Three things decide whether LB's OC engine runs hot or stalls: which seat you take, where a crime sits in its lifecycle, and which of the open crimes you join next. This is the short version. Requirements per seat live in the OC Requirements Guide.
An OC's success chance is not the average of everyone's checkpoint pass rate. Every seat carries a weight, and the roll is weighted by it. One 32%-weight seat moves the odds more than three 10%-weight seats combined.
| Seat class | Weight | What it means for you |
|---|
| MAJOR | ~24–35% | Carries the crime. Reserved for the highest CPR available. If a major seat is filled soft, the whole crime is soft — no amount of good filler fixes it. |
| CORE | ~10–16% | Real contribution. This is where most of the roster earns its keep and trains CPR up toward a major seat. |
| RECON / LOW | under 6% | Statistically near-irrelevant to the outcome — which is exactly why it exists. It's the on-ramp: new and low-CPR members ride along, gain CPR, and cost the crime almost nothing. |
Break the Bank is the classic trap: Muscle #3 (32%) and Thief #2 (29%) are the majors — not Robber, which is a 13% core despite the name. Never pick a seat by how important it sounds. Pick it by weight. The LB Role Filter script colours this for you in-game.
The rule: take the highest-weight seat you clear the floor for. Not the highest-weight seat you'd like. Sitting a 55 CPR in an 80-floor major seat doesn't stretch you — it burns the whole crew's six-day timer.
Read this first — the timer does not wait for a full crew, but it only ever runs for one person at a time. Planning is a single serial clock per crime: 24 hours per seat, one member at a time, in the order they joined. A 6-seat crime is 144 hours of clock, a 4-seat is 96, at every level. The clock starts the moment the first person joins an empty crime. Only the member the clock is currently on is planning — everyone who joined after them is queued and contributing nothing until their turn. The clock stalls whenever it runs out of unprocessed members, whether the crime is 2/6 or 6/6, and every stalled hour pushes the finish back an hour. Verified 11 Sep 2026: rebuilt from per-seat join stamps, matched all 19 live LB clocks to the second.
That one mechanic changes the whole calculus. Six members can pile into one 6-man crime on day one and each sits locked for six days — 36 man-days for one crime, five of them idle at any moment. Or the same crime is staged: one seed on day 0, the next member joining each day as the clock reaches them, the last seat filled on day 5. Same six-day finish, 6+5+4+3+2+1 = 21 man-days. The 15 man-days saved are five more clocks running elsewhere. Across a queue of 6-, 5- and 4-seat crimes that is roughly 1.6–1.7× the crimes from the same bodies.
The staging rules. (1) Every empty shell gets one seed — the lightest seat you clear; a seed is what starts a clock. (2) Each crime holds one runner and one in the queue; join when the queue is empty, not before. (3) Never let the queue hit zero — a stall costs everyone already in the crime an hour for every hour. (4) Majors close: if you clear the 75–80 seats you join last, locked a day, not six. (5) Full by day 7 from spawn: a full crime runs on past its expiry stamp, a Recruiting crime that is not full at expiry dies with everyone in it.
RECRUITING
Seats open, join or leave freely — and the clock is already running from the first body in, one seat-day at a time. Expires 7 days after spawn if it is not full by then: dead crime, no payout, nothing.
PLANNING
Full crew, clock still working through the remaining seats (24h each). You are locked in. Nobody can join, nobody should leave. Expiry no longer applies.
READY → EXECUTED
Weighted roll resolves. Success, or failure — either way the crew is freed and a fresh crime can spawn.
So "staging" is really about throughput — how many clocks the faction has running at once, not how many seats look tidy. Slots don't convert to money; completed crimes do.
The real cost is people, not clock — and it lands on major-role players. A crime that is down to its major seats is finished the moment someone qualified walks in. If your CPR clears the 80-floor seats, you are the scarce resource: your job is to close out crimes that are already mature, not to burn six days parked in a fresh 1/6 waiting for a crew to assemble around you. Stay liquid.
Recon players are the opposite case. If you only clear the light seats, sitting in a crime for longer than six days while it fills is fine — you were not the bottleneck anywhere else. The tier is worth the wait, and the numbers are not close. See the payout table below.
Expiry is the only truly wasted outcome. A failure still pays experience and frees the crew. An expired crime pays nothing to anyone and burns a week of a spawn slot. LB has already eaten expiries on Sneaky Git Grab and a Window of Opportunity. Those were preventable.
