A House of Many Doors – Tips and Tricks for Getting Started

Before you play the A House of Many Doors game, you will definitely want to know these simple but useful tips and tricks. If you have any tips feel free to share with us!

Things to Know Before Playing

• Insanity is way less of an issue than in Sunless Sea; there are some negative events, but for the most part you can travel around at low/no sanity with no real downside except being unable to talk to your crew. There are even a few benefits to discover!
• Getting blown up in combat is generally speaking the only way to actually game over. Getting a second cannon as soon as possible is a good idea.
• Your starting crew is intentionally awful, and their only real benefit is the rewards from their personal quests (and that some are so drunk/apathetic that they’ll keep functioning at lower sanity than more “normal” crew). Replace them with literally anyone else when you can, you can always get them back when you want to do their quest.
• Exception to the above: your starting seer lady will fall into a coma when you start her quest, and will die if you kick her off the ship before she wakes up. So, uh, probably don’t do that.
• Experience is gained by spending time at your house in the capital turning memory items into poems; AFAIK there’s no real effect to time advancing, so just spend them all.
• Money is generally gained either from doing newspaper articles, selling found items, or doing the few profitable trade routes that are available. Note that again unlike Sunless Sea none of the trade routes have intentional/hidden downsides or will go away; if you want to run a trade caravan, the develop has no qualms about letting you do so, so buy cheap/sell high to your heart’s content.
• Specific trading tip: from what I recall trading Laudanum between the Poet Knights and their adjacent City was a very quick way to rack up more money than I really knew what to do with.
• You will quickly unlock a side-quest to open a museum of your findings. You may be tempted to ignore the warnings and fill it with all the cursed occult junk you collect. This is a Bad Idea.
• Save any capital-K Keys you find. You will need more than one.
• Available romance options include an oil derrick, the last of the great clown detectives, and ten thousand crows. Basically just go with the flow and don’t worry about it too much.