The Junk Yard to Shipyard Route in Storage Hunters: Open World

Storage Hunters: Open World gates its map by net worth, and the gaps between the gates are wildly uneven. The first one is a formality. The last one is most of the game. If you know that going in, the mid-game feels like a plan instead of a grind that will not end.

Here is the whole ladder, and what I would actually be doing on each rung.

The five gates, end to end

• Junk Yard — free, where everyone starts.
• Back Alley — unlocks at $750 net worth.
• Cargo Ship — unlocks at $7,000.
• Farmyard — unlocks at $10,000.
• Shipyard — unlocks at $125,000 net worth. The end-game zone with the priciest lockers.

And one non-zone milestone that matters more than it looks:

• Time Capsule — unlocks at $100,000 net worth, behind the Shopping Mall.

Note the shape of that, because it is lopsided in a way that catches people out. The first four gates are bunched together in the early game — you can be standing in the Farmyard with $10,000 to your name. Then nothing, for $115,000, until the Shipyard. The Time Capsule at $100,000 is the only marker in that long stretch. If you want a live read on where you are and what is left, the profit route planner takes your current net worth and maps the gap to the next unlock.

(Correction, 2026-07-14: an earlier version of this post put the Farmyard at $35,000 and omitted the Cargo Ship entirely. Both were wrong. The numbers above are corrected and cross-checked against community sources.)

$0 to $750: get out of the Junk Yard immediately

This gate is not a challenge, it is a tutorial. You will clear $750 in your first session almost regardless of what you do.

Because it is so cheap, the only real mistake available here is spending too long in it. The Junk Yard's locker pool is the weakest in the game, and every hour you spend perfecting your bidding there is an hour spent on the lowest-value inventory available. Bid conservatively, learn what the front row of a locker tells you, sell everything, and leave. The beginner's guide covers the first-hour mechanics in more detail.

The one thing genuinely worth doing in the Junk Yard is learning value-to-weight. Your carry capacity is the constraint that will follow you all the way to the Shipyard, and the Junk Yard is the cheapest possible place to learn that hauling a wardrobe across the map is a bad trade.

$750 to $10,000: the honest grind

This is the stretch where most players either build a method or bounce off the game — and it is shorter than it feels, because two gates fall inside it.

Back Alley has a better locker pool than the Junk Yard, and it is where your bidding discipline starts to actually pay. The core loop does not change — read the visible items, estimate a range, bid the low end — but the stakes rise and so does the cost of an undisciplined bid. If you overpay here it hurts in a way it never did in the Junk Yard. The Cargo Ship opens at $7,000 and the Farmyard at just $10,000, so if you are bidding with any discipline at all you will pass both faster than you expect.

Two things to fold into your routine during this stretch:

Pick up the lost items. There are 29 hidden collectibles scattered across the map, worth about $520 in total — not much money by the time you are chasing six figures. Collect them for the milestone rewards instead, and note when those land, because it is not where most guides say: 5 Diamonds at 5 items, a +14% permanent Luck boost at 15, and a $150 cash bonus at all 29. The luck boost is the only one that changes how you play, and it arrives a bit past halfway — so do not defer the first fifteen. The sweep costs you nothing but a bit of walking if you do it while already moving between zones. One ordering note that will save you a second lap: grab the Key in Back Alley first, because it is what opens the Lost Item Garage that holds the Scythe. Without the Key you will walk right past it. The lost items tracker has all 29 locations with a check-off list.

Learn the weather. Wet and Shocked are both 6x mutations tied to weather events, which makes them the only high-value rolls in the game you can plan around instead of praying for. Knowing which weather is up and what it turns on is free money by mid-game standards.

$10,000 to $100,000: the long middle and the Time Capsule

Farmyard opens up the higher-value lockers, and the pace picks up — but this is where the run gets long, and it is worth being honest about how long. Once you clear $10,000 there is not another gate until $125,000. Everything between is one continuous grind with no new zone to unlock as a reward.

The thing to aim at instead is the Time Capsule at $100,000. It sits behind the Shopping Mall and it is the only mechanic in the game that lets you actively change an item's mutation rather than accept the roll you were given. It is a gamble, and it is a real one — Dirty (0.8x) is in the outcome table, so a bad result actively costs you value.

I would not treat the Time Capsule as an income strategy. Treat it as an option you now have on your genuinely good items, used sparingly. The math on any given attempt depends on odds the developer has never published, which is exactly the kind of number this site refuses to invent.

$100,000 to $125,000: the last mile

The final $25,000 to the Shipyard is the smallest of the late-game gaps — the $750 Back Alley gate is obviously shorter in absolute terms, but you clear that one before you have learned anything — and by this point in the run your per-locker income is high enough that it goes quickly.

The trap here is complacency. Bids in the Farmyard feel cheap when you have six figures in the bank, and this is precisely where people start bidding the average instead of the floor and watch their net worth stall. The discipline that got you to $100,000 is the same discipline that gets you the last $25,000. Nothing about the math changed just because your balance got bigger.

What the Shipyard actually gives you

The Shipyard has the highest-value lockers in the game. It also has the highest-value mistakes. A misjudged bid in the Junk Yard cost you a rounding error; a misjudged bid in the Shipyard can undo a serious chunk of progress.

So the end-game is not really a new game. It is the same locker-reading loop, played for larger stakes, with the same rule underneath it: estimate a range from what you can see, bid near the bottom of it, and win fewer auctions than you lose. The bidding calculator will give you a max bid and a Safe / Gamble / Skip verdict on any locker, and it does not get more permissive just because you got richer.

FAQ

What net worth do I need for the Shipyard? $125,000. It is the last area gate in the game.

When does Back Alley unlock? At $750 net worth, which you will hit in your first session without trying.

What is the Farmyard requirement? $10,000. It is much closer to the Cargo Ship gate ($7,000) than most progression guides suggest — including, until we corrected it, ours.

Is the Time Capsule worth using? It is the only way to actively reroll an item's mutation, so it is worth having — but Dirty (0.8x) is one of the possible outcomes, and the odds have never been published. Use it on items where a bad roll would not hurt much, not as a way to make money.

Are the 29 lost items worth collecting? For the cash, barely — the whole set is worth roughly $520. For the milestone rewards, yes: 5 Diamonds at 5 found, +14% permanent Luck at 15, and a $150 bonus at all 29. The luck boost lands at 15, not at completion, so the first fifteen are the ones that matter. Sweep them while you are already travelling.

Can codes speed any of this up? No. The game has no code redemption system, so there is nothing to redeem. Any site listing active Storage Hunters codes is making them up.

Last updated 2026-07-14.