The hideout keeps working while you are in a raid or not playing at all. Several modules produce items worth selling, and the best of them can cover a lot of your gear costs. A player who keeps the hideout busy can lose a kit or two in a bad session and still come out ahead for the day.
The word passive is a little generous, though. The hideout produces on its own, but it only produces while something is queued, and it only gives you the output once you walk over and collect it. This guide covers the earners worth building, how they feed each other, and the habits that decide how much they make.
How hideout production works
Every module that crafts works the same way. You pick a recipe, the module takes the ingredients out of your stash, and a timer starts. The timer keeps running while you raid, while you sit in menus, and while the game is closed. When it reaches zero, the finished item waits in the module until you collect it.
Two things stop that timer. The first is power: most crafting modules need the generator running, and the generator burns fuel. If the fuel runs out, crafts that need power pause until you add more. The second is the module itself. It will not start the next craft on its own, so a finished craft sits there doing nothing until you come back.
Items you craft count as found in raid. That is the tag the game puts on items you picked up in a raid yourself, rather than bought, and only items with it can be listed on the flea market or handed in for some quests. This is why crafted goods are worth more than the same thing bought from a trader: you are allowed to sell them to other players.
Bitcoin farm
Graphics cards in the farm produce bitcoin over time, and more cards produce it faster. It is the best known passive earner, though it takes a lot of upgrades and cards to set up. The farm holds up to 50 cards at its top level, but each extra card adds less speed than the one before it.
The farm also stores only up to three finished bitcoins. Once it is full, it stops until you collect them. That makes it the plainest case of the restarting problem in this guide: a large farm that you check once a day can earn about the same as a smaller one, because both spend most of the day full and waiting. We cover the full cost and payback math in a separate post on whether the bitcoin farm is worth it.
Moonshine
The booze generator turns purified water and a few cheap ingredients into Fierce Hatchling moonshine, which sells well and can also be used to run the scav case. The scav case is the hideout module where you send a scav out with an item or some roubles and get a random batch of loot back later. Moonshine is one of the inputs it accepts, and it tends to return better items than the cheapest options.
So moonshine gives you a choice each time a bottle finishes. Sell it on the flea if the price is high, or feed it to the scav case if you would rather roll for loot. Either way, the booze generator is only as good as your supply of purified water, which is why the water collector matters so much.
Fabric crafts
Crafts like fleece and Cordura turn cheaper materials into fabrics that players need for hideout upgrades and barters. Demand stays steady, especially in the first weeks of a wipe. A wipe is the reset where every player's progress goes back to zero, so everyone is building the same hideout modules at the same time and needs the same materials.
Fabric crafts are a good fit for players who cannot afford a bitcoin farm yet. The inputs are cheap, the modules you need come earlier in the hideout, and the output sells quickly. Check the flea for both the fabric and its ingredients before you commit, because a craft is only profitable while the gap between the two holds up.
Water collector
With a water filter installed, the water collector produces purified water, which other crafts, moonshine among them, need as an ingredient. Filters wear out over time, so a collector with a spent filter quietly stops producing. Keep a spare filter in your stash and check the module whenever you pass it.
Purified water is rarely the thing you sell. Its value is that it feeds the crafts that do sell, so an idle water collector slows down everything that depends on it. Think of it as the first link in a chain: water feeds moonshine, and moonshine feeds either your wallet or the scav case.
The catch: restarting
Hideout crafts do not repeat on their own. When one finishes, the output waits until you collect it, and the module does nothing until you start the next craft. Most crafts finish while you are in a raid or away, so a lot of possible output is lost to idle time.
Each new craft also needs its ingredients in your stash, which usually means another trip to the flea. If one ingredient is missing, the craft cannot start, and the module stays idle until you notice. Across several modules, these small gaps add up to hours of lost production every day.
A worked example
Here is a simple example with made-up round numbers, just to show how idle time eats into profit. Say a craft takes 4 hours and makes you a profit of 20,000 roubles each time it finishes. Run back to back with no gaps, that is 6 crafts a day, or 120,000 roubles.
Now say you only check the hideout three times a day: once in the morning, once after work and once before bed. A craft that finishes while you are asleep or at work waits there. In practice you might only finish 3 crafts that day, or 60,000 roubles. Same module, same recipe, half the money, and the only difference is how often the craft got restarted.
The real timers and prices in your game will be different, and they change between patches and through a wipe. The point holds anyway: for short crafts, how often you restart matters as much as which craft you pick.
Early wipe vs late wipe
Early in a wipe, money is tight and the hideout is half built. Cheap crafts with steady demand, like fabrics, are the best start, because they need few upgrades and the materials sell fast while everyone is building. Get the water collector and booze generator going as soon as you can reach them, since they feed each other.
The bitcoin farm makes the most sense once you have the roubles to buy cards without starving your raid budget. Built early, it has the most days left in the wipe to pay itself back. Late in a wipe, a big card purchase may not earn itself back before the next reset, so be careful about spending a fortune on cards in the final weeks.
Late in a wipe, prices also move. Materials that everyone needed for upgrades become less wanted once most players have finished their hideouts, so recheck the flea for any craft you have been running on autopilot since the early weeks.
Common mistakes
Letting the generator run dry is the most common one. Crafts that need power stop with no warning in raid, and you only find out when you come back to a hideout that has made nothing for hours.
Running a craft because it was profitable last week is the second. Ingredient and output prices both move, and a craft that made money at the start of the wipe can lose money later. Check both sides on the flea every so often.
The third is forgetting about the water filter. It wears out, the collector stops, and every craft that needs purified water stalls behind it.
A quick hideout checklist
Before every raid, and before you log off for the night, run through this list:
Collect any finished crafts and restart them.
Make sure the generator has fuel for at least the time you will be away.
Check that the water collector has a working filter.
Collect bitcoins if the farm has any waiting, so it never sits full.
Buy the ingredients for the next round of crafts, so the module does not stall on a missing item.
FAQ
Do crafts keep running when the game is closed? Yes. Timers run in real time, so a craft started before you log off can be finished when you log back in, as long as the module had power.
Can I sell crafted items on the flea? Yes. Crafted items count as found in raid, so they can be listed on the flea, subject to the usual flea market rules and fees.
Which earner should I build first? Usually the cheap ones: fabrics, then the water collector and booze generator. Save the bitcoin farm for when you can buy cards without going broke on gear.
What does the scav case have to do with moonshine? Moonshine is one of the things you can send the scav case out with. It returns a random batch of loot, so it is a gamble compared with selling the bottle, but it can pay off.
Why do my profits feel lower than the guides say? Usually because of idle time. Guides tend to assume crafts run back to back, while real players let them sit finished for hours. Some players use a tool like Tarkbot's crafting mode to collect and restart crafts while they are away, but even checking the hideout before every raid closes most of the gap.