PAYDAY 3 Touch the Sky Guide: Rob a Rich Bastard, Steal His SSD
Touch the Sky is pretty straightforward once you know what actually matters. Get into Mason Laurent’s personal vault, steal the SSD, decrypt it on the computer in his office and secure it. That’s the heist. Everything else in that absurd penthouse is optional loot.
Stealth gets more complicated from Hard onwards because Mason himself becomes part of the security system, unless you disable the iris scanner and remove him from the equation entirely. Loud is simpler. Although there is one fairly important thing to remember: grab Mason before he reaches his panic room.
Apparently the man owns a Bulldozer suit.
We'll get to that.
Planning to keep robbing people after Mason? Our PAYDAY 3 Heists Ranked puts every job in order, including the ones actually worth putting the mask back on for.
Quick Route
Stealth:
Infiltrate
Find the Master Bedroom
Hack the access points
Reveal the vault
Access Mason’s office
Open the panic room
Get the vault code
Steal the SSD
Decrypt the SSD in Mason’s office
Secure the SSD
Escape
Loud:
Infiltrate
Find the Master Bedroom
Hack the access points
Reveal the vault
Get the red keycard
Enter Mason’s office
Activate the panic-room switch
Drill the panic room for 120 seconds
Get the vault code
Steal the SSD
Decrypt the SSD
Secure the SSD
Escape
There are another 18 loot items and four figurines you can steal. You don't need any of them.
Best Touch the Sky Stealth Route
Once you're inside, start working towards the Master Bedroom.
You'll need to hack the control panel through the access points. I wouldn't go out of my way to do these immediately. You're going to be moving around the penthouse anyway, so hack them when you get a decent opportunity and somewhere to hide.
Once the hack is finished, enter the Master Bedroom and check the books for the hidden switch. That exposes the panel hiding Mason's vault.
From here the route depends on difficulty.
Normal
Normal is the easy version.
Get the red keycard from the Cigar Room, enter Mason's office and press the red button near his desk. That reveals the panic-room entrance.
Now find one of the marked fingerprints, lift it and use that to open the panic room.
Inside you'll find the possible vault codes on the whiteboard. Take the code back to Mason's personal vault in the Master Bedroom, open it and grab the SSD.
Bring the SSD to the computer in Mason's office, decrypt it, pick it back up and secure it.
You can now escape.
And I do mean can. The game has thoughtfully surrounded your actual objective with jewelry, cocaine, cigars and little figurines, presumably because PAYDAY understands that asking a player to leave perfectly good loot behind is like putting a bowl of crisps in front of someone and saying they're decorative.
Hard, Very Hard and Overkill Stealth
Hard makes Mason more important.
You'll first have to hack the Head of Security's phone to access the Cigar Room. Get into Mason's office, hit the red button again and reveal the panic room.
Except now a fingerprint isn't enough. The panic room wants Mason's iris.
The intended route is actually quite fun. Find the poison, spike Mason's drink, wait until he wanders off sick, grab him and take him to the scanner.
Or don't.
Disable the iris scanner
If you get the opportunity to disable the iris scanner, do it.
You can bypass the entire Mason sequence.
This makes the heist considerably easier because you no longer need to find the poison, spike the drink, wait for Mason to separate himself from everyone, grab him and then somehow transport a wealthy PMC executive through his own heavily guarded penthouse because a door would quite like to look at his eyeball.
I like that route. I also don't particularly want to do it every time.
A microcam is useful here too because you can use it to remotely see the information you need instead of repeatedly walking back into dangerous areas.
Once the panic room is open, the rest is familiar. Get the vault code, open Mason's vault, take the SSD, decrypt it in his office and secure it.
Very Hard and Overkill use essentially the same objectives. The big difference on Very Hard is that the Security Chief becomes the Lead Guard.
Yay.
Prefer committing felonies without three strangers turning the plan into interpretive gunfire? Best PAYDAY 3 Heists for Solo Players finds the jobs that work when the entire criminal organisation is you.
