Getting Started

From a blank tab to your first paycheck in five minutes.

Hustle City runs entirely in your browser. There is no installer, no launcher, and no patch to sit through. Any current version of Chrome, Brave, Edge, or Firefox on a reasonably modern machine will run it. Phones work too: touch controls load automatically.

Your first five minutes

1. Open the game. Hit PLAY NOW on the landing page or go straight to /play.html. The city streams in while the loading bar fills.
2. Pick a name. Type a street name on the boot screen and press PLAY. You start as a guest, no wallet needed. Guests get the full game; their progress just lives in the current session.
3. Learn to move. WASD walks, the mouse looks, Shift runs, Space jumps. Click the game once to capture the mouse. The full bindings live in the Controls section.
4. Find work. Every player starts with 500 $CASH of pocket money. Glowing beacons mark job zones around the city. Walk into one and press E to clock in.
5. Get paid. Payouts land in your pocket the moment the server confirms them. Cash in your pocket can be lost. Cash in the bank cannot. Find an ATM.

When you are ready to keep your money, your outfit, your guns, and your garage between sessions, connect a wallet. That is the next section.

Wallet and $CASH

Connecting Phantom, funding your account, and how earnings hit your wallet.

Guest mode versus wallet mode

You never need a wallet to play. Guests get the whole city. The difference is persistence: a connected wallet is your account key, so your balance, outfit, weapons, and owned cars are saved on the server and waiting for you next session. Guest progress evaporates when the tab closes.

Connecting

1. Install Phantom if you do not have it. More wallets are planned.
2. Click CONNECT WALLET in the game or on the landing page and approve the connection.
3. Sign one login message. It looks like HUSTLE CITY login <code> with a one time code from the server.

That signature is a login, not a transaction. It costs nothing, it moves nothing, and it cannot touch your funds. The game will never ask you to sign a transaction just to play, and nobody from the team will ever ask for your seed phrase. Anyone who does is running a different kind of job.

About $CASH today

Every price, payout, and balance in the game is denominated in $CASH. In the current phase the game server is the ledger: you earn and spend inside the city. When the city vault opens for real money, deposits and withdrawals ship with it, and the official vault address will appear on the landing page. That page is the only source of truth for the address. Treat every other version as a honeypot, because it will be one.

Two kinds of money

Once the vault is open, Hustle City runs on a two pool ledger, and the city is honest about which pool you are holding. Backed money is real: it entered the city through a verified vault deposit, or it was paid to you as a wage while the City Reserve could cover it. Backed money in your bank shows as CLAIMABLE, and claimable means exactly that: backed by the vault, withdraw any time, one for one, always. City scrip is everything else: your starting 500 and any wage the Reserve could not cover. Scrip spends everywhere in Hustle City, every shop, every dealer, every casino table, but it cannot leave the city.

Where does backing come from? The city collects it. Every time somebody spends real money at a register, the backing behind that spend moves into the City Reserve, along with the sales tax, the property levy, the vault fee, the track rake, and every other fee the city keeps. Wages draw from that Reserve first, so a busy city pays real. Payout toasts carry a small stamp so you always know which you got: a vault mark for backed pay, a scrip mark for city printed pay.

The arithmetic behind this is public and exact: everything claimable across all players, plus the City Reserve, equals the money actually sitting in the vault. Nothing claimable is ever invented, which is why claims settle immediately instead of queueing behind promises.

Claims

Claims come from your CLAIMABLE balance only, minimum 2,000 $CASH, 2 percent vault fee, one claim per 24 hours, daily cap 100,000 per wallet. The settlement desk pays in order, and because claimable money is backed one for one, it can always pay.

Currency details: ticker $CASH, total print 1,000,000,000.

Controls

Keyboard and mouse bindings for movement, driving, combat, and interaction.

On touch devices the game swaps to a virtual joystick on the left, look controls on the right half of the screen, and context buttons for fire, aim, jump, and interaction. The enter vehicle button appears only when a vehicle is close enough to matter.

Jobs and the Economy

Every legal and less legal way to earn, and how payouts are calculated.

You start with 500 $CASH. Five jobs are live, each started by walking into its zone and pressing E. Four are honest. One is very much not.

How payouts work

Every payout is validated by the server, not your browser. The server enforces per job earning rates, caps any single payout at 2,500 $CASH (the Vault Job is the exception), and applies a daily earning cap of 25,000 $CASH per account. Shop prices are also enforced server side, so the catalog is the catalog. If a number looks too good to be true in Hustle City, it is, and the server already knows.

The city pays what it collects

Wages come out of the City Reserve, the pool of real money the city collects from taxes, fees, and every register in town. While the Reserve holds, your pay is backed money: claimable, real, stamped with a vault mark. When the Reserve runs thin the city does not stiff you: the payout still lands at full size, but the uncovered part arrives as city scrip, stamped so you know. Scrip is legal tender on every street in Hustle City. It just never leaves the city. The Reserve also smooths itself: at most a fifth of it flows out per day, so no single grinder can drain the vault before lunch.

Taxes and fees

The city runs on its cut, and every cut is printed on the receipt:

• Sales tax: 5 percent on every purchase, rounded up, shown as its own receipt line in every shop, at the dealer, and on property deeds. Ammo top ups under 100 $CASH are exempt. The city does not tax the small stuff.
• Property levy: owning doors costs 10, 25, or 60 $CASH per day by tier, collected bank first at your first login of the day. Nobody gets repossessed. The city just collects.
• Everything else you already knew: the ATM fee, the wire fee, the track rake, the vault fee, the fines. All of it flows to the city ledger, and the real part of it lands in the City Reserve, which is exactly the pool your wages draw from.

