Trash N’ Treasure
A game about raccoon burglars · Casual management strategy · First-person · Low-poly 3D
Recruit raccoon burglars. Train them. Send them up through the storm drain. Try not to lose anyone.
You run a crew of raccoon burglars out of a storm-sewer hideout under the city. By night, you dispatch specialists to raid the neighborhoods above — scouts, haulers, distractors, each with a name and stats you care about. By day, you train recruits, craft gear from scrap, sort last night’s haul, and keep everyone fed. Raccoons that don’t eat, walk.
You don’t get your paws dirty. You decide — who trains, who raids, who eats. As the operation grows, you delegate the chores and focus on the calls that matter. Every raccoon burglar has a name, stats, and a possible ugly ending — and you’ll feel it when one doesn’t come home.
Every house is different. A dog in the yard, a motion light on the porch, a cat that won’t quit. Your crew has to match. Send a Distractor to bait the dog, a Scout to slip past the light, a Hauler built to carry the big score out fast. The right crew walks away loaded. The wrong crew doesn’t walk away.
Between raids, you fence the good stuff through a stolen laptop rigged to a streetlight. List valuables on the online markets, flip loot into currency, stock up on supplies to keep the operation running. Every sale funds the next upgrade, the next recruit, the next raid.
And somewhere out there, buried in the hardest targets, is legendary raccoon tech. Rare gear and gadgets no ordinary burglar was meant to have. Finding it is half luck, half planning. Keeping it means your crew just became the best on the block.
→ Vision · Style Guide
Sample Gameplay
You boot up the game. First-person, raccoon height. You’re standing in a concrete tunnel — dim Christmas lights strung overhead, a cracked cooler repurposed as a pantry, a stolen laptop propped on a milk crate. This is home.
Morning. Three raccoons in the crew. You walk to the Training Corner — a soup-can kettlebell gym — and put your fastest Scout through a recon raid. Costs some trash, but she’ll be hard to spot and bring back valuable intel on the target. Over at the Pantry you check food: enough for two days if nobody new shows up.
Planning the raid. At the Raid Board — a corkboard with a crude neighborhood map pinned to it — you review the Average Home across the street your scout just reconned. Decent odds on food, maybe some valuables. You assign the Scout again along with your Hauler, equip the Hauler with a scrap-built satchel for extra carry capacity, and send them up through the storm drain.
The raid. On the overhead city map, two raccoon icons creep toward the house. They arrive, start looting. Halfway through, a notification — encounter: aggressive dog. The raid pauses. You rush to the Raid Board and dispatch your Distractor as backup. She arrives, lures the dog away, crew finishes the job. Nobody dies tonight and the crew heads home.
Loot intake. The crew climbs back down with a haul: trash, a gold necklace (valuable), canned tuna (food). At the Loot Sorting Station you make the call — sell the necklace for currency, stash the tuna in the Pantry. Trash goes to the pile.
Expansion. With the currency from selling, you upgrade the Pantry’s storage cap. With enough trash banked, you unlock a milestone: a new Hauler joins the crew. Tomorrow night, you can run two raids.
The loop tightens. More raccoons means more mouths. More mouths means more food. More food means more raids. More raids means better loot — but also higher encounter risk. The operation scales, the decisions get harder, and eventually you’re planning a run on Animal Control HQ to free captured crew members.
Q&A
What’s the core fantasy? You’re the boss of a raccoon burglar ring. The crew does the dirty work; you make the calls. Think Evil Genius meets Darkest Dungeon, but funny and about raccoons.
What genre is this? Casual management strategy. Closest comps are Dave the Diver (tone + loop), Darkest Dungeon (roster mechanics), and This War of Mine (upkeep pressure).
Is there combat? No direct combat. Raids are stat-checked — your crew’s stats against the target’s difficulty. Encounters are dispatched by sending backup, not by fighting. The tension is in the decision, not the action.
What does progression look like? Early game: you do everything by hand. Sort loot, feed raccoons individually, run one raid at a time. As you grow, recruits and upgrades take chores off your plate — auto-sorting, multi-crew scheduling, delegated station work. You stop clicking repeated tasks and start making bigger calls. Automation eats tedium, never decisions.
How do raccoons work? Each has a type (Scout, Hauler, Distractor, etc.) and five stats: Speed, Stealth, Strength, Cunning, Luck. You train them, equip them, breed them. Stats matter for raid performance, encounter survival, and station efficiency.
What’s the resource pressure? Five resources, all from raids. Food is the constraint — raccoons eat daily, food costs currency, currency comes from selling valuables, valuables come from raiding. The economy is a loop that tightens as the crew grows.
What’s the MVP scope? 10 build blocks, ~17 working days. 3 unit types, 7 stations, 4 raid targets. Each block is independently testable. Breeding, advanced loot routing, and boss raids are post-MVP.
Deep Dive
| Design | Vision · Core Loop · Economy · Progression |
| The Crew | Units · Raccoon Stats · Training and Breeding · Gear |
| Raids | Raids · Raid Resolution · Raid Encounters · Encounters |
| Stations | Stations · Station Operation Model |
| Resources | Resources · Economy |
| Production | Production · Roadmap · Backlog |
| Art & Audio | Art · Style Guide · Audio |
| Research | Research |