Nobody will buy my stolen goods. Where do I sell them, and what counts as stealing?

Steps

1. Check each item rather than the room. Players report picking up one object with no stolen flag and the object beside it with one, in the same house.
2. Crouch before you work. Sneaking hides you from people in the room in the recordings here, but you cannot jump while crouched and it still drains stamina.
3. Do not open a container while its owner is watching. One player is attacked the moment he opens a chest, before taking anything out of it.
4. Use loot-all sparingly. The R key empties a container in one press, which is fast and takes the flagged items along with everything else.
5. Sell to Krizur on Update 7 or later. NerveLabs states that Krizur and one unnamed merchant accept stolen goods; ordinary vendors still refuse them.
6. Split a large sale across vendors. Merchants hold a finite amount of gold, and one recording is refused a legitimate sale outright because the shopkeeper cannot cover it.
7. If a guard confronts you, the surrender option is there. Both recordings that reach this point pay rather than fight, and one has the stolen goods confiscated on the spot.
8. A pickpocketed item can be put back. One player reverses a pickpocket by returning the item to the owner’s inventory rather than dropping it.

Where stolen goods can actually be sold

This is the one part of the page that does not rest on player video. NerveLabs’ Update 7 changelog lists, under Updated, that Krizur and a merchant whose name the changelog deliberately withholds as a spoiler now accept stolen goods, and that Krizur now has a robust inventory of items to sell. That is the developer answering the question in their own words.

It is worth knowing why that line exists. An hour into a launch-day session one player tries to sell a fork, is refused, works out that everything he owns is stolen, sells a loaf of bread to prove the vendor still works, and then says he is going to have to find a black-market vendor — adding that refusing stolen goods makes sense for an RPG and that he likes it. Update 7 shipped a week later with a fence in it.

A third player runs into the same wall in a session of his own, half an hour in. He has just looted a butcher and offers the goods straight back to him — “I’ll just sell you what I just took from you” — and the game refuses. His reaction is one line: you cannot sell what you steal. Ten minutes later he says the quiet part out loud, that on this build it does not even make sense to steal. Three unrelated sessions, the same conclusion, all of them before the fence existed.

What the changelog does not say is where Krizur stands, what he pays relative to a normal vendor, or whether he refuses anything. No recording cited on this page contains him, because all of them predate the update. So this page names him and stops there.

What the game counts as stealing

Ownership is per object. One player, working through a house, notes out loud that the thing he just picked up is not stolen but the one next to it is. A co-op player makes the same observation from the other direction, reasoning that a bag a guard let him keep was probably never flagged because there had been no steal prompt on it. Two independent sessions, the same rule: the room does not decide, the item does.

The trade window is where the flag becomes visible. One recording describes the stolen entries as reddened out behind the items in the interface, and the sale is simply refused; the unstolen loaf of bread in the same inventory sells without comment. That is the clearest description of the interface anyone in the pool gives, and it comes from one session.

Opening is taking. A player who has been sneaking successfully for several minutes opens a chest in front of its owner and is attacked at once. His own conclusion, repeated twice for his viewers, is that the moment you open it she is angry — not the moment you remove something. He tells his audience not to do it.

There is a bulk key. R loots a container in one press, which is how the same player ends up carrying a large amount of flagged property before he has thought about what he is going to do with it. Carry weight, not the law, is what he checks first.

Separately from the theft rules, merchants can simply run out of money. The third session hits a refusal message the game prints in its own words — that the merchant does not have enough money to complete the trade — while trying to sell unstolen equipment to a shopkeeper whose name the captions render as Taylor. That is a purse limit, not a theft flag, and a reader who has just cleared a house should know the two failures look nothing alike: the theft refusal greys the item out before you can offer it, the purse refusal fires on a sale the vendor is willing to make.

Being seen, and the two things that give you away

Crouching works, up to a point. The player who tests it says plainly that nobody can see him while crouched, and separately that he cannot jump while stealthed but still loses stamina for it. Neither detail has a second source in this pool.

Two things break it in the same session, and both are the kind of thing a reader will otherwise learn by being caught. The first is the lantern the game is named after: with it out he says he is being seen, and putting it away is what returns him to hiding. The second is that a sleeping NPC still detects him. He reverses a pickpocket at her bedside, is spotted, and asks the obvious question aloud — how can you see me, you are sleeping.

