Dug Out — Player Guide

You rent the property next to the target and tunnel in over a set number of nights. The digging is the easy part. This guide is about the rest.

Your first job: the corner shop

You start with a few hundred pounds, a spade, some timber props and a cart. The first target is a corner shop safe with no security at all — it exists to teach the three things every later job assumes:

1. Rent your way in. Every job starts by choosing which nearby property to rent. Closer means a shorter tunnel and a more obvious suspect; further means invisibility bought with digging time. On job one, take the obvious one.
2. Plan before you dig. The planning phase is paused — read the survey, pick tonight's tools, choose a heading. Time only costs you once the spade is in the ground.
3. Dig, and prop the roof as you go. Soil type sets your speed, the tool sets your noise. Supports take real minutes to place and a roof that runs too far without them comes down — a collapse is loud, and it buries the night's progress.
4. Deal with the dirt. Everything you dig out has to go somewhere — the back room, under the floorboards, eventually a van. This is not a chore between the fun parts. This is the game.
5. Cover up before dawn. Hide the entrance, park the van, wash the boots. Anything left out is evidence in the morning.

The core loop: a night in five phases

Plan → Dig → Dispose → Cover → Day. The dig is only the second phase of five, and it is maybe a third of a night. The rest is dealing with what the digging did. The Day phase you read rather than play: who noticed, what got reported, what the heat does next. Each target gives you a set number of nights; each score funds the kit for the next, bigger target — six jobs, in order, each one teaching what the next assumes.

The systems that confuse new players

The spoil is conserved, and it swells. Excavated dirt does not vanish into an inventory — it stays, and broken ground takes up more room than it did in the wall, so the pile is always bigger than the hole. That one rule is why you cannot dig straight at the vault: you would drown your own hideout in dirt. Storage inside is cheap but small; the yard holds plenty but the pile is visible, and a yard that keeps rising is one of the main ways you get caught.

Quiet versus loud digging. Hand tools are slow and nearly silent. Power tools are fast and loud — loud enough that you need cover: the freight train masks everything for ninety seconds, and so does rain. Learning the timetable is learning the level.

Seismic sensors trip on sustained digging, not brief. They have a patience measured in minutes of unbroken loud work. Work in bursts and they never fire — but cheap power tools cannot work in bursts, and good ones can. That difference is most of what the expensive tools are actually selling.

Heat is a meter, not a switch. Noise, visible spoil, hit utilities, being seen — everything feeds one slowly-decaying meter, and the meter buys the city things: more patrols, a car parked outside overnight, a survey crew. Jobs are lost by accumulation, not by one mistake. One bad night is recoverable; three careless ones are not.

Tools are options, never obligations. Owning a jackhammer does not make you loud — it makes loud available. Every tool in the shop lists which way of being caught it beats, because the buying decision is never "which is best" but "which of tonight's six ways of being caught am I buying my way out of".

Tips an experienced player would give you

• Fill the cheap hiding places first. Under the floor and the back room barely raise suspicion; the yard is where greed gets punished. Haul to the van before the pile gets noticed, not after.
• Dig loud only under cover. Train, rain, and bursts shorter than a sensor's patience. If you cannot hear cover coming, pick up the spade instead.
• Props before progress. A collapse costs you the tunnel, makes a noise you cannot mask, and can bury the night. Nine quiet minutes placing a support is the cheapest insurance in the game.
• Respect the utilities. Hit a water main or a gas line and engineers get called out — and engineers find tunnels. Recon (radar, council plans) turns those ambushes into map features.
• Never call the fixer. If someone sees you, there is a number you can call, and it will always look like the clean answer at 3am. It turns a burglary into a homicide: heat that never decays and a detective who does not work to a timetable. Pay the witness off, move them, or better — never be seen.
• Buy for the next job's security, not this job's speed. The shop exists to beat detection channels: seismic cover, spoil logistics, water, recon, breach. Faster digging is the least of it.
• The dog cannot be planned around. Every other detector has a pattern. The dog does not. Jobs with a dog want quiet tools and short sessions.

Achievements

Thirty, each with locked and unlocked art. They cover:

• The tunnel — your first cut, lifetime metres dug, supports placed.
• The dirt — spoil hidden and spoil hauled away, tools owned.
• The career — nights worked, targets cracked, and yes, times busted.
• The craft — completely quiet nights, and serious ground covered in a single night.

FAQ

Can I be seen while underground?

No — detection is entirely indirect: sound, seismic sensors, the visible spoil pile, damaged utilities, patrols above you, and the dog. Every channel except the dog can be planned around once you understand it.

What happens if I run out of nights?

The deadline is the point of a heist with a night count. Each target is designed to be reachable in its nights with the kit it expects — and not reachable without it. If you are behind, the answer is usually a tool, not more hurrying.

Do I lose my tools between jobs?

No. Kit carries forward — each score is meant to fund the next job's shopping list, and the whole ladder is balanced around that.

Is this the shooter I remember?

Dug Out used to be an extraction shooter. That game is finished and preserved on its own branch — the heist redesign shares the terrain tech and about half the codebase, and it is the game going forward.

When can I play it?

No date yet. The design and the underlying model are done and machine-verified; the playable build is still coming together. There is no store page yet.