Grading Calculator: Is It Worth the Risk?

How the grading calculator works

Type in the item’s appraised value, the number the game shows before you hand it to the Grader. Then drag the four sliders to whatever chance you think each grade lands. The sliders are relative weight, not fixed percentages, so pulling Two-Star up shrinks the other three automatically and everything keeps summing to 100%. The result panel updates live: an expected dollar value, the percentage gain or loss against the ungraded appraisal, and a verdict on whether your current odds clear the breakeven line. The four preset cards below the calculator run the same odds against a Junk Yard, Back Alley, Farmyard and Shipyard item at once, so you can see how the same risk plays out at different price points.

The four grading outcomes

Those four percentages are reported consistently across independent guides. A Two-Star versus Three-Star comparison matters most on expensive hauls: the gap between them is 65 percentage points of pure upside, while the gap between Replica and One-Star is 30 points of downside. Run your own item through the calculator above rather than assuming a Three Star, since the developer has not confirmed how often each grade actually lands.

Is grading worth it in Storage Hunters: Open World?

The honest answer is that nobody, including the developer, has published the real per-grade odds, so anyone claiming exact numbers is guessing. What guides that have tracked grading outcomes agree on is that low grades show up often and that caution matters most on expensive items, where a bad roll stings. That is the whole reason the calculator uses adjustable sliders instead of a single fake percentage: plug in whatever you personally believe your odds are and it tells you the breakeven chance of landing Two-Star or better. If your honest guess sits below that line, the math says skip it. A cheap Junk Yard trinket rarely justifies the wait either way, since even a good grade only adds a small dollar amount.

Where to find the Grader NPC

The Grader is in the Shopping Mall. Walk up and interact with the NPC, then submit an item you won at auction or a Lost Item you picked up while exploring. Grading itself costs nothing, the only price is time in the queue while your item waits for a result.

Gems, waiting, and whether to skip the timer

Grading time scales with the item’s rarity: Junk and Common pieces clear fast, while Legendary and Mythical items sit in the queue much longer. You can spend Gems to skip that wait and reveal the grade instantly, but Gems only remove the delay, they do not shift which of the four grades you land on. The exact gem cost per rarity tier has not been published, so treat a skip as a convenience purchase for your patience, not a way to buy a better roll.

Grading vs. mutations: two different systems

It is easy to mix these up because both change what an item sells for. Mutations roll on the item itself and stack additively, so a Silver (2x) plus Gold (4x) item sells for 6x, not 8x, and you can check every combination on the value calculator. Grading happens afterward at the Grader NPC and multiplies that already-mutated sale price by 55%, 85%, 135% or 200%, on top of whatever the mutations already set. See how each of the 23 mutations compares on the mutation tier list before deciding whether an item is even worth the grading queue.

Why the mutation stack sets the size of the bet

The four multipliers are fixed, so the interesting number is not the grade, it is what the grade is multiplying. This page uses the model described above: mutations set the sale price first, and the grade then multiplies that price. Read that way, the distance between Replica at 0.55x and Three-Star at 2.0x is always 1.45x whatever the item is already worth, so the mutation stack does not just raise your ceiling, it scales the entire spread.

Six times the multiplier is six times the spread. This is the part that gets read backwards: finding a strong mutation feels like a reason to grade, when it is really a reason to want firmer footing first, because the same unpublished odds are now deciding a much larger sum.

One caveat belongs here rather than in a footnote. The grade table describes each payout as a fraction of the original appraised value, while the section above describes grading as multiplying the already-mutated price. Those two readings agree on an unmutated item and come apart precisely when an item carries mutations, which is the difference between the table above and a flat $145 spread at every stack size. None of the guides this page draws on settles which one the game runs, so treat these figures as following the model this page states, not as a measured result. Check what an item is actually carrying on the value calculator before you decide the grading queue is worth it.

Two published rules that do not fit together

Two things this site publishes are hard to hold at the same time, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than picking whichever one is convenient. The first is that mutation multipliers add, so Silver 2x plus Gold 4x sells for 6x. The second is that Dirty is a 0.8x mutation and the Cleaning Service strips it free of charge, which only makes sense if Dirty is costing you something.

Apply the addition rule literally to an item carrying Dirty and Gold and you get 0.8 plus 4, or 4.8x. Clean the Dirty off and you are left with 4x. Under that reading a free service makes the item worth less, which is not what a cleaning service is for. Something in that picture is wrong, and this site is not going to guess which part. The full list of all 23 mutations, with Rainbow still marked TBA, sits on the mutations reference.

One case comes out the same either way, and it is the common one. If Dirty is the only mutation on the item, cleaning moves it from 0.8x to 1.0x under any reading of the stacking rule. On the model this page uses, where the grade multiplies the mutated price, that lifts every one of the four grading outcomes by a quarter: a $100 item graded Three-Star pays $160 while Dirty and $200 once cleaned. If grades instead apply to the original appraised value, cleaning changes the straight sale price rather than the graded one. Either way it is free, so the walk to the mall is worth it. On an item carrying other mutations as well, the arithmetic above is unresolved, so treat cleaning before grading as a clear win only when Dirty is on its own.

When the grading queue is not worth the walk

The percentages hold at every price, which is exactly why they stop mattering at the bottom of the range. As the section above notes, grading itself costs nothing beyond the wait in the queue, so the question on a cheap item is whether the spread is worth the trip to the Shopping Mall at all. Take two entries from the lost items list, which the Grader accepts alongside auction wins: the Needle sells for $0.25 and the Saddle for $100, the cheapest and most valuable of the 29. The Needle spans about $0.14 at Replica to $0.50 at Three-Star, a spread of roughly 36 cents. The Saddle spans $55 to $200. Same rules, same risk, and one of them is worth thinking about.

The practical line this draws is that grading decisions belong to your best few finds, not to your inventory. Storage hunters grading rewards selectivity more than volume, because queue time is the scarce resource and the multipliers only convert into real money on items that already carry a real price.