You process and sell or quicksell generic non-scripted male slaves as much as you can. You can capture up to 5 per fight. Use the Whipping Cane bought from Abbot Roo or Devious Tools to deal the killing blow. It's 100% capture rate unless the enemy is scripted uncaptureable (example: the daily generic bounties first position). You fight bounties and bandits, you gain influence and money slowly. Your main goal is the Workshop.
You can also gather a few slaves with Workaholic trait. These will be your future workshop workers and the stat that matters is discipline. Do not go overboard with getting everyone you can get or your food cost and escape attempts will be overwhelming. Your other goal is to earn enough influence (1000) to enter Emerald City and Crystal Heights. When there's no bandits to capture, you hunt for food or craft in your house. Or do some prospecting in Cole's Canyon.
You must be registered to see the links
. Check the Prospecting Skills entry.
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), capped at Loving affection. 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, discipline, 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. You set it to Manufacturing. (Sweatshop is a bait for cheapskates who won't ever get rich from it.) 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 because the journey to Hamah Bay takes a lot of time and stamina you could be using for better things. Leave 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.
Make good use of passive methods of training. Examples are:
- Slavemistress -
You must be registered to see the links
- Academy -
You must be registered to see the links
- Guard assignment -
You must be registered to see the links
- The Household stats -
You must be registered to see the links
- Tuner Jackson's Manager trait -
You must be registered to see the links
- Assigning NPCs into rooms and putting bookshelves into these rooms to give them a very small but daily chance of gaining academic related stats
- Putting slave collars on them to have a small chance of lowering willpower.
Willpower
Willpower is reduced by Slavemistress, by asking her to Hold and then Swallow your cum after sex, and through the Shrine in your backyard, holding Anti Willpower lectures 3x per day. You can only do lectures sometime before midnight. Assign the ones you want to lower as Followers and lecture only to Followers if there are guys and girls you do not want to lower the willpower of. There are more ways in the wiki but these are the three main reliable ways.
Corruption
Corruption is raised via Slavemistress, via orgasms while having sex in the Dungeon, and via the Pro Decadence lecture in the Shrine. Better shrine upgrades, better success. Same as before, shrine lecture is 3x daily.
For the sex part, pick bondage, put the oral gag on her, try to get her arousal to 9 with stimulate --> caress pussy if you can. After that, pick "fuck girl" ---> oral ---> press deepthroat once. You should see Affection +1 Corruption +2. Pull out, stimulate back to 9, do it again. Once her corruption rises to 20 (and maybe your stats in bondage is very high), she should naturally gain arousal from you just randomly clicking stimulate and clicking cancel, not pressing any of the stimulate option until she is at 7 or 8 arousal in which case you stimulate her pussy to get her to 9.
Affection
Affection of the whole household can be raised unconditionally using the Pool in the backyard I mentioned before. You can do one pool party per day and it must be done preferably before 10pm. You cannot hold pool parties past a certain hour in the night. This is unconditional, as long as the NPCs are not in bondage they will gain affection, but it is also capped at Loving affection only as the highest affection it can get.
Another way of raising the affection of the whole household is through Arrange Events ---> Dinner ---> and then picking followers, or all guys, or all girls, with maids assigned. The maids do not gain affection. The more dinner guests you have, the worse your chances may get at affection gain. Initiating the dinner grants every guest +1 affection and +2 Happiness. A successful Tell Joke grants +1 Affection. A successful Socialize grants + 1 Affection.
The wiki entry for Affection:
You must be registered to see the links
Affection from normal sex is capped afaik. Affection gain from dungeon sex is not. At a very high Flagellation stat (I have 130+), every whipping action guarantees orgasm which means +1 Affection. Note that NPCs often cannot be unconscious from stamina depletion during normal sex because sex actions outside of the Seduction phase will always restore Stamina. But sex in the dungeon will drain that stamina so they can easily be exhausted and unconscious there if their stamina is low.
A new passive way of raising Affection is equipping them with expensive necklaces such as Diamond or Embryl via the Inventory menu.
Affection has a slow decay. This decay can be stopped at 116+ Affection. Undying Affection starts at 110 so you have to do guaranteed affection gains such as Compliment intelligence twice and Encourage to raise her Affection to potentially past 116. Affection can also decay through traits like Feminist (this one stops reducing at Loving+), Attention Whore (you can apply Neuraclean to Bud and Sofia if you do not want to deal with it but it will delete some of their other traits too - won't remove Bud's Ammo Pack or Warrior however), Emotionally Detached (you will only encounter it very late game), and Deadly Enemy (again, from scripted captives only in the very late game)
Buying auction slaves are potentially more expensive than re-selling that same slave again untrained.
The scrap pile has several items in it including the Red River Circlet that you can give to Kelly McTierney.