So basically this:
1. Every port you visit and get a port report from gives you Echoes and 1 Fuel. This is your primary income stream.
2. So doing well early one involves getting as many port reports as you can, safely.
3. In order to find ports, you need to explore which uses a lot of fuel. Using the Zee Bat helps a lot in locating new ports. Discovering anything is worth Fragments, which give you a Secret when you get enough together. But only the first time you find it, and if it's not a port, you're not getting paid for discovering it.
4. Storylets at ports aer supplemental to your basic income. Sometimes things will happen in storylets that can give you a nice cash boost, most of they'll yield a resource or trade item.
5. The Tramp Steamer with the basic engine is enough to a) outrun most things and b) see pretty much the edge of the map. It is by far the most efficient method of travel in the game in terms of fuel and food consumed vs. distance traveled. So don't be in a hurry to ditch it. Once you get a bigger ship with a bigger crew, supplies rather than fuel become your highest consumed resource.
6. Combat is generally not feasible against most things in the tramp steamer. It doesn't have the weapon mount points to have a chance against larger ships and monsters. So generally avoid combat while in the tramp steamer.
7. Turning your lamp on/off is pretty much the only way to escape combat or outrun things larger, faster and deadlier than you. With the right practice, you can also sneak up on things and launch surprise attacks that let you get in several "free" shots before the enemy locates you and retaliates. So always have your hand near the Lamp on/off hotkey.
8. Ultimately the game is about finding an efficient, profitable travel route that leaves you with more echoes than you started with when you left Fallen London. In the beginning when you don't have much of the map revealed, this don't seem feasible and it really isn't. Making money is about quantity, not quality, of exploration for the most part. So you need to explore and discover several places before you start doing a route. But once you've found enough ports, routes pretty much plot themselves and if you don't make money, you tend to at least break even (thanks to the Fuel reward from the Admirality.)
9. Some stuff is time sensitive in this game, including some storylets at ports and the stories of some officers you can hire. I wouldn't stress about it too much, but it can make one officer in particular a pain in the ass.
10. "Trading" isn't really worth it. You can always sell stuff you find or are rewarded for a profit in FL, but buying low somewhere and selling high somewhere else isn't really what the game is designed for. As tempting as it might be, there are almost no situations where it actually works out to a nice profit.
Author
Topic: Sunless Sea: a steampunk survival roguelike RPG in a Victorian Gothic underworld (Read 40928 times)