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Wonderland — Beginner's Guide — How to Start
BasicsUpdated 2026-08-17

Beginner's Guide — How to Start

Welcome to San Diego, California. This guide walks you through your first hour: crossing the border, picking a side (civilian or agent), and setting up your first income stream.

The core loop

San Diego Border Roleplay is a checkpoint roleplay game. Everything revolves around one line on the map:

  1. Spawn your vehicle from the garage.
  2. Approach the border checkpoint — join the queue.
  3. Get approved or inspected by Border Patrol agents on the other side.
  4. Cross — legally with clean papers, or with contraband hidden in your car.

Play it straight as a Civilian, risk everything as a smuggler, or put on the uniform and run the line yourself as one of the eight teams.

  • Drive to the checkpoint and stop at the booth.
  • Wait for the agent to wave you through — most legal crossings take under a minute when the queue is calm.
  • The Legal Border Crossing badge unlocks on your first clean crossing — over 16.8 million players have it, so you literally cannot miss it.

That first crossing unlocks the core map: the city, the stores, the apartments and the tunnel entrance.

Picking your side

Civilian (free)

The default team and the economic heart of the game. Civilians:

  • Buy contraband at the black market, smuggle it across, and launder the cash.
  • Farm money printers in rented apartments for passive income.
  • Rob the bank, the jewelry store and houses for big scores.
  • Buy properties — apartments, and beach houses with basement gardens.

Civilian income scales with how many law enforcement officers are in your server — the bonus maxes out at 20 officers (announced in the official change-log, V4659). Busy servers pay better.

Border Patrol / Police (free)

  • Border Patrol: inspect vehicles at the line, run scans, stamp travelers through, send suspects to secondary inspection.
  • Police: city patrol — warrant raids, printer confiscation (~$10,000 per bust), pursuits of wanted smugglers.

Both earn a salary (around $1,913 per cycle, per community tracking) plus authority XP for every scan, detention and arrest.

Premium teams (Robux)

FBI, US Army, SWAT and BORTAC unlock with Robux — or free through XP:

  • SWAT: free at 80,000 XP earned as Police.
  • BORTAC: free at 80,000 XP earned as Border Patrol.

Premium teams earn roughly 30% higher salaries than the free authority teams (official change-log, V4700).

The Coast Guard joined with the August 16 update to patrol the new boat smuggling routes.

Your first $10,000

The money milestones come fast for new players:

  • $10,000 — the Big Balance badge (20 million players).
  • $100,000 — Six Figures (1.2 million players).
  • $1,000,000 — Millionaire (128k players).

Fastest early routes:

  1. Legal work first. A few clean crossings + a trucking delivery run (talk to the NPC at the depot near spawn) build starter cash with zero risk.
  2. Then graduate to smuggling runs. Buy cheap contraband, cross the border away from the highway, sell to the buyer on the other side. See the smuggling guide.
  3. Reinvest into a money printer once you have $20,000+. See the money printer guide.

Wanted levels — the risk side

Committing crimes near authorities builds wanted stars:

  • Equipping a weapon near a federal agent instantly flags you (Armed and Suspicious badge — 6.9 million players).
  • Five stars makes you a Serious Criminal.
  • Getting caught means jail — 30 seconds per wanted star (raised from 15 in V4700), or pay $1,000 per star bail to walk early.
  • Escaping clean earns the Clean Getaway badge.

Death drops at most $5,000 cash on the ground (lowered from $10,000), so don’t carry your whole bank across the border.

Server rules & anti-cheat

The developers moderate actively — roleplay rules apply, and exploiting is a fast track to losing everything. On August 2, 2026 the developer wiped 2,000 accounts confirmed to be running auto-farming scripts, erasing over $1 billion from the economy. Play it clean; the grind is the game.

What’s next