/the-game/deal
The 🤝 tab is Deal, the first of the three game modes: Deal, Steal, Heist. It is the main action tab in Dealers.sh. Almost all of your income comes from here, and almost all of your heat is generated here as well. This page covers everything that can happen inside it.
Getting to the streets
As of v1.2.0 the deal tab lives in the top bar rather than the action bar along the bottom. The area name you are standing in, MANHATTAN or AMSTERDAM or wherever you have travelled to, is the button: tap it to walk out onto the streets and open the actions below. The slot it used to occupy at the bottom now belongs to missions.
The three actions
When you open the deal tab on the streets of a normal area, you are presented with three options. Each one represents a different kind of action with a different cost.
- Buy lets you purchase a drug at the local price. It costs cash, it costs one attempt from your daily budget, and it adds the resulting amount to your stash.
- Sell offloads a drug from your stash at the local price. It pays you cash and also costs one attempt.
- Clear Heat is only available when your current heat level is above zero. It is a payable ETH action that resets heat to zero rather than spending dealer
$CASH.
Area limits
- 🛡️ Safe House: the streets are closed for business and you will be told to leave before you can deal. You are protected from other dealers while inside.
- Black Market: a shop run by a guy named Carl. Gated behind 10+ Infamy. The menu replaces drug deals with a single seller for exotic items earned from PVE — Goods, Contraband, and Jewels — at payouts well above normal sells.
- 🛡️ Jail: neither set of actions is available, and the tab redirects you to handle bail or attempt a breakout. You are also protected from PVP while inside. Full mechanics on /the-game/jail.
How a deal flows
A buy or sell walks you through four short screens. First, you choose between Buy and Sell. Second, you pick which drug you want to trade, from the list of drugs available in the current area. Third, you choose the amount, either using one of the quick presets or by entering a custom number. Fourth, you choose a strategy: a small set of options that influences how the negotiation actually resolves.
Once you confirm, the transaction is submitted to the chain. The result is written to the chat log inside the game and shows you exactly what changed: how much cash moved, how the deal resolved, how much reputation you earned, and how your heat shifted.
Deal, Threaten, or Bail
The strategy step is rock-paper-scissors against the streets. You commit to one of three approaches and the NPC commits to one of their own. The matchup decides whether you walk away with full reputation, a clean swap, or nothing at all.
- 🤝 Deal — play it straight. You meet, swap cash for product, and leave.
- 🔫 Threaten — pull a gun and take what you want. Works when the other side blinks.
- 🏃 Bail — try to run with the goods. You skip the transaction entirely and hope they don’t catch you at the turn.
The three options form a cycle. Each one beats one of the others and loses to the third. The NPC plays the same game from the other side, so a fresh dealer can read the chat log to learn which counters which. The matchups become legible within a session or two.
Attempts
Each buy or sell costs one attempt from your current period’s budget, displayed in the UI as a counter like ⚡️ 4/10. When you run out, you have two options: you can wait for the daily reset, or you can purchase an attempt reset from the shop.
Heat and Clear Heat
Every action adds one heat, capped at 5. On every action the game rolls for arrest with chance equal to heat × 0.7%, so heat 5 is a 3.5% jail risk per action.
The Clear Heat action provides an out: pay the current 0.0006 ETH fee to reset heat to zero. The decision of when to clear is one of the recurring economic choices in the game. Sometimes preserving the ETH runway is worth the arrest risk, and sometimes preserving the run is worth the fee.