MachiaVillain – Beginner’s Guide

My goal is to provide an explantion of game mechanics that might not be obvious or intuitive to players and set them up to succeed in the later game.

Starter Minions

All credit goes to Promethian!

The first thing you do is select your starting minions. The screen should look like this:

So what are you looking for here?

The first thing you should know is you can reroll the picks as many times as you like and you can select and lock in a minion and keep re rolling. So unless you are trying to challenge yourself you can select minions with the best possible traits no problem. The pool isn’t excessively large so it doesn’t take long rerolling to get 3 minions with good traits.

What are the most desirable traits?

• Quick Feet: Faster movement makes almost everything better. Your minions do a lot of fetching materials
• Coffee Maniac: Less time sleeping is huge. You’ll notice a big difference when you have this trait.
• Brain Excrescence: +2 jobs workable is a major QoL. You can set up a minion to do a lot of different regular jobs including the various types of maintenance and harvesting.

I personally favor Coffee Maniac but any of these 3 are great picks.

What monsters should I go for?

There are 4 starting monsters with their own ups and downs. Heres a quick breakdown.

• Skeleton: Eats bones. Special ability is a projectile that does good damage. +2 to store resources skill. 4 max jobs. Low health
• Zombie: Eats brains. Special abilities are Grab (long stun), Convert to zombie and Stealth while standing still. +1 to store resources skill. 3 max jobs. Very low health.
• Psychopath: Eats brains. Special abilities are Ear bite (damage and bleed) and Steal weapon. +2 cooking skill. 4 max jobs. Medium health.
• Mummy: Eats meat. Special abilities are Bandage (short stun) and Curse (increase damage taken). +1 to cleanup skill. 4 max jobs. Medium health.

The first consideration is feeding your monsters. You tend to get a lot of bones and about equal amounts of brains and meat. So it is very much worth your while to make sure you have a variety of food types eaten by monsters.

Second is bones are going to be plentiful (you’ll be swimming in bones), don’t rot and skeletons are the only monster that eats them. It is for this reason I have come to think of Skeletons as your basic worker. Not great fighters but they can do lots of work for cheap maintenance.

My recommendation is 2 Skeletons and one other. Any of the 3 are good. However I’d suggest a Psycho. The reason is Psycho is a very useful fighter, isn’t squishy and eats brains. Currently brain eaters are relatively uncommon. So you set yourself up to get a good mix of food types consumed when you start to unlock more monsters.

Basic Tips on Building

Here is where I skip some steps. The simple fact is some tutorials pop up that show you how to set jobs for your minions and how to place walls and floor and doors and the like. I am not going to give a step by step tutorial like you don’t know how to click a mouse. I’ll jump to tips assuming you can do the basics without a hand holding.

• Things are built in the order you give the command. If you need a specific item built ahead of the queue you don’t have to undo all the commands. Select a minion and right click the specific items. You can tell them to “build this first.”
• Set floors first. Minions move dramatically faster over floor than on dirt. There is a movement penalty for dirt and for carrying materials as well. On top of that flooring seems to negate the carrying penalty. Overall you will save huge amounts of building time if you set the floors first.
• Minions will wall themselves in. Best to just plan for door positions ahead of time.
• You can place a door on top of a built wall and it’ll replace. What it doesn’t do is place a floor under the door. You’ll have to do so manually.
• Light everything. Minions work faster in light and victims get scared in the dark. 
• Light can be blocked by objects thus negating its benefits. A good example of this is the table and chairs for kitchens.
• Tearing things down gives a full refund of all materials. So feel free to rebuild and experiment.
• Click on storages and set their filters. You generally want at most 4 different items per storage. I often just set 1 type. You are sometimes going to want to click on a single item type and when they end up stacked with multiple items in a single place it becomes impossible to get some items. 

Here is a picture of a very basic house. You can do all the things needed to survive with this and it effectively can do the 3 victim group getting them all alone. I should note this house is not ideal and was thrown together to just get the pieces in place. However it does demonstrate some good practices.

