, house them, tune them with serums, and butcher them with a blade.
Rats are not for selling. Live rats have almost no buyers. The money is in the meat, and the droppings are not worthless either.
The loop has four steps.
1. Trap
Mousetraps are sold by Dr. Jackson and can also be found scavenging. Leave one in the shop overnight and there is a chance a rat is waiting in the morning.
A piece of cheese sharply improves the odds. Cheese is sold at the commissary. You can catch rats without it, you just wait longer; players report roughly one every few days.
2. House and feed
Put the rat in an Animal Cage. The cage can be expanded with metal ingots.
Cages have durability, and wear scales with the size of the living animals inside. Dead animals and cage equipment cause no wear.
For feeding you can drop fruit straight in, or install a Livestock Feed Dispenser, store calories in it, and let it feed the cage automatically.
3. Breed and select
Put a male and a female together and pregnancy follows. The panel shows a countdown to birth.
Serious breeding needs a Gene Scanner for the deeper gene readout. Immunity Serum handles immunity problems. Steroid Serum raises growth rate but suppresses immunity.
The gene scanner’s allele colours track stat direction: a low hunger rate shows green and a high one shows red. The developer patched this specifically.
4. Butcher
Use a sharp blade on a rat and you get rat meat, which sells well.
Droppings need clearing, and a Vacuum Robot or cleaning robot handles that. The droppings have a second use: dropped into a water pitcher they slowly produce water, and they work as fertiliser.
What the panel shows
Sex, age stage, weight in grams, growth rate, immunity, disease status, pregnancy and birth countdowns, calorie consumption and gene letters.
Numbers seen in recorded runs: 417 g weight, growth rates of 0.74 / 0.96 / 1.01, immunity of 31 / 32. Five adult rats eat roughly 1,200-1,440 calories a night.
The three things that go wrong
Starving a whole litter. Rats eat every day. Run out of food and the litter is gone. Stock calories in the feed dispenser and check the level before you go out.
No scrap to repair the cage. Repairing with scrap now restores 50% of maximum durability instead of a flat 50 points. Bring scrap back from scavenging, or buy ingots for a size upgrade; each size upgrade adds 20 maximum and 20 current durability.
Stats you cannot read. Each attribute shows one to three numbers and genes use letters, with very little explanation in game. It is the most complained-about system on the subreddit, with at least four dedicated question threads.
Is it worth it
It depends on how many free slots and how much spare food you have.
The upside is turning idle time into steady output. The downsides are inventory space, constant feeding and droppings to handle. It is a good side business, not a main line.
Three claims to ignore
- The developer has published no rat system documentation. Everything above comes from player testing and patch notes.
- Gene inheritance is unexplained. Whether A/B paired with A/B can produce A/A is still argued about in the community.
- There is no official range for good weight, growth rate or immunity values.