Side Street

Side Job Overhaul: Localization, Thematic Rewards, Difficulty, and Motives

I'm better than I was before I was as bad as I am now.

Summary

• Side Job Difficulty Overhaul: Improved difficulty tiers with proper scaling and detective work
• Thematic Rewards: The sync disk a job pays out fits the work, and is part of the fee rather than a bonus on top
• Upgrade Vials: Sync disk upgrade vials can now be earned by working, on any job
• City Hall Exclusive Warrants: All warrants localized to city hall for immersion, no other side jobs present there

Patches

Side Job Difficulty Overhaul

Every case is guaranteed to be solvable (the clues resolve to only one citizen).

Descriptors are always drawn from what you can verify in that tier's pool (visual features, obtainable in a workplace, or by snooping a home). This applies to the job families that span the full difficulty ladder (arrests, photographs, thefts, food-throwing, and home vandalism); the single-tier job types are left as they are.

• D0: Full name
• D2A: Workplace plus descriptors
• D2B: Home address plus descriptors
• D3: Phone number plus descriptors (trace it through the switchboard to an address, then as D2B)
• D4A: A photo, and nothing else
  • Canvass the streets or work the client.
• D4B: A floor (or a building and floor, or a pair of initials) plus descriptors
• D4C: A workplace plus descriptors (requiring apartment verification)
  • Visit the workplace, but descriptors will not eliminate all red herrings there. Settle the final suspect pool by verifying the last descriptors at those employee's apartments.
• D5: A work building plus descriptors
  • Multiple businesses within one building, walk the place and validate suspects. Eligible buildings are deliberately restricted (10 <= employees <= 30) (2 <= businesses <= 6) to keep these jobs manageable. Most will involve ground-floor-business buildings, or hotels (staff + rooftop bar).
• D6: Descriptors only
  • The target is someone in the client's social circle - in their contact book, on their apartment floor, or employed at their workplace. Work the client, find the target. Solves similar to hardest vanilla cases, but more fair.

Thematic Rewards

Every side job type only offers 2-3 possible sync disks, ones which thematically fit the job. For example, an infidelity investigation pays in beauty and charisma; a burglary pays in lockpick prowess.

The disk is part of the payment rather than a bonus on top of it. Vanilla pays full cash and hands over a five hundred or a thousand credit disk besides, so two jobs of identical difficulty can be worth wildly different amounts. Here the cash halves when a disk is awarded, and the optional objectives (which vanilla quietly zeros out) are paid. The lowest difficulty jobs cannot offer a disk.

Upgrade Vials

A job that comes away without a disk has a chance of paying a sync disk upgrade vial instead, left for you wherever the job leaves its reward, just like a disk. Vials are otherwise something you buy or steal, and this gives a nice trickle of upgrades for those investigators without sticky fingers. Any job of any difficulty can pay one.

City Hall Exclusive Warrants

Enforcers outsource arrests, so their warrants are now posted at City Hall and nowhere else, with other side jobs and apartment listings kept off that board. The board holds two to five warrants depending on the city's population, never the same difficulty twice at once, and quietly rotates an unclaimed one every few hours since the enforcers are working these cases too.