The VIP Keycard Is Ridiculously Useful
For stealth, the VIP Keycard favor is easily my favourite.
It gives you free access to the normally private areas of the penthouse. The upstairs secure zones are still off limits, but you can basically walk around half the map without caring.
That's huge here.
Touch the Sky has you bouncing between the bedroom, office, cigar room, panic room and other parts of the penthouse. Simply being allowed to walk through a large chunk of it removes a surprising amount of hassle.
The Sky Cleaner favor gets you inside faster, but I prefer the elevator for stealth. The initial entry may be slower, but the VIP Keycard is useful for much more of the actual heist.
Blue Keycard and Blue RFID Tag
There are two blue things and they do different jobs, because apparently one blue access thing would have been far too easy.
The blue keycard is carried by patrolling guards and opens the Security Office.
The blue RFID tag is on the rooftop. It has three possible spawn locations and opens the door connecting the rooftop directly to the penthouse.
There's also a zipline on the roof that I found during stealth and couldn't find any bloody use for. My suspicion is that it's connected to a loud rooftop escape, but until I can actually prove that, I'm leaving it alone.
If you know what that thing does, congratulations. You're currently ahead of me.
Touch the Sky Loud Route
Loud follows much of the same opening route.
Find the Master Bedroom, complete the access-point hacks, use the books to reveal the vault, grab the red keycard from the Cigar Room and get into Mason's office.
Press the red button to reveal the panic room.
You now have to drill the panic-room door for 120 seconds.
Once you're inside, get the vault code from the whiteboard, open Mason's personal vault and steal the SSD. Take it back to his office, decrypt it on the computer and secure it.
That's enough to finish.
You can also use the elevator shaft between floors during loud, which gives you another way around the penthouse.
There is, however, one thing I would do as soon as everything goes to shit.
Grab Mason
If you can get to Mason when the alarm goes off, take him hostage.
Don't trade him.
If you leave him alone, he'll try to reach his panic room. And if he succeeds, Mason can partially equip Bulldozer armour.
I genuinely thought this was just a Dozer spawning inside the panic room the first time I saw it.
Nope.
It's Mason.
The man has emergency Dozer armour in his panic room.
I have spent far too long thinking about the practicalities of this. Does he practise putting it on? Is there a little laminated emergency procedure on the wall? FIRE: leave building. BURGLARY: become Bulldozer.
Either way, grabbing him early means you don't have to find out how quickly a rich man can get dressed when four heavily armed criminals have arrived to steal his SSD.
Take Mason hostage.
How Much Optional Loot Is There?
If you're staying for everything, Touch the Sky has:
Cigar Room: 4 loot items
Panic Room: 5 loot items
Vault: 9 loot items
Figurines: 4
I don't have reliable current post-rework values for all of it yet, and I'm not going to use old payout numbers from before Touch the Sky was rebuilt and pretend they're still accurate.
For completing the heist, it doesn't matter.
You only need the SSD.
So if you're doing a fast run, take the drive and get out. If everything is under control and you want to clean the place out, there's plenty left.
Which, let's face it, you probably do.
There's something fundamentally wrong with escaping a PAYDAY heist while the objective marker is still calmly informing you that Mason owns four cigars you haven't stolen yet.
Touch the Sky is one penthouse in a considerably larger crime spree. Head to the PAYDAY Hub for CRIMENET’s heist guides, builds and everything else required for increasingly professional bad decisions.
Fast Touch the Sky Stealth Recap
Use the VIP Keycard if you have it. Hack the access points when it's convenient, reveal the vault through the books in the Master Bedroom and get into Mason's office.
On Normal, lift a fingerprint to open the panic room.
On Hard and above, disable the iris scanner if possible. It saves you from having to poison, kidnap and transport Mason. If you can't disable it, poison his drink and use him on the scanner.
Grab the code from the panic room, open the vault, steal the SSD, decrypt it in Mason's office and secure it.
Then leave.
Unless there are still cigars.
There are always the fucking cigars.
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