A couple weeks ago I decided to fire up GTAO again after not playing for about a year. One of the things I was interested in trying was the Cayo Perico heist. Did you ever give this content a go Neal?
If you can believe it, I'm a legit GTAO player. Never glitched or duped, no shark cards, every dime earned legit. So I need to be careful how I spend it. I also spend 3/4 of my time in Invite, either solo or with a couple friends. Serious money making opportunities are hard to come by when you play this way. And that was OK with me. I also play full time first-person, for what it might be worth.
So I looked in to the Cayo heist, which I had heard was possible to do solo. No other heist in GTAO can be solo'd. So this was great news. But how difficult or frustrating would it prove to be? Only one way to find out! So I bought the sub that Neal talks about in the OP, plus the Sparrow helicopter, the Avisa submersible and the weapons workshop. It was all on sale at the time (since ended) and total layout was 3.8m. Of these only the sub is required to do the heist, but I highly recommend the helo too. There is a lot of back and forth to and from the sub during the preps and the Sparrow makes it so much easier and faster. I like the workshop too, but sort of regret buying the submersible, even though it looks really cool in the moonpool. But yeah, can skip that if you want.
The first go at the heist was not great. I died or got detected a lot, at least a dozen times. But each attempt was sharpening it up, and I forged a solid plan to ghost it. In, out, undetected, gettin' paid fool!
Last night I did my 13th run of this heist. Once you've got it down, everything -- intel phase, preps and finale -- can be done in about an hour and a half. The loot changes each time you play it, and the ideal setup from a time perspective is to spawn two paintings in the vault office. This way you can fill your loot bag in the shortest possible time and get off the island. There is an Elite Challenge, full bag, no restarts and under 15 minutes. I had practiced and perfected my plan enough that when I finally spawned two paintings I thought I'd have a good shot at the challenge if I could just nail my plan
I did a sub and scuba infil, came up the stairs and methodically went through the steps, and boom! Out in 10:44. Nailed it. Felt good, as you only get one shot at it and it has to come off. In all I cleared 1.5m for this run, some of it in bonuses. The take is dependent on several factors, but 1.5m is a good haul. There's no other way to make this sort of money this fast in GTAO, especially solo.
In all I've cleared about 18m from this heist. Things like properties, businesses, supercars and aircraft that would have been out of reach or poor decisions before are now quite affordable, all because of this Cayo heist. I'm still careful how it's spent, but I don't need to be!
So yeah, if you play this game and want to make mad stacks, give the Cayo heist a go. Best thing that ever happened to solo players in GTAO since they decided to make Invite a mode.