To raise rats in Probably Stolen, unlock ranching through Joe Wild or choose the Rat Wrangler start, then feed and maintain the animals in an Animal Cage. Successful breeding also depends on maturity and fertility, while hunger, disease, overcrowding, and cage damage can undermine the colony. Rats can produce meat for sale, but keeping them alive and healthy requires attention to food, cleanliness, and available space.
How to get rats and start ranching
Calling Joe Wild provides a route into ranching during a run, according to the recorded player guide. Unlocking ranching gives you a starter kit and opens the ranching content, including a visiting rat rancher who sells supplies. For a new game, the guide shows Rat Wrangler starting with an Animal Cage, rats, serum, and food, giving you the equipment and animals together.
The community Wiki lists six rats in both the Rat Wrangler start and the Ranching starter kit. It also lists the Retired Rat Rancher in the Lower Levels and wild rats caught with a Mouse Trap, with Processed Cheese marked optional. Historically, official Playtest Patch 48.3.12 made the previously secret Rat Wrangler scenario visible alongside the other starting scenarios; that patch announcement does not establish its current inventory.
Why rats may not be breeding
Check age before assuming that a lack of pups means something is broken. In the player guide's recorded version, rats become eligible to breed at 3 days old or older, indicated by the mature tag. Younger animals do not breed, so a cage containing immature rats needs time before fertility becomes the useful thing to inspect.
The guide describes random pairing each night, with the chance of pregnancy using the lower fertility value of the paired rats. A high fertility value on one animal therefore does not guarantee pregnancy when its partner has a lower value. The Wiki describes litters of 2 to 4 pups before genetics, while the guide explains that the mother's litter-size trait and random variation affect the eventual number.
Which traits matter when choosing breeding stock
The gene scanner reveals paired genetic values behind the displayed traits, rather than simply showing an animal's overall number. The player guide explains the usual displayed value as the average of that pair, with offspring inheriting combinations from their parents. A male also passes on the litter-size trait even though the mother's trait affects her litter, so breeding decisions can involve more than the female's displayed values.
Growth rate affects how quickly rats grow, and their weight affects how much meat they produce. Longevity affects usable lifespan, but the guide describes older rats losing weight and fertility even when longevity delays their lifespan limit. Hunger rate concerns overnight calorie consumption, while maximum health provides more health to absorb sickness or injury; the guide author's lower breeding priority for these traits is a personal preference.
How to feed rats without wasting food
Without a feed dispenser, the player guide shows food being placed directly into the cage for rats to eat. The game randomly decides which rat eats which item, so you cannot assign a particular piece of food to a particular animal. If there is not enough food, some animals can miss out; inspect their hunger values instead of assuming that food placed in the cage has fed every rat.
The guide treats hunger as stored calories and reports slower growth below 200 hunger in its recorded version. At zero, a rat becomes starving, and leaving it starving overnight results in death the next day. A feed dispenser blends food into stored calories through Blend or Start and feeds rats automatically, allowing food to be managed centrally while reducing the waste associated with consuming whole high-calorie items.
How to expand and repair the Animal Cage
The Wiki lists each rat as taking up 2 x 1 cells, making cage space relevant as the colony grows. In the player guide's recorded version, an Animal Cage begins with three rows and accepts five expansions, each adding one row by using an ingot on it. Expansion provides space, but it is a different operation from repairing the cage's durability.
Cage durability decreases overnight with occupancy, and sufficiently low durability gives rats a chance to escape. Escaped animals can eat food outside the cage or die, so missing rats make durability worth checking. The guide repairs a cage by selecting Use on scrap metal and applying it to the cage; a separate demo player report also identifies scrap metal as the repair material.
Prevent overcrowding and keep the cage clean
In the recorded guide, rats occupying more than 55% of cage cells trigger the first overcrowding level. That level doubles overnight durability wear, reduces fertility, and worsens the sickness risk associated with a dirty cage. Higher overcrowding levels can lead to fighting and deaths, while moving rats out can remove the warning; the cleaner bot itself does not count toward overcrowding.
Droppings appear overnight, and leaving them in an occupied cage increases the risk of sickness. You can remove them manually or use a cleaner bot kept charged with a battery to collect them for transfer to storage. Ordinary disease lowers fertility and meat production, while low immunity can be accompanied by sickness and overnight health loss, so cleaning supports both animal care and production.
Serum risks and harvesting rat meat
The guide shows Livestock immunity serum temporarily raising immunity by 20 for 4 days in its recorded version, without establishing universal protection from disease. Growth serum trades reduced immunity for increased growth speed, making faster growth a health decision as well. Keep rat meat out of the feed: the guide warns that feeding it to rats causes prions disease with permanent penalties to immunity, growth rate, and longevity, and does not establish that blending removes the risk.
To obtain meat, the guide equips a meat cleaver or skinning knife, kills the rat, and then harvests it. It describes the skinning knife as a reward after butchering 100 animals, with weight determining the meat output. For manual butchering, it reports ordinary disease reducing the effective weight used for output by 25%; harvested meat can be offered for sale, with food in the display case used to attract buyers.
Plan food supplies before the next night
The commissary offers food exchanges, but the guide warns that famine conditions can leave it without food stock. It also describes an underground exchange using ammunition placed in the trash can with janitor service enabled, with food returned the following morning. Because that exchange requires an overnight wait, it cannot provide an immediate meal for rats already needing food; a food neon sign likewise does not guarantee a food seller.
The guide demonstrates blending food marked stolen or carrying heat into dispenser calories, and a demo player also reports using rats to consume stolen food and free space. Those observations do not establish that every food item is suitable or that using the dispenser prevents Security penalties. For cage materials, the guide describes a furnace with a junk processing module converting six junk into four scrap metal, and a blast module converting three scraps into two lower-quality ingots that still work for cage expansion.