Storage Hunter: Hard Mode Guide

A comprehensive guide with tips and tricks for Hard Mode in Storage Hunter.

Storage Hunter: Hard Mode Guide

So you want to be a pawn shop magnate. You grab your last 750 bucks and a little truck and head out into the world. There’s two directions you can go in, one will save some time, one will give you more gameplay.

• Option 1, Take a loan and upgrade your fixing tool immediately. The fixing tool is your money maker, more on tools shortly. Or…
• Option 2, if you prefer to be loan free, open your tablet and look at your available auctions.

Regardless if you take the loan or not, you’ll end up at the end of option 2.

Auctions and Bidding

The game has an internal mechanic to ensure you dont win everything and there is still some kind of strategy that will benefit you.

You have 3 available auction sites in 3 separate districts and a site for blind auctions.

• In the beginning, it’s best to stay in the starting district, however nothing says you have to follow the opening questline and you can go and work on another district for a harder challenge if you wish.
• Most auctions, even on hard mode, you can win and profit from. Some you’ll break even, some you’ll triple your money. It can be difficult to get started though, especially if going in with zero game knowledge, but with a little bit of knowledge, you can get through it.
• Sometimes the NPCs will bid above what a locker is worth. They are not seeing something you aren’t. This can happen from your very first locker.
• I haven’t mathed out any of the following, this is all based purely off experience and observation and repetition.
• Typically, for your tier 1 lockers you want to pay between $100 and $200. If they are bidding you up over that, hold X and walk away. There is always more auctions.
• Tier 2 lockers you’ll be looking at 200-500, tier 3 500-1400, tier 4 1400 – 3000, tier 5 3000+
• Tier 5s can be harder to judge, but usually if they go up over 6-8k you’ll have difficulty profiting. Personally I’ve paid up to 12k, but the locker had something I wanted for my house, more on that later!
• Blind auctions are also available and we’ll touch more on those in the next section, but you want to have 1-2k available to win each blind auction.
• If you want to make money, you will have to walk away from some auctions early on. I wish I’d walked away from a few more than I did but unless you go completely bankrupt, which is extremely hard to do, it doesn’t really matter if you lose out a couple of times.

Fixing and Verifying Items

• To get the most out of your auction profits, you need to identify and fix the items you find.
• In your in-game tablet you will have a tools menu with the verification tool and the fixing tool.
• Each upgrade on the verification tool allows you to verify the next tier available. You start with common verification, then unlock rares (blue items), unique (purple/pink items) then legendary (yellow items).
• However this will only save you a bit of time and minuscule amount of money. The real investment is your fixing tool. With each level of fixing available the value of your item increases significantly, far outweighing any verification fees.
• There are a couple of ways you can go about things. You can store the items you cant yet verify until you earn enough to upgrade your verifying tool, or just take items to experts for verification in batches. Both methods are effective. It comes down to your preference.
• Which moves us on to experts.

Experts

• Until you level your verifying tool, you may or may not want to use experts. getting your items verified can provide a nice boost to your funds, as well as get you out and about in the town.
• You can drop off a bunch of items at once or drop them off individually. You may want to drop a few off individually until you get a decent cash pool happening.
• You’ll move past needing experts quite qucikly but they are worth it early days.
• The fees are minimal compared to what you’ll make, especially if you have leveled your repair tool.
• Pawn Shops love perfect condition items. They will boost your cash and renown significantly.

Leveling Renown

Leveling your renown in each district is important if you want to access higher tier houses and vehicles.

• Each district has their own pawn shop which are all available for you to buy at renown level 20.
• However, you may not want to buy them straight away at 20. They are a great source of instant cash and renown.
• Even with the starting pawn shop it may be beneficial to hold off buying it.
• Selling items to pawn shops, especially of perfect quality, you will see your renown visibly go up in chunks and quickly, even at higher levels.
• Any buying and selling activity in any given district will increase renown. Winning auctions, selling items to the shop and selling items in your own shop.
• To get bulk amounts of items quickly, blind auctions are what you want.

Blind Auctions

Blind auctions are a great source for bulk small items that you can profit greatly off. You can fund blind auctions with your first pawn shop and lower tier auctions quite comfortably and after just a few blind auctions they will fund themselves. They are the hardest auctions to actually lose money on and least likely to have the NPCs bid you up on.

• Personally, because the blind auctions are open right up until 9pm, I tend to save them for the end of the day.
• Once at the blind auction site, check the whiteboard inside the door, there will always be 1-3 auctions available, with a starting bid of 400-700. Grab the first one and go bid, then before you even look at what you got, bid on the second and third.
• The winning range is somewhere between 800 and 1800 per blind most of the time., you should be able to easily pick up all 3 for under 5000.
• After you’ve won them, time is yours. I tend to open all the boxes on one pallet, identify and fix, then you can actually lift the open boxes and pour the contents into another box. For each auction I put everything in the one box. The boxes make it very easy to carry a lot of small items at once and can be used and reused by you as often as you like and even sold in your shop. They are only worth a single dollar though, so personally, I like to launch the empty ones around the blind auction warehouse as I empty them for a bit of extra fun.
• You’re not at all obliged to cease operations at 9pm and utilising your time can also increase your profits.

Time Management

There’s lots of ways to manage your time depending on your playstyle. For the casual or the min/maxer there’s methods to suit everyone. Personally I’m somewhere in the middle.

