Every new raider makes the same mistake, and it is an understandable one: you are three minutes into a good run, the crates keep giving, and there is one more down by the fence. The clock says you have time. You do not go to the exit, because going to the exit feels like leaving money on the ground.
It is the opposite. Here is what the scoring actually does when you go down instead of out.
A raid runs 210 seconds. Say you find R3 000 of loot, fold four scavs and pop six crates. Extract at 2:20 and the board sees the full R3 000, plus 640 for the kills, 450 for the crates, a flat 1 200 for reaching the exit, and 560 more for the seventy seconds you left on the clock. That is 5 850.
Do everything identically and get folded on the way out, and the same run scores 1 540. The loot collapses to 15% — R450 of your R3 000 — the 1 200 extraction bonus never lands, and the speed bonus goes with it. Your kills and your crates are the only things that survive intact. You lost roughly three quarters of the run in the last twenty metres.
The stash works the same way, and this is the part that actually stings: items persist only when you extract. Score is a number on a board that turns over. The rifle you found is a rifle you own — but only if you carry it out.
Which brings us to the yards, and the single most misread thing in the game. The Deep Yard pays 1.35× and Boet's Own pays 1.7×, and both of those multipliers are paid only on an extraction. Go down in Boet's Own and the multiplier you get is the one you would have got going down in the Scrapline: 1×. Not 1.7. One.
That is deliberate. If the multiplier applied to every run, the deeper yard would be strictly better even for someone who never walks out of one, and “harder yard, richer yard” would quietly become a score bonus you unlock by grinding. Paying it at the gate makes the tier an actual bet: you are wagering a run you could have banked at 1.0 against one you might not bank at all. The Deep Yard also starts you at threat 2, adds a rifle on the far ridge and plants two ambushers behind crates — so you are buying 35% more score with considerably more than 35% more trouble.
The practical version, then. The clock is not your enemy; the last crate is. Extraction pays 1 200 flat plus 8 a second for everything you leave unused, so a fast clean run out-scores a slow greedy one more often than it looks. If you are having a bad night, the Scrapline is the correct place to be — a raider dropping into Boet's Own to make up for a rough session is choosing the yard where a bad night pays the worst. And from level 8, when the yard lets you pick your own contract, the Bruiser Bounty pays the most (800) because it spawns a six-health bruiser that hunts you for the entire raid. That is not free score. It is a different risk, which is the only kind of reward this game hands out.
Drop in. Grab loot. Get out. The third one is the whole game.