Blackwood Walkthrough: Act 1 Guide and Mission 01 Steps

Documented chapter

Act 1 — the opening chapter

Main mission covered

01: Discreet Retrieval Required

Opening beats

Sewers → Gate 6 → plaza → your car

Gate 6 lever sequence

Down, up, up, down, down

Protagonist

Anton — DarkMail handle Shadowline_87

Mail client

Maple, DarkMail tab

Mission limit

One mission per day

Store hours

Open until 7PM, closed Sundays

Repeat rewards

Main missions pay 20% on repeat

What this Blackwood walkthrough covers

Act 1 is the only chapter with published walkthrough material, so every step below sits inside the opening chapter. The sources document the tutorial mission and your first full day in detail, then stop. The guide they come from lists three main missions in total, which means the later two exist by name but not as instructions.

Mission 01, "Discreet Retrieval Required": the tunnel escape

You start in the sewers. Walk straight along the tunnel to the intersection and turn right, following the tutorial prompts for cover, vaulting obstacles and crawling under the pipes, until you reach a steel gate at the end.

Face the opening with the black tarp draped over it and climb up into the room beyond; the door inside is locked, so pull out the shelf unit on the right to clear the hole behind it and squeeze through.

The Gate 6 water-control puzzle

In the next area Anton mentions stopping the water. Note the gate number printed on the tunnel opening, then enter the control room and examine the folder on the desk to read the lever sequences.

On the other side of the room there are five levers, and for Gate 6 the sequence is down, up, up, down, down. Once the water stops, leave the room and vault through the pipe.

Reload and aim before moving forward, because something is in the murky water and it rushes you on approach. Kill it, continue to the far end of the tunnel, take the stairs and climb the ladder that leads back to the surface.

The plaza firefight

Climbing the ladder spills you onto the street and into an ambush, and this fight doubles as the mission's checkpoint — dying later in the mission restarts you here. The arena is deliberately closed: you will hit invisible barriers around the edge of the sandbox, which limits flanking and repositioning. Cover is automatic by default and can be turned off in the settings; hugging a surface takes cover, and pressing Q does it manually.

Enemies arrive in waves — two parked SUVs plus a group at the plaza entrance, then a second pair of SUVs, then a third group near your car, with stragglers able to end up behind you. Body shots are enough for most of them, loot the bodies because your DV18S takes NATO 5.56mm, and swap to the sidearm with the 2 key once the primary runs dry.

Finishing the mission hand to hand

Reaching your car triggers a cutscene, and the tutorial closes with a two-on-one fistfight. Left-click attacks, right-click blocks and space evades, and the sources recommend evading over blocking because it opens a better counterpunch window. Focus one enemy at a time and take the takedown prompt when it appears to end a weakened attacker instantly. Once both are down, the tutorial is over and cutscenes carry you into the main game.

Your first day: the DVD store chores

The story resumes on Monday of Week 1 inside your apartment. The morning routine is a set of interactions rather than a menu: change outfit in the closet, fix up in the toilet, and prepare breakfast at the stove, which grants a small HP bonus during missions and matters because no healing items can be bought. On the way out, the neighbour's kid asks Anton for a copy of "Fist and Flames".

Then the store day starts. The chores are feeding the store cat at the bowl beside the counter, cleaning the poster at the front, organising the comic books, mopping the mess with the mop on the right, cleaning the dirt in front of the t-shirt rack, and dusting the rack straight ahead. Cleaning and reorganising feed directly into the store's popularity rating, which is what drives the clean cash you need for bills.

Delivering "Fist and Flames" and the basement

Buy the DVD from the DVD Planet store on the PC downstairs, then go back up and interact with the neighbour's door to hand it over. This is also when the basement opens as your hideout — from the store, the door sits at the end of the same hallway.

Inside you can train takedowns on the punching bag, modify weapons at the workbench, manage gear at the weapon and ammo stashes, and order from the black market.

Dark Mail and Littleboy42

The basement laptop runs Maple, and its DarkMail tab is the message client everything arrives in — the dark web equivalent of an inbox, where invites, contracts and mission leads show up with the main story mission pinned at the top.

Open the first email from Littleboy42 to move the main story forward, since Littleboy42 sends the main quests. Invites and contracts come from other senders entirely, and each email names its own reward in the subject line. One rule shapes your whole schedule — you can only take one mission per day, whether you complete it or not. Main missions can be replayed, but a repeat pays 20% of the original reward and still uses up that day's slot.

