Failing a criminal action can land you in jail, and jail is not just a timer. It is a whole social system: other players can break you out, you can break them out, and a roster of captured outlaws sits in every city jail carrying a bounty. Understanding how the odds are built is the difference between farming it profitably and wasting a day of energy on it.
A failed criminal action carries a jail sentence of about 2 minutes. While jailed you cannot perform most actions, which makes the real cost of failure the time, not the lost attempt. You can wait it out, pay bail to leave immediately, or hope another player breaks you out, which costs you nothing and earns them a reward.
New characters get a grace period: your first 10 actions cannot land you in jail at all. That exists so learning the game does not mean spending your first session locked up, and it runs out quietly, so do not assume the risk is still switched off once you are past it.
Freeing another player is a genuine cooperative action with its own success roll. The odds are resolved entirely on the server from your stats, your jailbreak rank, the tools you have crafted, and the difficulty of the jail holding them. This is worth stating plainly because the displayed percentage is the real one: the number you are shown before committing is the number the server rolls against.
A successful bust earns you gold, character XP, and jailbreak XP that raises your jailbreak rank, which in turn improves future attempts. A failed one can put you in jail alongside the person you were trying to free, so the risk is symmetrical.
There are 6 jailbreak tools, one per rarity tier, each crafted from materials plus a gold fee and each gated behind a JAILBREAK rank rather than a character rank. You can own several, but only the highest-rarity one you hold is ever active, so a tool is a permanent upgrade to every future attempt rather than something consumed by one.
The top rung is different in kind, not just in size. Key of Heaven's Gate is the one divine item a player can make directly, and crafting it rolls it a unique effect out of a pool of 6 (Master Key, Silent Entry, Vanisher, Unshaken, Jailer's Ruin, Divine Harvest), at a strength also rolled at craft time. You do not choose which, and no other tool rolls anything at all. One of those effects, Divine Harvest, is itself a route to more Godshards. See the divine effect system for how that pool works, and every divine effect and its range for what each of these six actually rolls between.
A rolled effect is not final. Key of Heaven's Gate can reroll its effect from your inventory. A full reroll costs 150 shadowgems and redrawing only the strength costs 100, both flat, with no escalation however many times you do it. It is the only jailbreak tool with anything to reroll, because it is the only one that rolls an effect at all.
The reroll is blind. There is no preview and nothing to accept or discard: the effect you have is replaced the moment you confirm, at a freshly rolled strength, drawn from the same pool of 6 the craft drew from. Your current effect is still in that pool, so a reroll can hand back the same effect at a better or a worse roll purely by chance, and it can just as easily trade a peak roll for a floor one. A strong roll on an effect you can live with is usually worth keeping.
The confirmation lists all 6 candidates and the range each one rolls between before you spend anything, so the draw is blind but not unknowable. Every divine effect and its range is the same listing on this wiki, alongside the gear pools.
This applies to the captured OUTLAWS held in each jail, not to rescuing a jailed player: a player rescue runs at one flat difficulty wherever they are being held. Each of the 4 city jails has its own outlaw difficulty and its own payout, and the two move together. A higher divisor makes the attempt harder; a higher multiplier pays more when it works. Grinding the easiest jail is the safe play, but it is also the worst gold per attempt.
The second thing the tiers imply is a travel bill. An outlaw can only be broken out by someone standing in the city holding them, so working a richer jail means paying that city's travel toll and its cooldown before you roll a single attempt. Budget the trip as part of the cost of the tier, not as something separate from it.
The practical read: work the jail one tier above where you comfortably succeed. The reward multiplier climbs faster than the difficulty divisor across the ladder, so the harder jails are better value per successful attempt for a character who can actually land them.
Beyond the ordinary outlaws sitting in each jail, there are 4 Most Wanted elites, one imprisoned in each of the realm's 4 cities. They are the hardest busts in the game and they pay accordingly.
An ordinary captured outlaw carries a baseline bounty in the range of 70 gold to 140 gold, scaled by that city's reward multiplier and by the same server-wide inflation multiplier every other gold figure on this wiki is quoted before. A Most Wanted elite instead carries a sentence-level multiplier of 10x to 25x on top of the same city scaling, and a successful elite bust then applies a further flat 3x to gold, character XP and jailbreak XP. Those multipliers compound, which is why a single elite bust can be worth more than an evening of ordinary ones.
They also carry a 60-minute cooldown after a successful bust, so an elite is not a repeatable income stream. Treat each one as an event to prepare for rather than a rotation to farm.
There is a bounty on top of the bounties. Freeing your first elite opens a 60-minute window to free the rest of them; clear every one of the 4 inside it and the run pays 50,000 gold per character rank you hold, plus a unique title the first time you ever manage it. It is deliberately awkward: the elites sit in different cities, so the window has to cover the travel as well as the busts, which is why it is a planned run rather than something that happens by accident.
Two mechanics change the odds for everyone at once. A jail riot is funded by players and temporarily raises bust success chances across the board while it runs, with escalating tiers if more players pay to upgrade it. A bust party is an organised group attempt where the participants pool their effort against a single target.
Both reward paying attention to the realm rather than only your own screen. A riot running is the single best moment to attempt a bust you would normally consider out of reach, including an elite, because the multiplier applies to the roll you were already going to make.