System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Drift Bank

Deposit for small, steady interest — or rob the vault's own money without ever touching a single coin you put in yourself

The Drift Bank does two things: it holds a personal savings account for the player, and it holds a separate pool of the bank's own money that can be robbed. The two are kept completely apart — robbing the bank can never touch what you've personally deposited there, and depositing your own cash never adds to what a robbery could take.

Personal banking

Deposit or withdraw cash freely, in any amount or all at once. Every deposit or withdrawal also pays a small amount of interest on whatever's currently sitting in your account — 1% of your balance, capped at ¤50 per interaction — so a large balance still grows a little every time you actually use the bank, without turning into an idle money-printer you'd want to spam.

Robbing the vault

Separately from personal accounts, the bank keeps a float — its own operating cash, capped at ¤21,000 and refilling at roughly ¤600 an hour, a little over a day and a half to go from completely empty back to full. A robbery takes exactly what's currently in the drawer and nothing more — your own deposit is never at risk, and the bank's screen tells you the real, current float before you commit rather than a guess based on your own robbery history.

This is deliberately the single biggest crime in the game, routed through the same tally a killing uses, at a far higher cost — there's no version of successfully robbing a bank that doesn't bring every nearby guard down on you immediately afterward. A robbery you could simply walk away from clean would just be a button that gives free money.

If you own the city, there's no button at all

Hold Penjamin City yourself (see Settlements) and the bank screen changes entirely: the robbery card disappears, replaced with a plain statement that the vault's float is already your own money, and the only way to actually take it is a withdrawal like any other depositor would use. Robbing a settlement you already own would make no sense — what isn't yours yet from another faction's treasury is a matter for force, not this screen.

Reputation with the Syndicate

The bank is run by the Drift Bank Syndicate, whose reputation track is shared with property pricing — high standing discounts what you pay for a house, and falling to outright Hostile adds a flat markup instead. Robbing the vault is exactly the kind of act that standing is built to track.

A quiet puzzle hidden in the interest formula

A separate, unlisted system called The Struck Balance tracks something the bank screen itself never mentions: leaving your vault resting on an exact multiple of ¤1,000, which the bank's own interest — applied after every deposit or withdrawal — makes surprisingly hard to land on directly.

Version history

Bank robbery added, directly on request. Built to pay out of the bank's own money rather than the player's deposit, and wired through the game's existing crime system at its highest severity — the point of building the law first was so a robbery could actually mean something rather than being a free-money button.
The float, and a real cap on repeat robbery. A robbable amount that regenerates over time was added specifically so a robbed bank becomes worth robbing again in about a day and a half — long enough that it's a real event, short enough that it isn't a one-time trick never worth revisiting.
The float cut in half. Both the cap and the hourly refill were reduced — robbery stayed the single biggest payday in the game, just no longer worth roughly four times an entire settlement's other income at once.
The bank card corrected to show the real float rather than a number derived from the player's own robbery history, and to explain plainly why there's no robbery button at all once you own the city — a dead control with no explanation is worse than no control at all.

Trivia

Interest is capped per interaction rather than per day, so depositing or withdrawing in several small steps instead of one large one doesn't earn any more interest overall — the cap is what stops it from being worth gaming.
A robbed bank's recovery clock is a real, persisted timestamp rather than a session timer, so it keeps refilling even while you're logged off, the same pattern the game's rent and factory income use.