Like a Dragon Ishin – How to Make Money Using Chickens

Running out of money? Struggling to pay off your mortgage? Do you need a small loan to buy a cool sword? Look no further, Chicken Racing is here to the rescue!

Preface

Let’s be honest, Ishin is a bit of a grind fest. You need A LOT of money to craft gear, and the money you get from farming and missions really isn’t enough. Thankfully, like most of the other Yakuza games, Ishin has a little oversight that allows you to rack up money fast with minimal effort.

In about an hour of doing nothing, you can earn enough money to make the Shogun jealous.

In this guide, I’m gonna show you how, with one little script, you can rake in cash without even touching your computer.

Every Yakuza fan’s best friend, devilleon7, recently posted a video guide on how to always win the chicken racing minigame by making use of a bug in the interface. Consider giving the video a watch before continuing the guide to get an idea of what we’re doing.

While a flawless way to earn money, this is also a flawless way to earn hand pain, so we’ll instead be using an AutoHotkey script I wrote to do all this button pressing for us.

The Strategy

Wouldn’t it be great if instead of spamming the same buttons over and over we could make the computer do it for us? Well, here’s how to do just that!

Now, before I tell you to start downloading things, let me at least explain what the script does. It will go to the dividend list and rapidly max bet on everything it can. After betting, it will press ‘Quit Chicken Race’ to get your tickets back and then press ‘Start Race’ to start the race with your bets anyway. The script will wait about 70 seconds for the race to finish, which might be a lot longer than the shorter races, but who cares, then it will claim the rewards and repeat the process for the next race. You’ll be able to stop the script at any time, but you will have to have the game open and focused, so no using your computer for anything else while you’re doing this. Also, the script uses keyboard controls, so if you’re doing something that disables those, you’re gonna have issues.

Before you start! You’ll need some tags to bet with first, so first collect a minimum of about 8000 tags.

To get started, download the AutoHotKey script I made for this here.

This won’t blow up my computer, right?

No, it’s perfectly safe. If you think I would want to stick a virus in those .exe files, then feel free to use the included .ahk script with AutoHotkey or the .pmc if you want to use Pulover’s Macro Creator.

What’s inside

In the zip folder there are folders with the scripts for different framerates. If your game runs at a smooth 120fps, use the 120fps, if it runs at a smooth 60fps, use the 60fps, and so on. If the script for your framerate doesn’t work well, use the script for the framerate below that.

How to use the script

If you’re using the .exe, simply run that and an icon should appear in the system tray indicating that the script is ready. (If you would rather use the .ahk script, download AutoHotkey (v1.1) and open the file.) Nothing will happen yet. You’ll have to press one of the control buttons first.

The controls for the script are:

  • F3: Start
  • F12: Pause
  • F8: Stop

Now, in the game, head over to the chicken racing den, make sure you’ve got at least around 8000 tags, then start the minigame.

You should have the ‘Buy Tickets’ button highlighted like in the image above, then start the script by pressing F3.

Don’t press any other buttons while the script is running!

You should now be flying through the dividend list, max betting all of the possible outcomes without even touching a button! If that’s not what’s happening, try using a script for a different framerate or consult the troubleshooting section. Watch the game for a while and make sure the script continues after the race finishes just to be sure that everything is working alright.

When you’ve decided you’ve had enough racing, simply press F8 and the script will stop and close.

Congratulations! Through no effort at all, you are now on the path to be the wealthiest samurai in Kyo!

Troubleshooting

The script isn’t doing anything at all!

The script might not be activating or might not be allowed to send inputs to the game. Try running the game in windowed mode and see if that fixes it. If not, running the script as admin might help. You could also try using the other types of scripts (.exe, .ahk, .pmc, whatever you’re not using now). Just opening the script in Macro Creator and manually running it through there should always work as well, but it’s kinda janky, so I’d only recommend it as a last resort.

The script is doing something, but not the right thing!

First of all, just try running it again. Hit F8 to close it, reopen it, go back to the start of the menus and hit F3 again. Sometimes weird things happen. But if that’s not the problem…

You’re probably using the wrong framerate. The script holds down the keys for a certain amount of time on each script that’s tweaked to not be so long that the game scrolls too far and not so short that the game never picks up the input. If none of the scripts do the right thing, you can manually change the timings on the script. The 30fps file uses 40ms keypresses, the 60fps uses 30ms, and the 120fps uses 20ms. You can open one of those .ahk or .pmc’s in Notepad++ or something similar and replace all the ’40’s (or ’30’s or ’20’s) with a different timing of your choice until it works.

The script is missing some of the bets!

That’s normal. Sometimes the game decides to drop a few frames or something weird and mess with the script’s timings, but so long as the script is only missing a few bets, you’ll still be making bank.

This guide about Like a Dragon: Ishin! was written by alleine. You can visit the original publication from this link. If you have any concerns about this guide, please don't hesitate to reach us here.

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