The rooms that are absolutely necessary are Home Office, Kitchen, Victim Rooms and Bedrooms. A quick note. You can start calling in victims as soon as you have the Home Office and Kitchen in place. This is recommended as you must get the food rolling in for your minions and start building up Evillium.

Home Office

The absolute first consideration is where to build. Notice in my picture the little red mailbox right outside my Home Office. Every time you summon a group of victims you have to deliver the Home Office’s product to that mailbox. Its unwise for it to be far away.

Space for a desk is the bare minimum and you can do that if you please. A candle isn’t necessary but minions work faster when they have light. Also it is highly recommended you place wood storage and gold storage, if not directly in the room then very nearby. Every letter crafted in the office requires a bit of each so the less distance your minion needs to go to accomplish this the better.

Once the desk is in click it and select “maintain this quantity in stockpile.” The highest victim ad takes 50 letters. I recommend 10 or 20 starting out so your writing minion doesn’t spend a long time writing only letters early on. I don’t recommend setting produce indefinitely.

Plan for expansion. Eventually you’ll need more desks as it’ll take multiple minions working to produce enough letters for the bigger victim groups. Also for the really big victim groups you’ll need a printing press and even computers but the basic desk is never completely obsoleted. You’ll still need the letters from it in addition to crafts on the new equipment. So eventually you will want a very large home office.

Kitchen

Go big early for your kitchen. Set yourself up with two butcher’s tables and some tables with chairs. Make sure to provide light.

Two butcher’s tables is imporant because body parts decay fast. You will quickly want to have two chefs working to chop things quickly. Especially if you take an order from the undertaker merchant. You will lose some of even his smallest order if you only have one chef.

The tables with chairs are important. Minions prefer to eat at a table so its an easy morale penalty avoided. The starter tables can only serve one minion at a time. Thankfully they rarely all eat at the same time so you don’t need one for every minion.

Make sure you have a place for a smoker. The smoker works with the same UI as the writing desk. However every 1 craft you tell it to do makes 8 food. Smoked food does not decay but minions prioritize it last in favor of perishable food. So again, do not set indefinite craft. You’ll waste time and materials smoking food that will get eaten well before it expires. I recommend setting it to smoke 5 to 7 days worth of food in the “maintain stockpile” mode. Its easy enough to calculate. You can just set one craft per day of stockpile per monster for most monsters to make it easy. Werewolves and Frankenstein’s Monsters eat more so set two crafts per day of stockpile for them.

Victim Rooms

I’ll start with the list of tips in my other guide. They are a good starting point when considering the design of victim rooms.

• The victim’s default behavior is to stick together and occasionally explore a new room. The delay between going to a new room is very long.
• When encountering a distraction (TV, Bookcase, etc) A single victim will move to and sit at the distraction.
• This victim is completely oblivious. They won’t notice traps snagging people. You can even move your monsters into the room and murder someone else without them noticing. They do become aware if attacked.
• The rest of the victims immediately move on to explore another room if a person gets distracted. This simulates a horror movie trope.
• Every distraction increases a victim’s happiness. Let them live and encounter distractions until they reach 20 happiness and they will call out and reduce your suspicion level. 

Now to explain using the above knowledge what typically happens with the victims in my example house.

1. All 3 enter the red door. One victim rushes over to the TV and becomes distracted. 
2. Seeing this the other 2 victims move into the room on the left. 
3. There one of the victims becomes distracted by the bookcase. 
4. The last victim gets caught by the Rotating Wall Trap. Unnoticed by the victim at the bookcase.
5. My minions move room to room killing the victims. All of them alone for maximum Evillium and no chance for any individual to get a call out to raise suspicion.

Bedrooms

Bedrooms are blessedly easy. Initially you make them as a means of removing loyalty penalties. You give each minion their own room because there is a penalty if another minion enters the room while they are sleeping.

When you unlock the evil decorations you’ll be decorating the bedrooms. Minions spend a lot of time in the bedroom and you are going to want that loyalty from high evilness and prestige. The 3×3 floorspace in my example is enough room to do this though it probably won’t always be pretty or symmetrical. Feel free to make larger bedrooms to appease your sense of aesthetics.