Gold chain · Block Island Bank

Bank & gold

Gold is the highest-value material on the island. You can mine it, smelt it and sell it to the bank — and everything the bank buys goes into its vault, where somebody else can come for it.

The bank's gold buyer — The gold buyer, back room of the Block Island Bank (map 1104, 1918)

Gold bars on a vault shelf — Ingots on a vault shelf — 36 per layer, stacked as the stock grows

The vault behind the ARGUS-locked door: four shelves share the bank's stock

Security room: the ARGUS-4 control desk and the hosts on its network

Legal route — mine, smelt, sell

Mine gold ore. Four gold spots on the island, Pickaxe required (Super Market). Gold ore: $500 base, 5 kg, no shop buys raw ore. 10 % of the time a node also drops an Old note — read it.
Smelt it. The Smelter (West industrial, Metalworking licence) now lists Gold ingot: 5 × Gold ore → 1 Gold ingot (12 kg, 5 s). Same station as iron.
Sell to the Bank. The gold buyer in the bank's back room pays 80 % of the $50,000 base price per ingot. He is the only shop that trades gold ingots.
It goes on the shelves. Every ingot the bank buys is added to its stock and appears as a physical bar on the four vault shelves (up to 144 per shelf). Bars taken in a robbery are removed from the stock — the bank really loses them.

Weight check: a full backpack (96 kg) carries 19 ore = 3 ingots and change. Ingots are 12 kg each, so a robber walks out with at most 8 bars per trip.

Illegal

Robbing the bank

The bank is one heist site with one alarm (ARGUS-4). Whatever you do either keeps the alarm quiet — a silent job nobody knows about until an officer walks in — or makes it loud: every on-duty officer gets a text from 911 Dispatch with the grid square, and the clock starts.

1 · Intel first

The Informer sells the bank lead: how many gold bars are on the shelves, whether the alarm is armed, and whether a job is already in progress or the site is on cooldown. Buy it before you commit a crew — an empty vault is not worth a wanted level. The Old note from the gold nodes describes a third way in (a collapsed tunnel under the vault) that is not open yet.

2 · Silent entry — hack the alarm

Get a Hacking laptop ($15,000 — sold only by El Cocodrilo, the cartel head in the jungle). Stand within 20 m of the bank; that is the range of its Wi-Fi.
Use the laptop → the SHADOW CORE terminal opens. In the CMD window type scget llb to install LULLABY, then llb to run it.
Work the network: scan lists the hosts on 123.32.11.0/24, probe <ip> tells you what each one is. The IDS host (GLASSHOUSE) watches you — touching it costs trace. The sensor bridge (RS-9) is your tap target; the ARGUS panel (.23) or the hidden backup panel is your link target.
tap <RS-9 ip> → decode → link <panel ip> → spoof. You are now impersonating the panel's heartbeat and the alarm is suppressed.
Keep it alive: every few seconds the panel sends [SLP2] POLL seq nonce ttl. Answer ack <nonce> before the TTL runs out. A wrong or late answer adds trace; three missed polls in a row and the session locks — and the moment the heartbeat lapses during a breach, the alarm fires.
unlock while spoofing releases the vault door's maglock. Walk in, Take Gold ingot from the shelves, walk out, and only then bail to drop the link cleanly.

Command	What it does
`scan`	List hosts on the bank subnet
`probe ip`	Hostname, banner and a hint for one host
`tap ip`	Attach to the sensor loop. Trace starts to bleed on its own after 90 s
`decode` · `link ip`	Recover the session nonce, then link to a panel (ARGUS-4 or the backup panel)
`spoof`	Start the fake heartbeat — the alarm is suppressed while you keep acking
`ack nonce`	Answer a heartbeat poll. Wrong/late = +10 % trace
`mask` · `resync`	Knock 15 % off the trace (45 s cooldown) · resync a drifted poll
`status`	Stage, trace, current poll, deadline
`unlock`	Release the vault maglock (only while spoofing)
`bail`	Drop everything cleanly. `killswitch` trips the alarm on purpose

WATCHTOWER. Your trace climbs with every mistake and, after 90 s on the wire, by itself. Milestones at 25 / 50 / 70 / 80 / 90 / 100 %: at 80 % the police are dispatched in 60 s; at 100 % the alarm fires and the terminal locks.

3 · Loud entry — blow the door

Carry a Breaching charge ($20,000 — also only from El Cocodrilo), aim at the vault door and pick Plant breaching charge from the interaction menu, or use the item while aiming at the door. 10 seconds later it goes off: the door is blown open, the alarm fires, the police are paged. The blast is lethal within about 8 m — get clear. From here it is a race: grab bars, get out, lose the cops.

A charge planted while a silent job is running turns it loud immediately. Coordinate.

4 · After the job

Sell the bars. Right now the only buyer is the bank itself (yes — it buys its own gold back, no questions asked). A fence will come.
The site stays open for 15 minutes after a breach, then closes itself; after any job the bank is on a 45-minute cooldown before it can be hit again. The vault door re-locks when the site closes.
Police can Reset alarm on the vault door once it is ringing, and the Informer's lead shows the cooldown.

For officers

Every on-duty officer receives the alarm as an SMS from 911 Dispatch: which site, why it fired (forced entry / heartbeat lost / trace complete), and the grid square.
911 is also a shared channel: any officer who texts 911 reaches every colleague on duty at once.
A silent job sends nothing. If the vault door is unlocked and the shelves are thinning, someone is inside.