Junk trade

The junk trade is a way to make money in the game. It is not an *easy* way to make money, and it's initially a way to *lose* money. But it can be optimized.

## The Basics

If you go to the Cinci Dump and raise your Dump familiarity and reputation a bit, you will eventually get the option to take a junk contract. This commits you to deliver a certain amount of specific item within a week, after which you will get paid. On the day you get your contract or on the day that you're paid, you can increase the amount of stuff you're supposed to deliver and/or add additional contracts.

The initial junk contract doesn't really pay for itself, but it will let you increase your Dump reputation. The parts, components, and copper wire contracts are a little better.

### Going at it alone

You can, in theory, do this yourself. Go around buying and finding junk on the cheap, then head back to the Dumps and turn it in. This is going to take a lot of your time and you'll spend a small fortune, but it's something you could do.

### Using your crew

The better way to work the junk trade is own a Flatbed Truck and create a Logistics Team. You can hit the Deck/Down To Work and send them off to buy junk for you. Even a poor quality team will collect 30-40 units of junk per action, but you should build up your team until it's good quality (12-15 is a good initial target) if you can. Use Detailed Plans and major Moods to Work Your Teams to improve the quality if you can, since those aren't costing you any money.

### Initial Outlay

So you're $1,050 in the hole before you even start collecting junk, and you'll probably spend $0.50 to $0.75 per piece of junk you collect from an initial contract of about 500 pieces. Also, you can't use your truck while the logistics team exists, so you probably want to own another flatbed or a Pickup for doing your own hauling. So try to have about $4,000 (or $1,000 and a pickup and a flatbed or however you want to work that out) on hand before you get into the junk trade.

### Initial Revenue

Your initial junk contract pays around $0.55 per piece, or around $275 if you exactly make your targets. It gets better, though.

### Other benefits

While you're hitting the Deck/Down to Work, you'll have cards that train your Skill/Analytical thinking or raise your Dump Reputation.

You also might get opportunities to Hide the Evidence, which pays about $150 up front and is a fairly easy check if you keep working the deck.

## Moving up the chain

Component and copper contracts pay better and require less parts per week. You can actually make a minor profit off of them.

### Better Deals

You start by selling junk, but there are other and better options.

Typical costs are estimates and can vary dramatically depending on how successful your team is, how high your Junk Business rating is, and where the team is scrounging: scrounging copper wire in the Dumps will have higher costs, while scrounging it in the Slums should be around that point.

You can increase the size of your existing deals, once week on the day that you started in the Junk trade. You can find out how many days until your deals renew by looking at "Junk dealing/Another week" in the Weekly section of your "Progress" tab. If you want to reduce or quit a deal, you have to buy it out after delivering part of the deal. It's probably a bad idea to increase your early contracts, but electronics and copper wire are pretty profitable and may be worth increasing.

### Expanding Your Teams

At $1,500 to $2,000 per team, it takes a while to build up to efficiency. However, there are screen shots of players with 18 teams in the Cinci Slums earning $20,000 per week in the trade. That's total revenue, not net profit, but it's still decent money for a few card plays.

## Pitfalls

The junk trade works best if you commit to it. Keep your teams around and keep improving their quality. Keep building your reputation and getting better contracts.

Especially early in the trade, be very cautious about increasing the size of your contracts. Delivering 800 junk or 650 parts is generally manageable. Delivering 2,100 junk with a single logistics team is a huge hassle. Don't blindly increase the size of your contracts. Get a sense of what you can deliver.

You need multiple contracts to move up the chain to the better materials, but multiple contracts are harder to deliver on. For one thing, the card that allows you to refresh the money in your teams may not show up if you have 3 contracts. Spend a week with 2 contracts and see how that feels before moving to 3 contracts. Keep in mind that you can always drop contracts, but you can't always drop contracts cheaply.

If you have Your Fuel Depot, be cautious of hitting Deck/Down to Work in the bordertown. Junk trade cards will be mixed with fuel depot cards. If your depot is doing well, this is only a slight distraction. If your depot is doing poorly, you can be spending an additional fortune in mending the place while trying to make money in the junk trade.