Before day 1: what the game expects from you
Police Chief Simulator gives you a ruined building, a phone, and a title. The official description frames the campaign as clearing Winston Springs County of Shadow's Gang influence, but the first hours are humble: carpentry, janitorial work, and paperwork. Community walkthroughs of the full game follow a remarkably consistent script because the early objectives are quest-driven through Ron Dunn's phone calls rather than left for you to discover.
Expect a day and night cycle with an energy meter — players get forced to sleep by yawning prompts in the afternoon — and a day-summary screen that counts cases registered, sent, destroyed, and expanded, plus the day's earnings and expenses. Wages and bills are deducted around 21:00 in-game, which is when many players first discover their balance has dropped despite a profitable-looking day.
Day 1 walkthrough: crowbar, breaker, broom
Your shift starts at the boarded front door: equip the crowbar from the tools menu (TAB), rip the planks off, and head inside. Find the back room, flip the power switch, and watch the lights come on. Ron calls: clear the trash out of the registration room, and HQ transfers some starting money to your account — players report balances around $500 to $1,000 after the transfer lands.
Sweep dust with the broom, collect small trash by hand or with bags, and throw it into the outside containers; a percentage counter climbs toward a target near 90–100%. Mid-cleanup, a courier drops boxes at the parking barrier — open it so he can deliver your waiting-room furniture, because he will wait a long time otherwise. Finally, sleep on the squatter's mattress in the office to end day 1 with nothing solved but everything running.
Day 2 walkthrough: pawn shop run and first cases
Ron's morning call lists the shopping list: a fax machine, a shredder, and registration forms, all from Tony's pawn shop, plus printer paper. Footage shows totals of $205–$300 depending on quantities. Load boxes into your vehicle trunk, drive back, and set the fax above the shredder with forms stocked at the registration counter — the classic layout every veteran run copies.
Flip the open lever and citizens begin walking in. Inspect each form — name, address, birth date, sex, license number, expiration, photo — then green-stamp the clean ones and fax the file to HQ for a $30 bonus. Mistakes you can fix with a pen (misspellings, wrong sex) should be corrected; wrong photos or expired IDs cannot be fixed, so reject those and shred them. Between visitors, HQ rents you a motel apartment — the keys are under the doormat.
Days 3–4: the detective room and your first cracked case
The next objective sends you to a locked side room: pry it open, clean it, and call the garbage truck (123-123 in the dialer, $100 disposal in most footage). Order the detective furniture set from Tony's by phone — desk, evidence board, scanner, paper, and forms; one full-game streamer paid $1,540. Place the scanner, stock the printer, and you are ready to investigate.
Take a registered case file to the scanner, close the lid, and press start: the system searches the database and auto-prints suspect documents. Pin the victim, suspect, and location on the board — one solved example pinned Bruce Lewis as victim, Dorothy Martinez as suspect, at 645 Birchwood — connect the strings, and take the photo. 'Case cracked' doubles the fax payout to $60, and a few solved cases push you to reputation level 1.
Week 1: reputation, renovation, and first hires
With reputation level 1 reached, Ron allows the first station expansion: call the renovation company at 369-777. Community runs show roughly $550–$650 for the level-1 registration area and main hall, plus $425 for a locker room. Each hire needs a $225 locker, and the Hired In computer app lists candidates with strength, charisma, intelligence, and a daily wage around $45–$65 — cheap hires are tempting, but low-intelligence employees reject good files.
A mid-week update unlocks the correction pen, and an objective asks you to fix five citizen mistakes — remember that expiration dates and photos are never correctable. This is also the stretch where employees start making mistakes of their own: expect rejected files from dim-witted hires, and reassign the smart ones to the detective room where their stats pay off.
Week 2: ticket book, cruiser, and street money
A special delivery brings the ticket book, and Ron's call points you to the gas station and the local car dealer to revive an old police cruiser. Refueling costs about $50–$100 per tank depending on how empty it is; the dealer repairs crash damage for a scaling fee. Parking patrol pays $20–$30 per ticket, and the ticket book does not appear to run out.
The second week is where the money curve bends: the $300 speed gun from the gun shop lets you cite speeders on the interstate for roughly $60–$90 each — one player banked $1,700–$2,500 in a single session. By the end of a popular two-part full-game series, the player had reached station level 3 and was booking prisoners at the county prison for $75–$250 a head.
Late walkthrough: arrests, prison, and level-3 station
The arrest arc begins with a gun-shop loadout — community footage shows about $610 for a 1911, rubber ammunition, and two handcuffs. Chase fleeing suspects, drop them with rubber bullets, handcuff and carry them to your cruiser's rear seats, then deliver them to Winston County Prison for front-and-side booking photos. Payouts plus returned handcuffs make each delivery a clean profit, and innocent arrests are punished with a 50-reputation fine.
Building holding cells ($1,890 in one run) lets you process criminals at the station and batch-deliver them. The level-3 station upgrade costs about $4,500 and requires reputation level 8; it adds the garage, a brick wall, and the endgame loop of dispatching equipped officers from the briefing room. Beyond that, players report reputation level 9 objectives appearing — the game keeps scaling after the credits would roll in any other sim.
