Night City is like any other dystopian corporatocracy: a playground for the rich; a meat grinder for the poor. Part and parcel with navigating the seedy, neon underworld is money — lots of it. It greases the gears, keeps you safe, and pays for mantis-blades to be surgically embedded in your forearms. A can of bubbling Chromanticore might come cheap, but the real necessities are never so, and some players find themselves quickly tapped out and strung out, in need of some money to either foot their Ripperdoc bill or buy the impressively durable threads they need.
And no self-respecting Night City resident is going to try and earn money the honest way. Heck, not even the corpos do that. In fact, they’re the last people to look to for ethical money-making. No, you’re going to want some Money exploits — some Eddy-Farming, some get-rich-quick schemes — if you’re going to make it in Night City And, unsurprisingly, they do exist.
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Soda Can Exploit
Certainly the mildest of the Cyberpunk 2077 exploits, this trick lets players cheese their way to some quick cash with relatively no work. It boils down to buying all the cans out of every soda machine you can find, disassembling them for components, and selling said components for a profit to any vendor/deposit machine. It’s straightforward, works like a charm, but is without a doubt the single lamest way to earn money as the chosen badass within a city overrun by criminals and pitless Corpo-leviathans. But maybe it’s early game and you just need to scratch out some quick cash to pay back Viktor, and a few minutes of cheesing out some Eddies isn’t the worst idea.
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Space Oddity Exploit
This one is a real deal exploit. Unlike the Soda Can game which, at the very least, involves finding, purchasing, disassembling and selling items to flip for cash, this option can be spammed to generate thousands upon thousands of eddies in the blink of an eye. During the Space Oddity side job that comes up in Act 2, players are able to loot a painting out of a space capsule that sells for four grand to any vendor/dropbox — and, for some reason, can be purchased back for 5 eddies. You do the math.
In case the drop box runs out of money, you can skip time 24 hours or find another dropbox. But remember to keep that painting. If you lose it, your free-money-machine is gone.
Don’t expect this one to last for long, however.
CHAR Incendiary Grenade Exploit
In terms of cheesiness, this exploit lies somewhere between the Soda Can trick and the Space Oddity exploit — the routine of the former, the payoff of the latter. You’ll first have to put 12 attribute points into Technical and unlock the Grease Monkey perk before you can start piling up the free eddies, but it’s well worth it for those looking for a free lunch in Night City. Once you have the skills necessary, you’ll need to pick up the blueprint for the CHAR Incendiary Grenade, which can be found in Santo Domingo nearby the Cyber Psycho: Discount Doc encounter. Just scan, scan, scan until you see the purple icon. Once you have the blueprint for it, you’ll be able to craft the CHAR Incendiary Grenade out of Common and Uncommon components — and then subsequently disassemble it into Epic and Rare components. Pretty wild, pretty nonsensical, and pretty foolproof if in need of game-breaking levels of cash.
The “I Walk the Line” Glitch
Rather than an exploit, this method makes use of a straight-up glitch that, at the very least, requires you to get your gorilla-arms dirty in Cyberpunk 2077-appropriate way. During the “I Walk the Line” quest, you’ll be presented with a choice of siding between two factions: the Voodoo Boys or the Netwatch. Siding with the Voodoo boys will find you tasked with sneaking your way through the Netwatch headquarters — go in guns blazing. Downing — not killing — the Netwatch boss will net you a clean 30K eddies for the trouble.
Now for the glitch.
As soon as you’ve killed the boss but before you’ve completed the quest, save your game in a new slot and reload. You’ll still be thirty grand the richer, but the boss will have arisen from her knockout like a cash-rich Tyson Fury. KO her again, grab the 30k, save, reload, repeat. Note that you can only make use of this glitch in a single sitting. As soon as you officially complete “I Walk the Line” you won’t be able to return — so, if you’re going to go this route, make as much as you want/are willing to put the time in for, and then be on your way. You won’t get the opportunity again in that incarnation of V.