Invites and contracts you can take alongside the story

Two lists run alongside the story missions, and both are priced by name in the guide's own navigation. The invites are the Shooting Drill Range at $30/hour, Prove Yourself at $312, Last Man Standing at $2200, Irongate Trials at up to $8000, and The White Tiles at $5000.

The contracts are "Unit Verify" at $1200, "Bottle Service" at $2000, Stunt Work I at $1250, Stunt Work II at $2200, and "Smoke Break" at $3500. Subject lines use a fixed format — [CONTRACT] "Unit Verify" — $1200 and [INVITE] Shooting Drill Range — $30/hour — and you accept a job by opening the mail and pressing ENTER MISSION rather than by selecting it from a list.

The black market, Clean Road, runs on the same laptop and carries a 15% markup because orders are delivered instantly.

Invites: the Shooting Drill Range

Not every invite is a mission. The Shooting Drill Range is a trip to a range where you bring your own gear, useful for practising your shooting or testing a weapon you have just bought, and it bills by the hour at $30. The invitation itself comes from RangeRat, who runs it as a private, camera-free range.

It also carries a ranking system based on how quickly you clear the targets. When you are finished, interacting with the motorcycles takes you back to your apartment.

Contracts: "Unit Verify" at the train station

"Unit Verify" arrives from a sender called Switchyard, and the brief is small on purpose: a storage unit near Roosevelt Ave in Queens has been opened early, and you are asked to match what is inside against the tag, take nothing, and leave. You are told to bring a sidearm and to walk away if anything feels off.

The mission opens with a melee brawl against three thugs straight after you leave the train. There is very little scenery to use, so keep moving to avoid being surrounded while you take them down one at a time.

Armed enemies then arrive from the stairs and you begin that sequence behind cover. Cross to the far side of the station and bait the last group at the final flight of stairs rather than meeting it head-on.

Once every target is down, Anton leaves the station automatically and the contract completes, so there is no extraction step to manage.

Contracts: "Bottle Service" at the warehouse

"Bottle Service" is a different kind of job and it comes from AshenBroker. The target is Rico "Goldfinger" Marchetti, who owns a liquor warehouse on Pier 14, and the brief is to eliminate him and return with one of his fingers as proof — which is what the walkthrough's "target's digits" refers to.

You enter the warehouse through the opening in the loading bay and a henchman spots you immediately, so there is no stealth phase to plan around. Take cover by the entranceway and clear whatever you can see.

Watch the metal walkways on both sides next, because enemies use the height. After the first wave, go upstairs to the right and use the draped material on the railing as cover while more enemies arrive from across the building.

Keep doorways sighted instead of walking into them, and once the rooftop group shows up, peek through the broken section of wall rather than stepping outside. Clear the stairwell with your weapon up, watch the office doorway, and take out the last guard.

Combat rules the walkthrough keeps assuming

Health is a segmented silhouette in the lower-right corner. Damage confined to your current segment regenerates on its own after a few seconds in cover, but damage that reaches a lower segment only heals back up to that segment, which shortens your margin for the rest of the mission. Loadout is a primary and a sidearm, and that is the whole kit.

Accuracy comes from your own skill plus how the weapon is modded, so a stock rifle spreads more than the same rifle with parts installed.

A dive kill slows time in mid-air, and throwing an empty weapon at a closing enemy creates the opening for a melee takedown. Takedowns kill instantly, make you invincible for the animation and restore a little health, but melee takedowns only unlock once the target has been softened up.

Store numbers worth knowing

Popularity is weighted unevenly: stock accuracy and customer service are 45% each, while organisation and cleanliness are 5% each, so racks sorted by genre and movies actively suggested to customers carry almost the entire rating. Each rack holds up to 24 stacks of up to 8 identical titles, and the game recommends keeping around 80% of your inventory stacked.

The store closes at 7PM and is shut every Sunday, and 15% of your dirty cash is laundered into clean cash each morning.

What the walkthrough does not cover yet

Mission 02, "Good Work, Next Step", and mission 03, "Cars All Patched Up", are named in the guide's navigation but have no steps published, and the source explicitly marks 02 as coming soon. Most of the invite and contract list is priced but unwritten — "Prove Yourself", "Last Man Standing", "Irongate Trials", "The White Tiles", "Stunt Work I" and "Stunt Work II".