Six numbers, six habits
Most Lethal Company tip lists are collections of things you already do. This one is six numbers pulled from 70 scrap items and 25 entities, each of which changes a decision you make several times per run. The numbers come from src/data/lethalcompany-scrap.json and src/data/lethalcompany-monsters.json, parsed from lethalcompany.wiki.gg.
If you only take one: the weight column is the game’s real difficulty setting. The table ranges from 14.60 credits per pound to 0.45, a 32-fold spread, and nothing else in the game has that much leverage.
Tip 1: the ratio column outranks the value column
Two items can sit in the same room and differ by an order of magnitude in what they are worth to carry:
| Item | Avg value | Weight | Credits per lb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toilet Paper | 73 | 5 lbs | 14.60 |
| Easter Egg | 37 | 3 lbs | 12.33 |
| Hairdryer | 79 | 7 lbs | 11.29 |
| Old Phone | 55 | 5 lbs | 11.00 |
| Coffee Mug | 45 | 5 lbs | 9.00 |
| Cash Register | 119 | 84 lbs | 1.42 |
| Big Bolt | 25 | 19 lbs | 1.32 |
| Player Body | 5 | 11 lbs | 0.45 |
The habit: when you enter a room, look at what is light first, not what is expensive. The Cash Register is the second-most valuable item in the file by average value and only 41st of 46 by credits per pound among the items that weigh anything. Four light items (Toilet Paper, Easter Egg, Hairdryer, Old Phone) beat it by 125 credits while weighing 64 lbs less.
Tip 2: 24 items are literally free
Thirty-four percent of the table weighs nothing. That is not a rounding quirk — it is a designed layer, and it totals 929 credits at average values.
| Item | Avg value | Weight | Two-handed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zed Dog | 99 | 0 lbs | No |
| Beehive | 95 | 0 lbs | Yes |
| Perfume Bottle | 75 | 0 lbs | No |
| Teeth | 71 | 0 lbs | No |
| Laser Pointer | 65 | 0 lbs | No |
| Airhorn | 61 | 0 lbs | No |
| Clown Horn | 61 | 0 lbs | No |
| Rubber Ducky | 51 | 0 lbs | No |
The habit: check weight before you check anything else. An item at 0 lbs only costs you a hand, never speed. The only one of those eight with a real cost is the Beehive, which is two-handed and brings Circuit Bees at 90%.
The remaining sixteen weightless items are small money — Bone 10, Ear 7, Foot 13, Hand 7, Tongue 9, Dust Pan 21, and so on — but they are free money on the way out.
Tip 3: plan to the minimum, not the average
Every scrap row has three values, and the gap is where quotas go missing:
| Item | Min | Avg | Max | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Egg | 40 | 119 | 199 | 5.0x |
| Beehive | 40 | 95 | 149 | 3.7x |
| Zed Dog | 0 | 99 | 199 | n/a (min is 0) |
| Red Soda | 18 | 53 | 89 | 4.9x |
| Rubber Ducky | 2 | 51 | 99 | 49.5x |
The habit: count your haul at the minimum, or add 25% to your average estimate. Ten items averaging 47 is 470 credits on paper and about 300 if the rolls run cold. The quota guide builds a whole planning method around this.
Zed Dog is the extreme case. Average 99, minimum 0, maximum 199 — it is either the best free item in the game or worth nothing at all, and you cannot tell until you sell.
Tip 4: 70% is a wall, not a warning
The bestiary gives 18 of 25 entities a numeric rating. Here is how the indoor half distributes:
| Band | Count | Entities |
|---|---|---|
| 70% and above | 6 of 16 | Jester 90, Thumper 90, Coil-head 80, Bracken 70, Butler 70, Maneater 1000 |
| 20 to 50% | 2 of 16 | Snare Flea 30, Bunker Spider 20 |
| 5% and below | 3 of 16 | Spore Lizard 5, Hoarding Bug 0, Hygrodere 0 |
| No rating | 5 of 16 | Barber, Nutcracker, Ghost Girl, Mask Hornets, Masked |
The habit: memorise the six. A confirmed 70%+ entity ends the looting phase of the run, no exceptions. Six names is a two-minute memorisation that pays back on every dive.
Two of them cannot be fought at all. The Jester’s HP field reads “Invincible” and its log says “You cant hide from it, just evacuate.” The Thumper at 90% has no HP value recorded, so no kill threshold exists to plan around.
Tip 5: heavy means two-handed more often than you think
Sixteen items take both hands. For a diver in a facility, that means no light, no shovel and no second slot — a cost that never appears in the value column.
The pattern to notice: the heaviest items are usually the two-handed ones. Cash Register (84 lbs, two-handed), Chemical Jug (32, two-handed), Apparatus (31, two-handed), Panting (31, two-handed). Four of the seven items at 30 lbs or above cost both hands as well as speed.
The habit: before lifting a heavy item, ask what else you are giving up. If the answer is “my light and my ability to run”, the 119 credits are not 119 credits.
There is one happy exception. Egg is two-handed at 19 lbs and pays 119 — 6.26 per lb, seventh-best in the file. That is the one two-handed item worth routinely sacrificing your hands for.
Tip 6: sell in units of 470
The table’s mean is 47.0 and its median is 44, so ten items is a natural unit: about 440 to 470 credits per trip.
The habit: treat the trip, not the run, as the unit of planning. Two trips of ten items beats one trip of twenty, because the first 470 is banked before the second is at risk. It also means the quota drops between trips, which lowers the target for the deeper, riskier half of the day.
A practical breakdown for a four-player crew: 40 items across eight hands is roughly 1,880 credits at average — four banked trips, not one heroic haul. The co-op guide covers how to split that across roles.
What none of these numbers cover
Two of the biggest factors in a run are absent from both data files: the facility layout and the clock. Neither lethalcompany-scrap.json nor lethalcompany-monsters.json records where the exit is or how much day is left, so any guide quoting a “typical run length” or a “most common death” percentage is making it up.
What the data supports is the mechanism. Weight slows the walk back, the indoor median hazard is 70%, and 24 items cost nothing to carry. Those three facts explain most losses without needing a statistic that does not exist. The survival guide turns them into a procedure, and the common mistakes page prices the errors.
Related guides
- Scrap guide — the full 70-row table.
- Enemy guide — all 25 entities sorted by hazard.
- Quota guide — planning to the minimum.
- Survival guide — the drop order under pressure.
- Best scrap tier list — the ratio column as tiers.