For stamina, you can train and increase it. Just go to Training -> Basic Training and train from there. You can also build a Dojo later on in your yard because the higher your max stamina is, the more likely it is to fail stamina training and the dojo helps with that by increasing your training rolls.
Ways to mitigate stamina loss is via converting to Christianity or Cult of the Elder. Christianity provides small stamina regen that increases a bit the higher your devotion point is. The catch is you have to pray in your shrine at home to increase devotion points or upgrade your shrine to level it slowly passively. Cult of the Elder prevents stamina drain from storms and heatwaves just by having that religion, even at very low devotion.
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. Both religions have a wife limit but you can just convert to another religion later. They do have charm/persuasion penalties against NPCs of a specific religion stated there in the wiki and in the tooltips in-game.
As for making money, the primary money making endeavor I find is the Workshop. You build into it. You fight bounties and bandits, earning influence and capturing slaves. Bring enough rope and use whipping canes (can be bought in the General Store near your house) to deal the final hit. The higher the number of your followers actively in combat with you, the more captives you can hold without processing them, up to 6 captives. I think in public you can carry your party size +1 number of captives. So if your party size is 4, you can carry a maximum of 5 captives. A party of 5 (you + 4 followers) = 6 captives. You can process them at the same time via the handcuff icon in the lower left. If you process all 6 without entering and exiting the handcuff icon repeatedly, time will not progress. You process them, you add them to your Household. You can sell any
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if they have Addiction trait or they have no Workaholic trait via the Actions tab in the NPC menu, sell to Watery Eyes (you had to have visited Watery Eyes' auction house first though). If you sell them one after the other, time will not progress. Workaholic is important because it passively raises their discipline up to 100. Also, a couple of unique males start with 100+ discipline even without workaholic. These will be your future workshop workers and the stat that matters is discipline. Your goal is to earn enough influence (1000) to enter Emerald City and Crystal Heights while grabbing future workers and money. When there's no bandits to capture, you
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or craft in your house.
You upgrade your bathroom a bit and your bedroom as well as the Dorms in the basement. The small cost upgrades. A dilapidated dorm reduces NPC happiness and increase Household Disrepair. You want it to be at least neutral (happiness +0 instead of happiness -1). A dilapidated bathroom and bedroom will lower your stamina instead of replenish it.
If you can, build a gazebo in your yard. There's a tiny stone tile in the right corner, below the scrap yard that you can build it on. Upgrade it once to build a pool. You can use it to hold pool parties. Everyone in your house will gain + Happiness and +1 Affection (+2 if you have the party animal trait). Further upgrades just increase happiness gain and contentment gain so you can leave it at just the basic upgrade for now. Your captives will start at despising affection. This helps combat it and their possible escape attempts. Assigning guards help here too. You can only assign guards that are not despising or lower affection. Other ways include clicking the gatehouse of your walls, in the left side. There's cheap upgrades to the wall to reduce escape chances.
Other cheap things you can build/upgrade are gardens to generate some rations to offset how much your household is eating.
Now if you can access Crystal Heights, you can enter the bank and hire Armand. He is the best accountant you can have access early on and he has a passive that increases your investment income even higher (he shares this with Adrienne Keller but her intelligence and administration stats starts much lower). You can also take out a loan of $25,000. This will jumpstart your workshop along with the funds from selling male captives.
You can build a Workshop in your backyard, you upgrade it, especially the upgrade on the top part. You assign your most disciplined slaves to it, you assign a foreman with good intelligence (Ansel works for now, there will be better foreman in the way but you have to capture/buy them). You set it to Manufacturing. You wait one day and the next day the Production Points would have been generated. You buy discounted steel, wood, fasteners, or durasteel from Aimee's Goods in Stokke Hills. You use the production points to produce the items on the first page. Knives. Rifles. You sell the knives in the market beside your house. You sell rifles and auto rifles every 7 days or when you stockpiled enough to Hamah Bay because it sells more there. Hamah Bay is accessed via the port in Darkmere, past Imogen's Barrow. You spend money to earn more money. It's best to produce knives early game and leave auto rifles for later, especially once you can kill the two charucks in the place above Hamah Bay for RNG stat gains (capped at around 120 for each stat iirc) and 60 meat each. They respawn every 5-7 days.
Assigning NPCs to Workshop involves going to the Jobs and Titles part of NPC Menu and going to page 3 or 4 of the Jobs part, clicking the <- -> options.
You can also use the workshop to generate money to grab investments or donate weapons to a couple of factions to have passive daily income.
Important note: the workshop is not necessary. If you have a specific playstyle you want to go for, go for it. This is just the quickest way to get to be stable. It's not the only way. Just like real life. You can have a stable job as a master carpenter or a tenured professor but the real big bucks lie with the businessmen.