• You dont have to collect your won items straight away.
• The storage lockers and containers you win will stay open right through to 8am the next day.
• Internal time moves fairly quickly in this game so if you plan to be somewhere on the other side of town give yourself at least an hour of in-game time to get there.
• You can win your action and run to the next one to squeeze in as many auctions as you dare. Because beware, the more auctions you win, the more items you have to deal with. Make sure you leave yourself enough time to collect all your won items before 8am the next day. (it’s only happened to me once but I cut it too fine one night and 8am hit with a 3rd of a T4 still to pack, the doors slammed shut and the items disappeared, I was locked in the locker!)
• So the min maxer can plan a day maximising auction attendance but to be successful it’s not 100% necessary. I tend to pick one of the 3 sites, win all I can there, pack it, and get to the blinds.
• The other thing to take into account is what vehicle you have. It’s harder to maximise your won auctions with a smaller vehicle, more about vehicles soon.
• Pawn shops you own can still be accessed for delivery of new stock and collecting the day’s takings after 9pm.

Pawn Shops

There’s 3 available in the game, all of which you can own or do business at.

• Owning a pawn shop is not necessary to get through the game. It may be beneficial to hold off buying them, depending on how you want to play.
• Items you sell in your pawn shop will always fetch a higher than market price, but they have a cooldown from the time they are put out for sale, to when they can actually be sold.
• This is to steady the flow of bulk cash. The higher tier and more expensive the item, the longer it will sit.
• However, by the time one load sells inside the shop, you could possibly pick up and sell instantly 2 or 3 loads to a shop you dont own.
• When you do decide to own your shops, you will make more per item, it will just take longer, but when you have all three operational, it makes higher income a lot more steady and consist.
• Personally I wouldn’t buy the shops until the tools are leveled, or at least the fixing tool is leveled to max, but again, how you play it is entirely up to you!

Vehicles

A huge part of what made things fun for me in this game was stacking your starter truck.

• Packing your vehicles and transporting goods can affect your time management. It’s very easy to get carried away trying to take everything in one load when often it’s a lot quicker to just give in and make a few short trips.
• Each vehicle gets progressively faster and has more room and each vehicle has a purpose. The starter truck will take you far, I skipped the second pickup and went to the box truck.
• The box truck is fast and carries a lot, you can quite easily fit your days’ winnings in most of the time without fancy stacking.
• If you are still using the blue pickup and have trouble balancing items, keep in mind you can enter the vehicle as an item begins to fall and it will stop falling.
• Be aware that sometimes however, those items perched on top will sometimes drop through the rest and detach from the items-truck system and try and fall off. A little bit of strategic accelerator usage will keep your item on board but sometimes they fall off. If you exit the vehicle before it falls off completely it can sometimes throw all your items out and you have to stack again.
• So while it’s fun to stack the small truck it’s sometimes a lot more beneficial to just make several smaller trips.
• To buy the bigger and faster trucks (and houses), you need to be renown level 30 in the appropriate district.

Houses

Along with each pawn shop, there’s also a progressively larger house and they unlock along side vehicles at renown level 30.

• Houses are great for storing items you wish to identify yourself once you have the tool for it. For example when I knew I was getting close to maxing out the verifying tool, I started to stockpile the legendaries instead of taking them to the experts.
• Along with the useful storage, you can also place any items you find throughout your house with architect mode.
• The possibilities are endless! And you need not think that only rares and uniques are worth keeping for your house. My kitchen is now full of pots and pans and utensils, wine jugs, coffee makers and such. My office has a laptop and filing cabinets and stacks of books and a lamp and a safe and a smartphone on the desk and lovely chair… the potential to make your house yours is huge! Being at end game money is a breeze so for me personally now I’m mostly hunting for items to show off in my house.
• The largest house is the best house not just for its size but for its location, pretty much in the middle of everything.

Collectors

Collectors are a recent addition to the game and interacting with them can earn you rewards such as display items, rare items, and wardrobe items.

• There are three collectors around town. An archaeologist, a doomsday prepper, and a mechanic. Their locations are marked on the map with a vase, an army helmet, and a wrench respectively. The archaeologist is the cathedral grounds, in the graveyard, behind the East Black Elk pawn shop. The mechanic is across the road from and slightly north of the Blueberry pawn shop, and the doomsday prepper is back toward the starting trailer park, opposite the driveway to the park.
• Items the collector wants will have an icon in the corner of the tooltip with the word collector. The list of items that a collector wants in any given week changes every Monday. Your progress does not reset so don’t panic if you don’t collect everything that week.
• Items not wanted by the collector that week will have a greyed out collector icon. These items can be stored for future picking should the items appear on next week’s list, for example.
• You can store collector items anywhere you store any other item. utilising house space, both the storage and internal space, you should not have a problem keeping and storing collector items for future use. Alternatively, you don’t have to store collector items at all, you can just deliver the ones you find day to day if they are needed that week.
• The collectors will want a range of different rarity items. You do not have to give them rares, uniques, or legendaries if you don’t wish to. All items progress the collector the same amount, regardless of rarity. So you can, if you wish, only give the collector common items until you fulfill the requirement.
• To give items to the collector, just click on the collector and select the item you wish to give him from the pane on the right and select give. As with offloading at the locksmith and experts, the items just need to be in your vehicle and within range.
• If you can afford to, giving collectors all rarities and storing collector items for future weeks is the fastest way to obtain all the collector’s rewards, but you can pace it out as long as you wish.
• Collectors and completing collector goals are not required to play the game. It’s entirely up to the player if they wish to use them!