Pulled from LB's own last 400 crime records. Per head is the whole reward pot (cash plus item rewards at market price) divided by the number of seats. Days is our real median recruit-to-ready time for that crime.
| LVL | CRIME | SEATS | TOTAL POT | PER HEAD | DAYS | PER HEAD / DAY |
|---|
| L8 | Break the Bank | 6 | $263.6M | $43.9M | 6.2 | $7.11M |
| L8 | Clinical Precision | 4 | $105.6M | $26.4M | 4.9 | $5.44M |
| L7 | Blast from the Past | 6 | $115.5M | $19.2M | 6.2 | $3.11M |
| L7 | Window of Opportunity | 5 | $91.8M | $18.4M | 6.3 | $2.90M |
| L6 | Leave No Trace | 3 | $23.5M | $7.84M | 9.5 | $0.83M |
| L5 | Counter Offer | 5 | $13.7M | $2.74M | 6.9 | $0.40M |
| L4 | Snow Blind | 4 | $9.3M | $2.33M | 4.2 | $0.55M |
| L4 | Plucking the Lotus Petal | 4 | $8.2M | $2.06M | 4.1 | $0.51M |
| L3 | Gaslight the Way | 6 | $7.4M | $1.24M | 6.6 | $0.19M |
| L3 | Market Forces | 5 | $5.8M | $1.16M | 5.3 | $0.22M |
| L2 | Thou Shalt Not Steal | 3 | $1.2M | $0.41M | 4.5 | $0.09M |
| L1 | Pet Project | 3 | $0.8M | $0.27M | 4.1 | $0.07M |
Verdict: the "more than 5×" claim is true, and it badly undersells it. The weakest L7 we run — Window of Opportunity at $18.4M per head — pays 6.7× the best L1–L5 crime on the board (Counter Offer, $2.74M) and 67× the worst (Pet Project, $0.27M). Break the Bank pays 16× the best L1–L5. Nothing in L1–L5 comes within a factor of six of any T4 crime.
And the wait doesn't cost what you think. High tier does not mean a longer clock — Break the Bank runs 6.2 days, but so does Counter Offer at 6.9 and Gaslight the Way at 6.6. Even measured per head per day, the tightest comparison there is, WoO earns $2.90M/day against Snow Blind's $0.55M — still 5.3×. A recon seat that takes eight days to fill on a T4 crime still beats a four-day L4 by roughly 4×. Wait for the tier.
1
Filter to what you qualify for. Open the queue, apply your CPR against the seat floors. Everything you don't clear is invisible to you — don't negotiate with it.
2
Prefer the crime closest to full. Among seats you clear, join the one that needs the fewest bodies. 4/5 beats 2/5 beats 0/5. Not because of the clock — the clock is already running on all of them — but because a nearly-full crime converts to a payout soonest and releases its crew back into the pool. If you hold a major-seat CPR, this rule is close to an obligation: mature crimes are waiting on people like you, and there are not many of you.
3
Break ties on expiry. Two crimes equally short-handed? Take the one expiring soonest. The other one still has days of runway.
4
Then, and only then, tier & pick order. Highest tier you qualify for, and within a tier: Break the Bank > Clinical Precision > Blast from the Past > Window of Opportunity. This is a member pick order, not a spawn priority — we complete all of them, nothing gets abandoned.
5
Take the heaviest seat you clear in that crime. Back to section 1. Leave the light seats for the people who can only take light seats — that's what they're for.
One-line version: qualify → nearly-full first → soonest to expire → highest tier & pick order → heaviest seat you clear.
Two corollaries: if you clear major seats, stay liquid — close out mature crimes, don't park in fresh ones. If you only clear recon seats, hold out for the tier — waiting extra days for a T4 seat beats a fast L4 by 4–13×.
Pulled from the Torn API at time of writing. 13 crimes recruiting, 10 in planning.
| Priority | Crime | Filled | Open seats | Expires |
|---|
| URGENT | Window of Opportunity L7 | 4/5 | Muscle #1 | 3.1 d |
| HIGH | Window of Opportunity L7 | 1/5 | Looter ×2, Muscle ×2 | 3.1 d |
| HIGH | Blast from the Past L7 | 4/6 | Engineer, Muscle | 5.2 d |
| NORMAL | Blast from the Past L7 | 2/6 | Picklock #1, Engineer, Bomber, Muscle | 5.2 d |
| NORMAL | Window of Opportunity L7 | 2/5 | Looter #1, Muscle ×2 | 5.2 d |
| NORMAL | Thou Shalt Not Steal L2 | 1/3 | Picklock, Thief | 4.9 d |
| NORMAL | Pet Project L1 | 0/3 | Kidnapper, Muscle, Picklock | 4.9 d |
| FRESH | Clinical Precision L8 ×3 | 0/4 | Imitator, Cat Burglar, Assassin, Cleaner | 7.0 d |
| FRESH | Break the Bank L8 | 0/6 | full board | 7.0 d |
| FRESH | Blast from the Past / WoO L7 | 0/6, 0/5 | full board | 7.0 d |
Read that top row carefully: one Muscle is all that stands between a five-person crew and a running timer, and it dies in three days. That's the shape of the problem — not a shortage of crimes, a shortage of last-seat fills.
Standing note on Window of Opportunity: it is the lowest-priority T4 and it keeps piling up — four recruiting right now, on top of five in planning. It's still worth running. If you clear WoO floors and nothing higher is close to full, that's your crime.
- LB Role Filter — flags every seat JOIN / RISKY / BLOCKED against your CPR.
- LB Show CPR Reqs — prints the weight and required CPR under each role in-game.
Both are linked with install buttons on the OC Requirements Guide. If you're picking seats without them, you're guessing.