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The penthouse in Touch The Sky is one of the smallest maps in Payday 3. It's still brimming with guards and cameras, though, so the tight quarters can be troublesome if you're trying to make it through without being caught. On the other hand, if you raise the alarm, elite enemies start appearing in the very first assault wave.
With randomized room locations, difficult hacks, and even dangerous falls if you're not careful, Touch The Sky can be a tough heist to pull off. If you can master it and get away with all the loot, there's a lot of money to be made.
How To Enter The Penthouse
The main entrance to the penthouse is watched by a camera and a guard. If you want to walk in the front door, you'll have to eliminate both; this isn't ideal, since you'll have to waste a radio right away and the delivery person who arrives later might see the body.
It's much better to take the staircase up until you see a vent, then mask up and climb through. The vent drops you off in one of three locations, depending on how far you crawl:
If you go all the way to the end of the vent, ignoring the first drop, you'll find yourself in an unwatched room across from the master bedroom and the left-hand staircase. This is the safest entry point, and can serve as your main hiding place for the first part of thไe heist.
If you take the first drop, you can emerge from one of two vents. The nearest vent will put you in the upstairs hallway, near the right-hand staircase. The further one will put you on the glass platform over the entryway. This second option is safer overall, but beware of the guards on the first floor, who mighꦜt be able to see you from below.
The guard patrolling the upstairs hallway sometimes passes under the vent by the stairs. If you're able to catch him there, it's very easy to steal his keycard as he walks away.
How To Find The Vault Door
Your first stop is the master bedroom, in the rear left corner of the second floor. Activate the screen outside the door, then move around the apartment hacking hotspots until it opens. While you're doing this, check to see if the door in the front left corner has a blue keycard scanner. If it does, that's the security room - steal a keycard from the nearby guard and use it to disable the cameras.
If the security room isn't here, then it's on the first floor, below the bedroom. It can be hard to reach without being spotted since it's so far out of your way, but it can be worth the effort since cameras are everywhere in Laurent's penthouse.
Once you are able to enter the bedroom, pull books off the shelf opposite the bed until one triggers a mechanism. You can now open the panel behind the bed to reveal the vault door.
How To Get Into The Office
The passcode for the keypad is in a panic room behind the office, which is itself locked with a red keycard. The keycard is in the filing room, which is located either in the front left corner of the second floor or the rear left corner of the first floor. The filing roo🤪m and security room are randomly assigned to these two locations when you cre🧸ate a new lobby for the heist.
The filing room must be opened with a QR code, which is on the phone carried by the security chief. Look for a man in a suit patrolling both floors. The best place to hack his phone is on the stairs, as he is less likely to turn around while he's ascending or descending - just watch out for others who might see you skulking around!
Hacking the chief's phone without him noticing is one of the hardest parts of the heist; if you can get away with it, capture him or shoot him in order to get the phone.
Use the QR code to open the filing room, then check the drawers in each corner until you find the keycard. This allows you to get into the office in the front right corner of the second floor. Inside, press the button on the left side of the desk to reveal the panic room.
If the alarm is triggered, the QR code will no longer work - Shade will have a bag of thermite dropped off on the balcony for you to burn your way into the filing room.
How To Get Into The Panic Room
The panic room requires Mason Laurent's retina scan to open. He's holding a meeting in the living room at the bottom of the right-hand stairs; look for a man with a shaved head. If you're confident that you've sufficiently neutralized the cameras and guards, you can simply threaten the assembled conspirators and take Laurent hostage.
If you can't risk making a scene, wait for a bottle of whiskey to be delivered to the bar behind the living room. You can spike it with a pill bottle found in one of the bathrooms or storage rooms (the exact location is randomized). If Laurent drinks it, he'll leave the group, giving you a chance to nab him and take him to the retina scanner.
If Laurent dies or escapes, you'll have to drill the panic room door, which takes several minutes.
How To Escape With The Hard Drive
Inside the panic room is a whiteboard on the left with four codes, one of which will open the vault in the bedroom. There are also two bags of cocaine, one bag of cash, and several loose stacks of bills to steal.
Once you're in the vault, crack the safe and steal the hard drive. Leave the jewelry for now; if it's not bagged, the police won't be able to move it around.
Bring the hard drive to the office; plug it into the computer, then interact with the monitor to start decrypting the drive. When it's done, bag the drive and make your escape.
In the likely even that the alarm has triggered, you'll need to light a flare on the balcony to signal the chopper. The helicopter arrives at the right-hand corner, and unlike other escapes, the drop point is on the ground in front of the vehicle. This means that if you stack up bags in the corner where the escape point will spawn, you can ensure that they will automatically be collected when Bile arrives.
If you want to get the jewelry from Laurent's vault, the best way is to keep two team members on the balcony to defend the bags while you send the other two up to the vault. These players can then throw the bags down to the balcony from the bedroom window, allowing the players below to carry them to the helicopter. This ensures that the police won't steal your loot, and gets you the biggest payout.