Rat Ranching Guide - Probably Stolen Guide - IGN

Rat Ranching is not an easy process to work through in Probably Stolen. You'll be taking care of a small colony of rats, cutting them up, and then selling their meat to the public for a high profit. Food is one of the most lucrative trades you can work in, but getting to that point takes time, and there are critical things you need to know about taking care of rats. In this guide, we're going to cover everything you need to know about Rat Ranching and how to best get started with it in Probably Stolen.

How Rat Ranching Works in Probably Stolen

You can choose to begin Rat Ranching by purchasing it as a special upgrade from Joe Wild, or make it your starting profession at the beginning of the game. Buying it from Joe costs 750 Credits . You'll receive a starter's kit for taking care of rats, beginning with a small family of rats, an Animal Cage, a Livestock Feed Dispenser to put into the cage, and some food.

Contain all of your rats inside the Animal Cage, with the Livestock Feed Dispenser on the left side. You can place any type of food that you purchase from other characters into the dispenser, grind it up, and it automatically gives the rats food when they're hungry. The best kinds of food you can put into the dispenser are going to be: Nutrifruit, Milk, Peat, and Cheese .

You want to avoid any type of rat meat. If you give rats the meat you cut up after butchering them, their health deteriorates, and they have a higher chance of becoming diseased.

Expect your rat family to begin growing up in a short amount of time. When a female rat becomes pregnant, she'll be in this state for three days before giving birth to children. Eventually, when a rat dies, you'll need to cut them up using a butcher knife, or you can buy an Auto Butcher and set it to do it automatically for you whenever a rat carcass is in the Animal Cage. You can then sell the meat you get from cutting up the rats to customers and make a profit.

Those are the basics of how Rat Ranching works. It's a bit more complicated than that, as you have to factor in the Animal Cage, the stats of your rats, breeding them, and making sure you don't keep diseased rats in the Animal Cage for long.

Your rats will remain in the Animal Cage, and that's where they're also going to expand. As the females become pregnant, more rats begin to take up the cage. You'll have to expand it using Metal Ingots from a furnace. You can do this five times to expand the various rows and prevent Overcrowding, a negative buff that all rats get when they're stuck inside a cage without too much room (which does happen often).

A good way to help out with this is to manually choose which rats to place into your Auto Butcher, even if they're not dead. Getting a second Animal Cage is also a good idea, but you'll need a second food dispenser to feed both of them.

Additionally, as time goes by, the durability of the Animal Cage goes down. When this happens, at night, some of the rats get out and appear in other parts of your shop. They can show up in the display case, your base inventory, your counter, or even in other containers. They'll also leave behind Rat Feces when they do this. You'll need to repair an Animal Cage using Metal Scraps.

As you get the Animal Cage in good quality and expand it, knowing what rats to keep and breed is also important too. Rats with higher stats live longer, meaning you can get more meat from them when you use your knife or Auto Butcher.

Whenever you hover over a rat, you'll get a breakdown of their stats. You can see it for every rat, including whether they're male or female, their age, health, hunger, hunger rate, expected litter (if they breed), and if they've reached maturity.

You'll always be able to see these base stats. However, if you buy the Gene Scanner from Dr. Jackson. It costs a hefty price, but you can see if these stats are positive or negative.

Rats with negative stats are ones you want to avoid having for too long in your Animal Cage. If they stay, there's a chance they might mate with your females, and their offspring rats also have these negative stats. You can use the Wire Cutters on any rat to neuter them, preventing them from mating with other rats in your colony.

At the start of each day, it helps to go through your rat colony and double-check that none of them have become diseased or are immunocompromised. If you see any rat with an immunocompromised status, remove them as quickly as possible or, at the very least, neuter them. You can also set the Auto Butcher to remove any rats that become sick or are a prion carrier.

The prion carrier is what rats get if they eat rat meat. If you're not feeding your rats that meat, you'll never see it, but it's possible you might purchase one from a retired Rat Rancher.

Eventually, most of your rat colony should have green positive stats. These provide you with the best rats that you can take care of and turn into food to sell for the best prices. I recommend waiting until a rat reaches its Elder stage (11 days old) before considering butchering them, as this yields the largest amounts of meat that you can sell for the most.

You can still use rats labeled as (Mature), but I don't recommend it if you're trying to yield the largest amount of meat every day.

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