ReStory Chill Electronics Repairs Best License Guide

Buy licenses before tools. That is the short answer, and it holds throughout the early game: licenses unlock categories of work you cannot perform at all, while tools only speed up work you can already do. Community guides are consistent that story progress is driven by buying licenses, which makes them the bottleneck on everything else.

There are 21 licenses

The full set numbers 21, and owning all of them is tied to an achievement. That total is worth knowing early because it sets expectations — this is a long-running spending track, not a handful of one-off purchases.

Planning around that means treating license money as a recurring budget line rather than an occasional splurge.

Why licenses outrank tools

A license opens a category of device you simply cannot accept orders for otherwise. A tool shortens a job you can already complete. When your story has stalled, a faster screwdriver does nothing at all.

The scale of the tradeoff is stark. The ratchet screwdriver sits around 11,000 and the electric screwdriver around 45,000. That second figure is a large amount of money to commit to convenience while a license you cannot yet afford is holding up a whole category of orders.

How buying works

Licenses are purchased through the in-game browser, and holding the relevant license is what lets you accept the matching orders. The certification is a prerequisite for the work rather than a bonus applied to it.

This is why the purchase order matters so much more here than in games where upgrades are purely incremental. You are buying access, not efficiency.

When to buy a tool anyway

Tools are not a trap — they are a timing question. Buy one when it removes a bottleneck you hit constantly, not at the first moment you can afford it.

Cleaning and speed upgrades are a reasonable exception to consider earlier than device-specific tools, because they affect nearly every repair rather than paying off only on particular devices. They compound across the whole workload.

If the story has stopped

The most common progression complaint is the story simply halting, and the recurring explanation is a license that has not been bought rather than a broken flag.

Before assuming you have hit a bug, check which license tier you are on and what the next one costs. See the walkthrough for how progression is structured.

Keeping the shop solvent while you save

Saving for a license still has to clear your fixed costs. Rent runs about 2,000 per week and internet is tiered at roughly 500, 1,000 and 1,500 per week, and both come out whether or not you finish a job.

Customer orders are the reliable way to clear that floor while you accumulate. Marketplace restorations have higher upside but you pay before knowing the full damage, so they suit the phase where a bad buy will not stall your savings.

Where the money actually goes

A practical priority order, given what the sources establish:

1. Cover rent and internet.
2. Keep a small reserve for replacement parts on active jobs.
3. Buy the next license.
4. Buy broadly-applicable cleaning and speed upgrades.
5. Buy device-specific tools once a bottleneck is recurring.
6. Layer in marketplace restorations once the above is stable.

Can you miss a license permanently?

Nothing in the sources gathered indicates that licenses can be permanently missed or that buying them in a particular order locks you out of content. The constraint appears to be money and sequence rather than a closing window.

待确认: That said, this is an absence of evidence rather than a confirmation. If you are planning a completion run, do not treat "nothing can be missed" as established.

Licenses and completion

Because the full set is tied to an achievement, a completion run has to buy all 21 regardless of whether you find each category useful. Factor that into your money planning if you are chasing 100%.

Some achievements in this game are missable and a few require separate playthroughs, so license planning is worth doing alongside achievement planning rather than after it. See the achievements guide.

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待确认: The individual license names, their prices, and which device categories each unlocks are not established in the sources gathered — no verified full listing exists. Commonly searched specifics, including the cost of the first paid license and whether a particular brand's license is worth buying early, are unconfirmed and are deliberately not guessed at here. Several sites publishing license tables for this game are in the excluded shadow-wiki list.