Some tips on how to survive.
Surviving Tips
All credit goes to hamsterHEARTSbeef!
Before You Start
This game is pure unadulterated RNG. But there are some things you can do to increase your chances of survival.
Tips
Don’t Sell That 1st Painting
Get creeping poverty before selling your first painting. Because creeping poverty doesn’t evolve back into cost of life on its own, takes 1 coin every 60 seconds and doesn’t give you any negative conditions on it’s own it is even better than getting the increased life cycle timer.
What You Need to Unlock as Soon as Possible
Unlock the Drugstore, liquor Store, Pawn Shop, Bar, the Park and the Ocean as well as getting any upgrades that increase timers and the good listener upgrade.
The Park and Ocean For Health, Sanity, Passion and Emotions
Try to mostly stick to the park and the ocean. Both can give you health, sanity and passion.
The park gives more health and mostly green emotions (including energized that decreases painting duration if painted with). It has a small chance to produce the red emotions attraction, lust and courage but sanity is hard to come by and the green emotions are usually weaker and some have very short life spams 30~40s.
The ocean gives more sanity and mostly blue emotions, the yellow emotion delight and some green emotions including the uncommon lvl3 admiration of nature. Blue emotions tend to be long lasting 40+s and several come out as lvl2 but the Ocean is much less likely to give health and will not produce any red emotions.
Protecting And Nurturing Emotions And Ideas
If you are painting with, thinking about or talking about an emotion(s) or idea(s) you will not get them from events but a new unwarted contrition can’t take them away either.
If you get an emotion you already have from an event that isn’t in use, the timer will reset and the emotions will increase by 1 lvl but if you have a lot of blue or green emotions in use, don’t visit the ocean (blue) or park (green) because you are only increasing your chances of an unwanted condition.
If you get an idea you already have (in use or not), you will get an unevolved version of the card.
Because unwanted conditions can happen and take your unused emotion(s) at any time it is better to keep and evolve 2~3 higher lvl emotions than to have many lvl1 and lvl2 emotions just sitting there. Same for idea(s) but ideas don’t have timers and are fairly easy to get by talking to someone with an idea.
Avoiding Unwatend Conditions And Habits
There is no fool proof way to avoid every unwanted condition and bad habit but you can minimize how many bad events you are likely to get while building up your health, sanity, passion, wealth and reputation.
- Avoiding reading.
- Getting and keeping the creeping poverty card.
- Having at least 2~4 friends.
- Not consuming alcohol.
- Not visiting the Plaza or Dark Alleyways.
- Not wasteing your time visiting the mountains.
- Taking care of unwanted conditions, illnesses and bad habits as soon as they happen.
- Only thinking about emotions, ideas, unwanted conditions, bad habits, cost of life cards and game progress cards.
- Regularly selling your art to the art gallery.
Job Opertunities
Ignore job opportunities unless you happen to have one already or you are very strapped for coin and have nothing to sell in the city or to the pawn shop as taking a job won’t guarantee income.
What You Don’t Need To Unlock (right away)
The Bookstore, Concert Hall, Corner Doctor, Dark Alleyways, Mountains, the Plaza and Reading are not needed early game.
While the Plaza has many red and yellow emotions as well as some green ones and invite letters it and The Dark Alleyways (many victory ideas) are far too risky in the early game so ignore it for now.
Reading should be avoided in the early game because it can create bad conditions you don’t have the resouces to deal with. The rest are only useful for evolving specific friendships.
Love
Every emotion in the game is easy to get with the exception of Love. It can be obtained from the Muse upgrade.
I must note/correct that Culture Plaza is one of the safest locations for visiting, so avoiding it might not work to the benefit of your artist. Visiting it while having a lot of wealth might occasionally subject you to various Temptations, of course, but you shouldn’t fear the Temptations x)