This is honest bookkeeping, not a scam: every unit the city collects is a unit that either retires outstanding scrip or becomes real backing for the next paycheck. The books are public at /api/stats and in the Reserve app on your phone.

Spending it

Three shops take your money: the clothes shop tints your outfit, the gun dealer stocks the arsenal, and the car dealer sells everything from a rusty hatch to a gold super. Dying costs you 10 percent of the cash in your pocket, so bank what you cannot afford to lose at an ATM.

Vehicles

Buying, boosting, storing, and what happens when you total one.

Walk up to any car and press F. If nobody objects, it is yours for now. Bought cars are different: the dealer registers them to your account, and your owned car spawns at the garage whenever you need it. Headlights come on at night, H is the horn, and pedestrians are softer than they look.

Dealer price list

Driving notes

• Handling is arcade style: fast to learn, satisfying to abuse. High speed plus hard steering gets you a drift, or a lamppost.
• Running people over is technically a crime. The heat system agrees instantly.
• Totaled a car you own? It respawns at the garage. The city has no memory for metal, only for money.

Combat and Heat

Weapons, damage, the wanted system, and how to make Metro Police lose interest.

The arsenal

Heat and wanted stars

The city tracks your behavior as heat, displayed as one to five wanted stars. Firing a weapon raises heat. Hurting people raises it faster. At one star Metro Police officers spawn, chase you, and shoot back, and every star after that makes them more numerous and less polite.

To cool off, break line of sight and stay hidden for about 30 seconds. Heat decays when nobody can see you. Rooftops, alleys, and the Scrapyards are traditional choices.

Dying

When your health hits zero the screen fades and you wake up at the hospital, lighter by 10 percent of the cash you were carrying. Banked money is never touched. The lesson costs exactly as much as you failed to deposit.

Districts and Turf

The eight districts of Hustle City, and who thinks they run them.

• The Grid. Downtown. A canyon of glass towers where the real money changes hands and everyone chasing it sprints between meetings they are late for. Suits and street kids share the same crosswalks. Construction never stops. Neither does the noise.
• Goldcrest Hills. The hills north of downtown, where the cost of a mailbox is more than most people make in a year. Mansions with infinity pools, garages of cars nobody drives twice, and private security that answers only to the house.
• The Scrapyards. The industrial east side. A rust colored maze of dead factories and wrecked cars, crowned by Mount Rust, forty stories of crushed cars and scrap. Good place to scavenge. Better place to hide.
• Neon Row. The casino strip south of downtown, where hope gets converted into noise around the clock. Every game is rigged, every patron knows it, and the line is still around the block.
• The Ironport. The west harbor, where cargo comes in legal and cargo comes in the other way, all of it craned onto barges and shipped out under the Gateway Arch. Dockworkers union motto: WE MOVE WHAT FLOATS.
• Southside Flats. The low rent flatlands, home to everybody grinding their way up from the bottom. Leaning walkups, pawn shops that buy anything, and a diner that never closes.
• Spotlight Heights. The media district, a canyon walled with screens. Camera country: streaming studios, agencies selling attention by the pound, and ground that shakes when a top name whispers a rumor.
• The Undercity. The tunnels beneath everything, lit only by bare bulbs. Where the deals nobody claims get made, Static changes hands in whispers, and the one question at every back door is the same: who sent you.

Turf

Turf control is on the roadmap for phase three. Crews will be able to claim districts, defend them in turf wars, and collect rewards for holding ground. Until then, the districts belong to whoever is loudest at the time, which is tradition anyway.

Crews

Forming a crew, ranks, shared stash rules, and crew wars.

Crews are a phase three feature and are not live yet. This is the plan, so you can start recruiting early.

• Founding. Any player will be able to found a crew with a name, a tag, and a color that shows up over members heads and on the map.
• Ranks. Boss, lieutenants, and soldiers, with permissions for inviting, kicking, and touching the money.
• Shared stash. A crew bank that members pay into and ranked members draw from. Every withdrawal is logged, because this city has seen what happens otherwise.
• Turf wars. Crews claim districts, defend them on a schedule, and collect district rewards while they hold. Losing turf hurts. That is the point.
• Crew heists. Multi player scores with bigger payouts than anything a solo runner can pull, and a split the boss sets before the job, not after.

Details will land in these docs when the feature ships. Watch the roadmap.

FAQ

Short answers to the questions the chat asks every single day.

Do I need a wallet to play?

No. Hit PLAY NOW and you are in as a guest. A wallet upgrades you to a persistent account so your money, outfit, weapons, and cars survive between sessions.

Is the game free?

Yes. The game is free to play and every new player starts with 500 $CASH of street money.

Can I cash $CASH out right now?

The in game ledger runs on the game server today, denominated in $CASH. Real deposits and withdrawals ship in phase two with the city vault. The official vault address will appear on the landing page the moment it opens, and that page is the only address you should ever trust.

How do I make money fast?

Work. The four honest jobs pay roughly 280 to 350 $CASH per minute. The Vault Job pays 4,000 in one hit, if you survive the three stars that come bundled with it.

Can I lose my money?

Dying costs you 10 percent of the cash in your pocket. Banked money is untouchable, so visit an ATM before you do anything brave.

Does it work on my phone?

Yes. Touch controls load automatically: a virtual joystick, fire and aim buttons, and context actions. A recent phone and a modern browser are enough.

Can I fight other players?

Not yet. You can see them, race them, and talk trash in chat. Open PvP arrives with crews and turf wars in phase three.

The game will not load. What do I check?

Use a current version of Chrome, Brave, Edge, or Firefox, make sure hardware acceleration is on, and turn off extensions that block WebGL or websockets. On a weak machine, add ?lowend=1 to the play URL for the light version.

Roadmap

What ships next in Hustle City.

Dates are not promised. Order is. Hustle City ships when it is ready.