Both come from one recording, and the lantern reading in particular is a player inferring a cause mid-sentence rather than reading an indicator. They are printed here because they are cheap to test and expensive to discover by accident, not because they are established.

When a guard catches you

Two recordings reach a guard confrontation and both end the same way. The guard demands the player give it up or be run through; the player picks a surrender line that names a sum of gold, and the encounter ends without a fight.

The sum is not the same in the two sessions. One reads out fifty gold, the other a hundred. Nothing in either recording explains the difference, and neither player is in a position to test it, so this page reports both numbers rather than picking one.

In the co-op session the guard also confiscates the stolen goods, which the player narrates as a shakedown, and the guard leaves with a line about no bad deed going unpunished on his watch. The player notices that one item was not taken and reasons it was never flagged. Whether confiscation always accompanies the fine is not something one recording can settle.

There is one session in the pool where a theft ends in violence instead: a player who has been stealing openly is attacked by the owner and describes the guards as wanting him dead as well. That run is a deliberate crime spree with several other offences in it, so it is not evidence about theft specifically, and this page does not treat it as such.

Requirements / limits

• The fence is Update 7 and later. On any earlier build every vendor in these recordings refuses stolen goods, and three players confirm it independently.
• Merchant gold is finite, but no figure is known. One session reads the refusal message off the screen; nothing in the pool states a starting purse, a restock interval, or whether the limit varies by vendor.
• The second merchant has no name here. NerveLabs withholds it as a spoiler, and this page does not guess at who it is.
• Nothing is known about Krizur’s prices, location or limits. Every recording cited here predates the update that made him relevant.
• The interface description — stolen entries reddened out in the trade window — is one player’s account of his own screen, not a documented indicator.
• The stealth details are single-source. One session supplies the no-jump rule, the stamina drain, the lantern and the sleeping NPC, and no other recording tests any of them.
• No crime statistic, bounty or wanted level appears in any source cited here. Consequences in these recordings are immediate and local: the owner attacks, or a guard demands payment.
• Update 7 also raised pickpocket and lockpicking experience gain, in NerveLabs’ words. No recording here measures the old rate or the new one, so no figure is printed.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a full pack of loot is money. Two players fill up first and find out at the counter, and before Update 7 there was no counter that would take it.
• Treating a house as one decision. Flags are per item; the object beside the one you just took may be clean, or may not be.
• Believing the crime starts when you remove the item. Opening the container in view is enough, and the owner reacts immediately.
• Pressing loot-all in an occupied room. It is one keypress between deciding to steal one thing and carrying everything the owner owns.
• Sneaking with the lantern out. One player spends a minute wondering why he is visible before putting it away.
• Assuming a sleeping NPC is a safe target. In the one recording that tries it, she notices.
• Fighting the guard. Both recordings that reach one take the surrender option and continue playing; neither tests what refusing does.

Still unverified

• Who is the second merchant that buys stolen goods?Developer changelogUpdate 7 states that Krizur and one other merchant accept stolen goods, and withholds the second name as a spoiler.
• Where is Krizur, and what does he pay?Not verifiedEvery recording cited here predates Update 7, so none of them contains him as a fence.
• What sets the fine a guard demands?Not verifiedOne session reads fifty gold, another a hundred. Neither explains the difference.
• Does a guard always confiscate stolen goods?Single unconfirmed reportThe one co-op session that is searched loses its stolen items; the single-player session that pays a fine does not narrate a confiscation either way.
• Does carrying the lantern actually affect detection?Single unconfirmed reportOne player concludes it does, mid-sentence, from being seen while holding it. No indicator is read out and no second session tests it.
• Is there a bounty or crime record that persists?Not verifiedStill nothing. A deliberate search across eight post-release recordings on 24 August 2026 found no arrest, cell or bounty counter anywhere; see /answers/surrender-to-guards-pay-fine. One co-op player does find NPCs still hostile after dying, which is persistence inside a session rather than a record kept against you.
• How much gold does a merchant carry, and does it come back?Single unconfirmed reportOne recording is refused a sale by the game’s own not-enough-money message. No source states an amount or a restock rule.