COPS
FIELD MANUAL
Read it in the car. The shift already started.
WHAT THIS IS
Detroit, after dark, and the gangbangers are taking blocks faster than the department can book them. You are a patrolman out of Precinct 13. You woke up on shift with an open case file, an empty bullpen, and a park across the street that stopped being a patrol route a while ago. The order is simple and nobody wants to say it out loud: clean up the streets, at all costs.
Every other cop out there got the same order. That matters more than you would think.
CONTROLS
| W A S D | walk the beat. arrows work too. |
| SHIFT hold | run. faster, and much louder. they hear you coming. |
| R hold | hunker. down behind cover, small and quiet. |
| E / SPACE | work the scene. look at things, keep thinking out loud. |
| CLICK | fire the service rifle. draw it off the armory rack first. |
| V hold | talk. real voice, real people, and only units within earshot hear it. |
| I / TAB | the duty bag. everything you are carrying. |
| ESC | pause. the city does not. |
THE PRECINCT
Precinct 13 is where you start every shift and where you wake up when a shift ends badly. The case file archive runs the length of the north wall, the evidence board still has red string on it, and the duty roster has more names crossed out than standing. The armory rack by the south door holds the service rifles. Take one. Nobody is going to hand it to you.
THE STREETS
Out the west door is the park, the avenue, the shop row, and the House of Corrections behind its wire. The park is where the marauders work. They travel in numbers, they carry clubs, and they take two rounds to put down: the first one staggers him and tells him exactly who fired it, the second one ends the argument. Your vest is three plates. It comes back if you break contact long enough to let it.
Go down and you wake up at the precinct with the desk sergeant pretending not to notice.
THE OTHER COPS
Everyone else on the street is also a cop, and that is the part the department does not put in writing. Clearances are handed out for results, results come from evidence, and evidence goes to whoever reaches it first. So you will race another unit to a scene, and sometimes the race gets settled with rifles. There is no penalty for it. There is no rule about it. There is just the number on your record and who got there first.
Take a rival's badge and it counts for more than a marauder does. Everybody knows that too.
CLEARANCE
Your clearance is your service record. Gangbangers cleared off the street move it a little, a rival cop's badge moves it a lot, and closing a case properly moves it most. At 600 the bronze doors at the end of the avenue open for you, and the president is on the other side with a job that does not go through dispatch.
THE PIMP COMING
One marauder in that park does not fight, does not run with the pack, and keeps appointments. Follow him, at a distance, and he will take you to a crackhouse on a side street that is not on any patrol map. What is inside is worth the walk.
VOICE
Hold V. Proximity chat: your voice carries a conversation's radius and no further, and the mic only ever transmits while the key is down. Deny the mic and you can still hear everyone. Listening is also police work.
ELSEWHERE
@CopSimulation on X
@thebagwassealed, the dev
the game itself
COPS · DETROIT · PRECINCT 13