Crimson Desert Crime Guide: How to Steal, Rob Banks, and Clear Bounties
Playing the noble savior of Pywel is a great concept until you realize you are completely broke and cannot afford basic weapon upgrades.
Crimson Desert offers a massive, beautiful world filled with innocent townsfolk, and it fully allows you to terrorize them. You can be a menace. You can pickpocket, vandalize property, rob banks, and commit outright murder in the streets. The catch is that the local authorities are completely ruthless. If you swing your sword at a civilian or get caught swiping a cabbage, the guards will swarm you with terrifying speed. The justice system here does not play around, and getting tackled into the mud by an armored sentinel usually results in you waking up inside a jail cell with empty pockets.
I learned how to manipulate this system the hard way after accidentally running over a farmer with my horse and triggering a massive manhunt. If you want to fund your adventure through grand larceny without constantly reloading your save files, you need to follow a very specific set of rules. Here is exactly how to become a master thief and scrub your criminal record clean.
Securing the Mask: Your License to Steal
You cannot just walk into a house and start stuffing silverware into your pockets. The game physically will not let you. To unlock the ability to commit crimes, you need to acquire a Mask.
The description of this item literally states that it allows criminal behavior. The easiest way to get your first Mask is to play the good guy for about ten minutes in Chapter 2. Head to the Hernand Guard Captain located west of Hernand Castle and check the bounty board. Grab the notice for Jeffrey, a local pickpocket causing trouble in the east district.
Track Jeffrey down in the designated white search zone. He wears a sleeveless top and a hood. If he bumps into you, he will actually steal your money, so be aggressive. Tackle him to the pavement, beat him into submission, tie him up, and carry him back to the Guard Captain. Your reward for taking a thief off the streets is the Mask, which you can now use to become an even worse thief. If you hate bounty hunting, you can also loot Masks randomly from Bleed Bandits or buy one directly from the Back Alley vendor in Hernand.
The Mechanics of Theft and Fencing Goods
Once you equip the Mask from your inventory, you can walk up to items in houses or shops and hit the new steal prompt.
The moment you steal something, a crime search triggers. A massive red circle appears on your minimap, indicating the area where guards are actively looking for the culprit. Do not panic, and absolutely do not run outside into the street. If a guard or a witness spots you within that red zone while the timer is ticking, you are caught. Just crouch in a dark corner of the room you just robbed and wait for the heat to die down.
Every item you steal drops your Hernand faction reputation by five points. This is a microscopic penalty that you can easily offset by doing a single heroic deed later. If you are worried about the long term effects of being a villain, you can read my guide on how the reputation and contribution system works to see how easy it is to repair your public image.
Stolen goods cannot be sold to normal merchants. Honest shopkeepers know the items are hot. You have to take your ill-gotten gains to Black Market vendors. Groks, located at the Goldleaf Tradepost in the Serkis Estate south of Hernand, is your best bet for fencing stolen paintings, vases, and valuables early in the game. Make sure you actually have the carrying capacity for a heist before you start grabbing heavy furniture. Cross-reference my inventory expansion guide if you are constantly running out of room.
The Ultimate Score: Robbing the Hernand Bank
If you are tired of stealing petty cash, you need to hit the bank in the northwest district of Hernand. It is the most lucrative early game activity available.
You need two things to pull this off: your Mask and a single key. Go to the masked back-alley merchant hanging out near the windmill outside Hernand and buy a key for 30 copper. Equip your Mask, walk into the bank building, and immediately turn left. Walk directly into the locked side door. The game will automatically consume your key and let you inside. Hilariously, the bank tellers will not react to a masked stranger slipping into their secure vault room.
Once the door shuts behind you, the heist begins. The room is loaded with chests and strongboxes. Plunder everything. The red crime search circle will trigger repeatedly, but since you are locked inside the vault, no one will actually see you. Just wait out the timer before you open the door to leave.
Do not sell the strongboxes. Open them directly in your inventory to extract the raw silver. Head up to the second floor and loot the bookshelves for even more strongboxes. You can easily walk out of this building with 90 silver pieces. If you want to know what to do with that massive pile of cash, check out my breakdown on how to make money fast and invest it.
Assault, Murder, and the Guard Swarm
Stealing is a quiet crime. Violence is loud, and the game punishes it severely.
If you assault a civilian or commit murder by continually striking an NPC, a bounty is instantly placed on your head. The threat notification pops up, and every guard in the vicinity will draw their weapons and swarm you. The more crimes you commit in rapid succession, the higher your bounty skyrockets.
Unlike petty theft, murder carries a massive -30 hit to your Contribution level. You do not want to fight the guards. They are highly coordinated and hit incredibly hard. If a guard manages to tackle you to the ground, a brutal quick-time event triggers. You have a few seconds to perfectly time your button presses to kick them off. If you fail, Kliff is knocked unconscious. You will wake up inside a jail cell, your bounty will be forcibly deducted from your wallet, and you will suffer a massive overall penalty.
How to Clear Your Criminal Record
Living life on the run is exhausting. When you inevitably get a bounty slapped on your head, you have three distinct options to wipe your record clean.
The first method is evasion. If the crime is minor, like vandalism or a botched pickpocket attempt, simply sprinting out of the red threat zone and hiding in the wilderness will drop the aggro. The guards will eventually give up, and you just eat a small fine out of your pocket.
The second method is religious penance. Pywel allows you to literally buy your innocence. If you have a massive murder bounty and cannot enter a town without being attacked, sneak your way to a local church. You can pay a penance fee to obtain a writ of absolution, which instantly clears your wanted level and calls off the guards. It is expensive, but it saves you the humiliation of going to prison.
The third method is the tactical retreat. If you accidentally hit a civilian with a flaming arrow and trigger a provincial manhunt, just pause the game and reload your last save. The autosave system is generally forgiving enough that you will only lose a few minutes of progress. It is significantly better than losing thousands of copper coins to the Hernand police department.
