Probably Stolen Vending Machine Guide: Overnight Sales & Upgrades

What the vending machine is

The vending machine is 1.0's passive income channel: stock it, close the shop, and it keeps selling overnight.

New in 1.0, vending machines can be stocked and left to sell overnight while the shop is closed, generating passive income.Official

It is not a second counter. It does not use your display case, your counter queue or your reputation — it is a separate overnight roll with its own rules.

Three ways to get one

A vending machine can be taken as a 2-point starting perk, bought through a 1,200-favor Store network upgrade, or purchased from Wild.Player-tested Players report the landlord offering a vending machine in exchange for higher rent at around day 40. We have not verified that this is a fixed day or a guaranteed offer.

For a first run, the network upgrade is the least disruptive: it does not eat starting perk points and does not raise rent.

One night, start to finish

1. Stock the machine with items from your inventory;
2. Check the battery. Base draw is 2 energy per night, plus 1 per capacity upgrade;
3. Sleep. The machine rolls its sales overnight;
4. Read the result in the morning — how many items sold and which ones;
5. Press Transfer All to move the credits into your cash.

The machine draws 2 energy per night before capacity upgrades, with each capacity upgrade adding 1; if the battery cannot cover it, nothing sells that night.Player-tested Sale proceeds stay inside the machine until you manually transfer them out.Player-tested

Step 5 is the one players forget. A machine full of credits looks like a machine that made nothing.

Pricing: value + markup + 10%

Vending machine sale price is the item's value plus Retail Markup plus 10%, and it is not affected by event price changes.Player-tested

That last clause is why the machine is a stabiliser rather than a jackpot. During an outage or a water crisis, counter prices move; vending machine prices do not. You give up the spike in exchange for never being on the wrong side of one.

On Thin Margins the retail markup is zero, so the flat 10% is doing almost all the work — the machine is comparatively stronger on hard difficulty than it looks.

The sale chance formula

Sale chance is (Attractiveness × 200 × category multiplier) ÷ (200 + item price). Food, drink, water and snacks use a 1.5× multiplier; general goods under 100 credits use 1.0×.Player-tested

Two consequences fall straight out of the formula:

• Price is in the denominator. Expensive items sell less often, even when attractive. A 500-credit luxury item is a bad vending candidate.
• Attractiveness is in the numerator. Doubling attractiveness roughly doubles the chance for the same item.

The machine guarantees at least one sale per night; attractiveness 25 guarantees 2 and 50 guarantees 3. Guaranteed sales prioritise non-luxury consumables under 50 credits.Player-tested

The guarantee is why cheap consumables are the correct stock. If the roll fails, the fallback still picks from exactly that pool.

Attractiveness and capacity upgrades

The machine does not take normal machine modules. It upgrades through its core:

The vending machine starts at 15 attractiveness and is upgraded by inserting metal ingots for capacity and electronic components for attractiveness.Player-tested

Raising capacity without raising attractiveness gives you more items competing for the same rolls, and a higher power bill. Raise attractiveness first, then capacity.

The Vending Fountain

The Vending Fountain sells water from three tanks: Basewater, High Quality Water and Pure Water.Player-tested

It is a separate unit, not a mode of the general machine. Stock it with the water grades you can spare — the low grades are the natural fit, since they are cheap to produce and easy to replace.

Do not pull your 99%+ high-quality water out of the display case to feed the fountain. Counter sales pay more for the top grades; the fountain is for volume.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting Transfer All. The credits are in the machine, not in your wallet.
• Stocking luxury goods. High price lowers the chance, and the guarantee skips luxury items.
• Ignoring the battery. No power means no sales, silently.
• Upgrading capacity first. More slots with low attractiveness mostly means more unsold stock.
• Expecting event prices. The machine ignores event price swings by design.
• Treating the landlord offer as guaranteed. It is a player-reported event, not a scheduled one.

Open questions

Checked on 4 November 2026:

• Whether the 1,200-favor upgrade and 2-energy base draw are unchanged;
• The exact guaranteed-sale thresholds in the current build;
• The landlord event's trigger conditions — day number, rent increase and whether it repeats.

The formula and the 10% pricing rule come from public player documentation; the official 1.0 notes only confirm that overnight selling exists.

Read next

• Compare the machine with active routes: Money Making Guide
• Cheapest stock to feed it: Production Chains
• Where the machine fits in a run: Beginner Guide