Rats in Probably Stolen are a source of income worth investing in. You can start this by catching rats with a mouse trap (preferably with processed cheese in it), getting the ranching equipment from Joe Wild, or just starting the game as a Rat Wrangler. Start building a farm and selling the meat for profit. If you want to enter the rat meat market, keep reading for tips and tricks on the subject.
Table of Contents
How to Unlock Rat Ranching in Probably Stolen
To start a farm, you need the ranching items and content. To unlock them, give a call to Joe Wild and buy the ranching pack for 500 credits. An alternative to this is starting the game as a Rat Wrangler, which gives you a cage, some rats, and food to begin the game with.
How to Catch Rats With a Mouse Trap
By placing a mouse trap in the shop, you can start to catch more rats, which you can either just kill them and sell the meat, or add to your colony of rats and increase the population.
Where to Find a Mouse Trap
The most reliable way to get mousetraps is to buy them from Dr.Jackson. He will sell them to you for 50 credits each. He will come to you on days 6, 8, and 12, and on Fridays after day 12. You can also find one when you go to the dumping grounds and scavenge there, with a 1% chance of finding yourself a mousetrap.
Where to Get Processed Cheese
The tooltip for the mousetrap says, “Putting some cheese inside will probably help.” Buy processed cheese from thieves and vendors to put into your traps and increase your chances of getting rats from 1% to 50%.
Where to Keep the Rats?
After purchasing ranching from Joe Wild, a retired rancher will visit you once per week. Buy an animal cage from him and start your ranching business from here. Animal cages start with three rows of space and can be upgraded with ingots up to 5 times for maximum capacity.
Overcrowding
When you have more rats than 50% of the cages space you will see the overcrowding alarm. Overcrowding has three stages. On the first one, it increase the chances of disease and reduces fertility. on the second one it adds the chance of your rats fighting and killing each other overnight. On the third stage, the probablities of this increases by an incredible amount, so much so that you will lose almost 1/3 of your cage per night until you drop to a lower stage.
To evade overcrowding, have more than one cage and seperate males and females when you are having too many rats.
How to Feed Rats?
Feeding rats is quite simple. At first you need to put the food in the box with rats and they will eat it over night. later on in the game, you’ll get access to livestock feed dispencer which allows you to turn food into calories and never have a waste of it.
Now you may ask yourself, how can rats waste calories? The answer lies in how the growth system works. Every night, the rats will use 65 calories from their hunger bar and grow up. now if you put a bloomberry in the box, a single rat will eat the bloomberry worth 150 kcal, and only use 65 kcal of that. So in order to increase the efficiency of your farm, it’s recommended that you get your hands on a feed dispencer as soon as possile.
How to Breed Rats in Probably Stolen
Rats are able to breed from 3 days old onward. If you have a mature male and female rat in a cage, they have a chance to be paired and breed everynight. Just make sure you have enough space so that children don’t roam your shop the next morning!
Breeding Simplified
I’m going to give you a simple explanation here and then deep dive for those who care about the statistics. To get better Rat meat, you need better growth and above 50 points on immunity on the rats. For the breeding pair, you also need better fertility and longivity, cause you want them to live as long as possible. You also need to check for overcrowding as it can cause death and sickness.
Rat Growth, Genetics, and the Gene Scanner
Drop 300 credits at the Rat Rancher for the Gene Scanner. You need this item to do any serious breeding. It takes the basic stats and splits them into two hidden alleles (LLA and LLB) for a complete genetic breakdown.
When your male and female mate, the game rolls a basic Punnett square. The baby has a 25% chance of inheriting any specific combination of the parents’ alleles. There are no dominant or recessive genes to worry about—it is a straight 1-in-4 dice roll.
The scanner also color-codes these stats so you can read them at a glance:
- Green: Top tier. The stat is 5% or more above the standard baseline.
- Teal: Average. The stat is within 5% of the baseline.
- Red: Penalty. The stat is 5% or more below the baseline.
Top Traits to Prioritize (Fertility & Growth Rate)
If you are trying to print credits with a meat farm, you only need to care about two primary stats, with two secondary stats acting as a safety net.
| Trait | How It Works | Why It Matters |
| Fertility (Primary) | Determines the nightly percentage chance a pair will successfully mate. | The game uses the lower fertility stat of the two parents. If your male has 55% and the female has 50%, you only have a 50% chance to get pups. Keep this high to scale your farm. |
| Growth Rate (Primary) | Modifies daily weight gain. A base rate adds 75g a day, while a higher rate can push 90g. | Heavier rats yield better cuts of meat. Faster growth means you hit the 350g “Raw Meat” threshold using fewer calories. |
| Litter Size (Secondary) | The whole number is the guaranteed pup count. The decimal is the percentage chance for an extra pup. | A 3.75 stat means 3 guaranteed pups and a 75% chance for a 4th. The game also randomly adds a -1, 0, or +1 modifier to the final count to keep things unpredictable. |
| Immunity (Secondary) | 50+ prevents all sickness. Under 25 causes nightly health loss. | Sick rats get a massive fertility penalty (dropping from 50% to 12%) and yield 25% less meat on the butcher block. |
How to Make Money From Rat Farming
Your rats will give you two main ways to make money. The most profitable path is with the meat. You can sell the meat to upwards of 350 credits. There’s also the poop which you need to clean. If you care about maximizing your profit, know that you can get 100% clean water out of them.
How to Butcher Rats and Sell Rat Meat
You need to possess a sharp tool or item: a glass shard, a cleaver, or a skinining knife (which you get after butchering 100 animals), kill the the rat and harvest its meat. The ratio between the weight of the rat and the quality of the meat is per 50 grams of weight on the rat, you get 15 credits on the meat. If you want to get the max profit, you are looking for wieghts above 350g.
How to get water from Poop
Put all the poop in a pitcher and use UV light, Kotton fabric and HydraTech Micro Water Purifier, you can remove almost everything, drop the water in a pitcher with advance filter and you get a 99.99% pure water. It’s not the best way to get water, but it’s not the hardest either as you don’t have to deal with chemical and metal waste in this water.
Best Rat Farming Tips
This is a lightining round to give you as many golden tips and tricks in the shortest time possible
When Do You Use Processed Cheese?
Only when you want to catch rats and have a problem with them in the shop, otherwise don’t waste credit on it.
How to Protect the Breeding Pair?
Put them in a big fully upgraded box and keep them far away form overcrowding. Always feed them food and keep their box clean. When they reach their end (around 14 days at highest longevity), prepare the next pair.
How to Avoid Food Shortage for the Rats?
Buy contraband and stolen food. You can’t reliably sell them cause of the risk of losing the run, so just feed them to the rats or mix them in the feed dispencer and your problems are solved while your rats are kept fed.
Can You Use Rat Meat to Keep Your Rats Fed?
NO! cannibalism in this game will infect your rats with the prion disease which heavily effects their meat quality. Don’t feed them rat meat.
