A Fortune in Fuel

This is a long and influential story that will show up early in the game. You need Contact/Dusty and Contact/Smith to complete it, and will need to spend a lot of time playing the Deck/Borderlands.

At the start, you will hear rumors of a fortune in fuel oil. You will need to either actively search for it, or make it a Background Consideration and wait a week or so. Either way, you will eventually find the fuel bunker.

You then need to go to the Ethanol Plant to buy the one-shot chemical analyzer, among other tasks. Eventually you will be given a choice.

## The Big Choice

You can either chose to sell the fuel bunker to Smith, which nets at least $45,000 up front and some additional money over the next few weeks, or you can choose to set up Your Fuel Depot and become a rival to Smith and make a fortune selling fuel oil. The second option requires much more effort and set-up and pays off more slowly, but supposedly will be worth more in the long run.

### The Little Choice

Your fortune in fuel can either be Ethanol Fuel or Gasoline Fuel. There's no real benefit to choosing Ethanol over Gasoline and no real drawback to choosing Gasoline over Ethanol. If you choose to sell the bunker,

### Selling to Smith

This is pretty straightforward option. You will receive a lot of money, at least $45,000 and $2,000/week for 16 weeks. You can negotiate for more, but this requires passing Charisma and Skill/Business and Skill/Persuasion tests, so you'll need decide how hard you want to negotiate. Now that you're flush with cash, go to Bob's Tools via the Go shopping option in the Cinci Slums and buy a Strongbox and stash your fortune before someone robs you.

If you are not familiar with how the game works, selling to Smith is a very good option. You get a huge pile of cash and can go buy guns, Clothing, Vehicles, and Implants with relative freedom.

### Setting up your own fuel depot

Instead of selling the bunker to Smith, you can turn it into a post-Apocalyptic gas station. This is difficult and expensive, and if you are not prepared, it can be extremely frustrating to dump $1,000s into building a depot that seems to be a money pit.

This is a large task and it pays to be extremely prepared. You'll want at least $10,000 in cash before you start, a large pile of Building Materials, Spare Parts, and Electronic Components, a Borderlands crew of at least 7 (14 or more is better), and preferably a Trusted Sidekick, a Flatbed Truck, and access to Heavy Goods at the Cinci Dump. Having Smith as a contact at 9 or better will also minimize some friction with him. Giving the amount of cash you'll want on hand, you probably want to build Your Bordertown Crash Pad so you have access to a Living space and a Strongbox. Setting up a catfish farm is a distraction from getting your depot set up, and the depot *probably* will earn you more money, so that can wait.

The game suggests at least 20 Building Materials, but 50-100 is probably better. After you've found the bunker, you're under no time pressure until you start the set-up process, so take your time preparing. Get some money by Working The Streets, do some other storylines, and improve yourself.

When you're ready, it's helpful to go to the Arms Depot and pick up a Machine Gun. Then get in your truck and start bringing in materials. Bringing in materials will raise your Fortune in Fuel/Setup After it gets past 10, you'll have the option to start working on the depot and increasing your Fortune in Fuel/Depot and Fortune in Fuel/Security. It's generally more efficient to pay your crew to do the work for 1 action and then spend 2 actions recouping the money, than it is to spend 3 actions to do the work yourself. The machine gun will give a large boost to your Fortune in Fuel/Security for only a few actions but a lot of money, so you may not want to get one if you're on limited funds.

After your Fortune in Fuel/Depot and Fortune in Fuel/Security are past 10, you spend additional actions to sweat the details until they are 15. It is slightly more resource efficient to only raise your Fortune in Fuel/Setup to 3 (the minimum to get the option to Sweat the details) and immediately work on Depot or Security than it is to spend a lot of materials and actions to raise the Setup any higher.

Eventually, your Fortune in Fuel/Depot and Fortune in Fuel/Security will reach 15, and your fuel depot is almost ready to go. Go to your inventory and create an Informer Network from your Borderlands Crew (which takes about $600 and 14 people even though the team only has 3 members). The advantage of team is that they'll show up as a no-cost option on Working Your Depot cards that would otherwise cost you $700 to resolve, so this is a great investment. Assign a Trusted Sidekick to the depot, if you have one, so that you can spend some money to resolve issues at the depot when you're elsewhere. And finally, if you still have Crew, assign at least 6 or 9 people.

Set your prices for your fuel and sit back and wait. Every week, you should be pulling in roughly $3,000 to $6,000. It'll be a couple of weeks before you pay back your initial investment, much less the money you could have gotten by just selling the entire thing to Smith, but if you're in for the long haul, it'll pay off. Supposedly. It's at least 14 weeks to break even, but if you're going to be playing the game in 6 months, running your own depot should be worth another $70,000 over selling it.