Drug LordDrug Lord 3 guide
Shipping, vehicles, property and crew
Early ranks are won by picking good trades. From Dealer onwards, they're won by moving volume without losing it. These are your tools.
Also in this guide: beginner's guide · fighting and weapons · the 26 cities
Shipping
Shipping sends stock to another city without you flying with it. You choose a courier and a speed, and you stay where you are while the shipment travels. Shipments skip airport security, and freight gets cheaper per gram the more you send.
The catch is that a courier's odds are rolled every day the shipment is moving. A courier that's 94% safe per day is only about 83% safe over a three-day trip. Here's how the numbers compound:
| Courier | Safe per day | Overnight (1 day) | Three-day | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Street Runner | 85% | 85% | 61% | Dirt cheap, but a slow trip multiplies the risk. |
| Courier Stan | 94% | 94% | 83% | He tries his best. Fine for short hops. |
| Sharp Ship | 98% | 98% | 94% | Professional and discreet. Worth it for big loads. |
| Global Express | 99.7% | 99.7% | 99.1% | Near-guaranteed, at ten times the price. |
Speed. Overnight costs 2.5 times the base freight and risks a single roll. Three-day costs the base rate and risks three. Pay for speed when the cargo is worth more than the difference.
What a failed day means. Usually a checkpoint seizes part of the load and the rest arrives late. Sometimes the whole shipment disappears.
Insurance refunds the purchase value of anything seized or lost in transit. The premium scales with the courier's risk, so insuring a Street Runner is expensive and insuring Global Express is cheap. Insurance never covers an overloaded courier.
Weight limits. Couriers unlock as you rank up, and each has a hard weight cap. Overloading one is a 90% chance of disaster. Don't do it.
Heat. Seized shipments and airport busts raise your heat. While you're hot, couriers run into more trouble, airport security flags you more often and insurers charge more. Heat cools by three points a day, so sometimes the smartest move is a quiet day or two.
Rule of thumb: ship weight, fly light. Send the bulk of a big load by a safe courier, carry only what you can afford to lose, and insure whatever would end your run if it vanished.
Vehicles
A vehicle is how you move product without an airport. It never changes the price of a gram, but it changes how much you can carry, how quietly you sell and how you get from city to city. Buy one at the dealership.
- Drive, sail or fly private. Road vehicles reach any city on the same landmass, boats sail between coastal cities, and the private jet flies anywhere. You pay fuel instead of a fare, and the trip takes days based on distance and speed. There's no disguise, no customs and no 500 kg airline limit, but each day on the move carries a search roll that your vehicle's blend keeps down. The jet is never searched at all.
- Blend. Higher blend means fewer gang encounters, fewer roadside searches and less heat when you deal. A beaten-up hatchback attracts less attention than a supercar.
- Evasion and speed raise your chance of escaping a fight. Speed also sets how far you cover in a day on the road.
- Reach means more buyers per day when you sell (up to +50%) and a quieter sale. Nobody looks twice at the ice cream van. Reach never improves the price.
- Carry bonus. Each vehicle is built for a band of ranks. Its carry bonus is full within that band, halves one rank above, and disappears beyond that. A van doesn't scale to container loads, so trade up as you climb.
- Reliability. Low reliability means surprise repair bills and the odd day lost on a trip. Factor it into running costs.
Safe houses
You can own one property per city, from a trailer at the bottom to a hospital at the top. Stock in your stash doesn't count against your carry limit, and it can't be seized in a bust or found by customs. That makes stashes the backbone of any route:
- Pre-position stock. Keep a stash in each city on your route, so you can sell where you land without carrying everything on every flight.
- Buy the dip, sell the spike. When a product crashes in a city where you own property, buy deep and store it until the price recovers.
- Upgrade hiding spots. Each property has upgrade slots that add storage. How much each one adds isn't shown in advance, so part of the fun is finding out what each hiding spot holds.
- Heal faster. Owning a Penthouse or better anywhere doubles your daily recovery. Owning the Hospital property means full health every morning.
Crew
Crew members fight alongside you and fire every round automatically with their own weapons. Each has a daily wage, their own health and a perk that works outside fights too, such as shop discounts, cheaper flights or better bribe rates.
- Slots grow with rank. You can run one paid crew member from Runner, and one more every three ranks after that. The best talent won't sign until you have some reputation.
- They get better. Every win grows a crew member's health, and their ability sharpens at 5, 15 and 30 wins. A veteran is worth far more than a fresh hire.
- Injuries. A crew member who's knocked out is laid up for three days, with no wages and no fighting, unless the Hospital brings them back now for double the price.
- Wages are daily. They're paid every time a day passes, including travel days. Don't hire more than your cash flow can carry.
Even one crew member dramatically changes how fights go, and by Runner the wage is easy to cover. Hire early, arm them well, and keep your veterans alive.
Front businesses
Fronts are legitimate businesses, from a car wash and a taxi firm up to a casino and a crypto exchange. Each one raises the daily interest your bank balance earns, and each has daily upkeep. Small fronts give the biggest boost for their price, but every front is outgrown: beyond a certain rank its bonus halves with each rank you climb. A car wash can't clean a cartel's billions. Treat fronts as a mid-game engine, and keep upgrading to bigger ones as you rise.