In the 1.05 patch the chicken race exploit was tragically patched. If you happen to have an older version of the game saved or can find one online, you can downpatch to 1.04 to use this trick, but otherwise the wondrous ways of the chicken are closed to you.

Rest in peace chicken strat ~ Feb. 28, 2023 - Apr. 3 2023 ~ You will be missed

Let's be honest, Ishin is a bit of a grindfest. 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.
https://youtu.be/Zx39GzFH4xk

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.

EDITED MARCH 8 2023: I've reworked the script so that it will now work regardless of your FPS, should break less, and will no longer fall apart when you get a Beak-to-Beak race. The download to the old version has been removed.

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 80 seconds for the race to finish, which might be a lot longer than the shorter races, 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.

Also, the script will attempt to look for the green background on the race title that indicates a Beak-to-Beak race is happening and if so, it will just start that race without betting so it can move on to more new races (This type of race changes the UI layout, so this was the easiest way to handle them).

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[drive.google.com].

What's inside?
The .ahk is the AutoHotkey script and for the sake of convenience I've compiled it to an .exe as well, so you don't have to download AutoHotkey to use this guide. Whichever file you use, the process is the same, but if you'd prefer to use the .ahk script, you can grab AutoHotkey here[www.autohotkey.com]. Make sure you downloaded v1.1 since the script doesn't support v2.0.

If you're worried about safety, all AutoHotkey does is mimic button inputs on your computer, and you can open up the script with a text editor if you want to take a peek inside.

The first thing you'll need to do is make sure your game is windowed and in 1080p! The script needs the window to be that resolution to be able to detect Beak-to-Beak races properly. Once you've done that open the script (either run the .exe or open the .ahk with AutoHotkey). 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, make sure your mouse cursor is somewhere on the edge of the screen where it can't select anything, 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 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.

You can trade in your tags for platinum plates and silver hammers (the hammers stack up to 999 and sell for just as much!) in the gambling den and sell them at the nearby pawn shop. Make sure you're wearing the Virtuous Hood to get an extra virtue with every sale!

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

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 .exe instead of the .ahk or vice versa. As a last resort, the .ahk includes the source code from Pulover's Macro Creator[www.macrocreator.com] it was compiled from so you could try using that program to run the script instead.

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.
You can also try hitting all of the keys on your keyboard (namely q, w, e, a, s, d, and c) to make sure they're registered as being in the right state.

If you're still having problems, you might be experiencing a weird problem with your framerate. After every keypress, the script will wait a couple milliseconds before releasing it to make sure the game picks up that they key is pressed. If things align in just the wrong way, the script's timing and the game's timings might be missing each other. You can try fixing this by changing the times between all of the keypresses to something lower or higher. By default the time is 47ms so you can open the .ahk, replace every 47 with your new timing, and see if that fixes it.

In general, if something isn't working properly, you can probably fix it with a simple timing edit in the script!

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.

Huge thanks to devilleon7 for teaching us this fantastic trick, and if you're curious about the best way to grind other things like XP and materials, or need some starting cash to buy your first tags, they've got another great video about that!
https://youtu.be/56jlrexk3es
Also, big shoutout to the programmer that forgot to lock menu navigation after you click the exit button! Please never let RGG fix this, because it's making me very rich :)
(Edit: I should NOT have said that)












And praise be to Nugget, for once again being the world's greatest financial advisor.