Starting out in SS can be really difficult due to a lack of money.
And the only way to really get money is to explore, which requires money.
It's a little bit of a catch-22 but it's not insurmountable.
So first thing you want to do is get provisions. This is where the cost part of every trip begins.
Here's the order of importance for supplies, at least in the early game: fuel is god, supplies are jesus and crew is everything else. Pay very close attention to fuel consumption rates as you play to get a sense of how much doing what or going where will cost you. This math is incredibly important to getting ahead in Sunless Sea. If you're not paying attention to fuel and estimating how much you need to go where, you're either going to end up stranded or be perpetually broke until you get lucky. I always try to make it back to Fallen London with a barrel or two to spare. And remember, calculate everything needed as a round trip. Every trip begins and ends in Fallen London because it's where provisioning costs you the least on average, among all the other things you can do there.
Supplies will diminish appreciably slower than Fuel until you buy a bigger ship and have more than 10 crew. So you can go easier on supplies but don't forget them because events can still change how many you're carrying. Supplies are also generally easier to get/a more common reward. Hunting is a good way to supplement your supplies if you feel comfortable with combat. Most beasts yield supplies as loot. (Teehee.) Starting out Zee Bats are plentiful and easy to kill, so they're a nice way to save on Supply costs. Do note though, as long as the game is unpaused, you're consuming Supplies. So if you're going to sit there at port zoning out with the Gazetteer closed, pause the game. You don't consume fuel while at port and your ship is stopped. You also don't consume Fuel while you've got the throttle set to 0. But Supplies are always ticking down.
Crew by and large is the thing you need to worry the least about, until you're running at 50% of your crew or less. They can die in combat, but only if things are going really far south. Events will either take them from you or offer them to you, so their numbers move a little bit back and forth constantly. And they're easy to replace in FL for a pretty reasonable cost.
Once I'm provisioned (10 to 12 Fuel, 8 to 10 Supplies is a good starting amount for any short trip) I usually start by hugging the coast North and South of Fallen London. There are a few ports to the North that are always there. Ports to the South are fewer and far between.
From there you zail to the East between islands and visible light buoys. When you find a new island with a port, stop and see if it has a port report. Starting out those are going to be your most reliable, predictable and repeatable source of income. Always remember to visit the Admirality and turn in your port reports after every trip, because you can only have one of each at time. (Delivering a new port report for the first time also earns you the Admirality's Favor, which can be used to get high quality repairs done on your ship in FL for really cheap. A very nice way to cut back on costs and make some money.)
Ask the Admirality if there's anything special they need. These are fairly high paying Strategic Information requests. The first one is always to the same place, but after that there's an assortment of places they can ask you to go. Generally, at least before release, the Admirality only really asks you to go places that fall in the middle/upper north of the map. Starting out these are basically just requests for additional port reports from specific places, and they should serve as your starting point for planning trips because doing these will make you the most money, usually. You always get Admirality's favor for turning these in too.
So once you've done some exploring and revealed some ports, you start looking at how to do "profit runs." This is basically plotting a course to visit as many ports as your fuel will allow. Between the port reports, strategic information requests, storylets with rewards and just random luck, you can start making a profit. It takes time though and if you're playing hardcore, exploration can very well cost you your life.
When it comes to profit, it's about quantity, not quality. Big pay offs start happening around the middle of your zailing career. So starting out, it's about finding as many sources of profit to offset your costs, like I said above. Eventually you'll stumble on some big paydays that will put you comfortably in the green. Until then though, you have to make lots of little trips within the range your fuel allows, and sometimes those won't turn a profit. Exploration costs money, it's as simple as that. So don't leave yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place by just zailing out into the great unknown. There's a good chance it will cost you far more than it will make you.
Once you've explored enough to start doing routes, the process goes a little like this: a profit route is a route between areas of safety and ports that forms a full circuit taking you back to FL. You maximize your potential profit by ONLY hitting ports that a) offer a port report b) have a strategic information request and/or c) have storylets that can be profitable. You minimize your terror gain by zailing a smart course between landmarks, you minimize your fuel loss by not doubling back or taking inefficient, long routes around islands. You allot for buying fuel somewhere on the trip if you need it (Mount Palmerston is usually where I would do this, depending on where it shows up.)
You will tempted to buy trade objects really cheap and try to sell them somewhere else for a profit. Don't do it. The amounts you need to carry of pretty much anything to turn on a profit on them are ludicrously high, and beyond the capacity of the starting ship. There are specific storylets that propose trade ventures, those can make money. But the game is pretty much designed to not reward buying a bunch of one thing somewhere and selling it somewhere else. The profit margins are so thin it makes it not worth the effort or tying up your money.
Short trips rarely make money in SS. It's designed that way. Long trips and as many income sources as possible, over repeated trips, is where money gets made. (Until you find the high paying storylets.) For new players, this has always been sort of a catch-22, and you just have to get lucky/savescum sometimes to break out of the newbie game. There was a time a trip to Mutton Island (an island really close to Fallen London) could yield a reasonably big profit for the effort because of a certain storylet showing up often, but now it's very, very rare. So best money is usually made by doing as much stuff as intelligently as you can with the information you have available. (Sounds pretty straightforward when you say it like that
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I'd avoid combat with anything but the pirate steamers outside of London, until you are comfortable with combat. Killing beasts will usually give you food. Something worth money coming from them is much rarer until you're fighting much harder monsters. Actual ships usually yield a trade item or something that you can sell for a small profit, or fuel and supplies. Sometimes both. If guys are chasing you and you really don't want to fight, turn off your lights and stay out of their frontal vision arc. It will cost you some terror points but it beats getting sunk.
Oh, FAIR WARNING on the Blind Bruiser. Do NOT take their help until you feel confident about zailing to and surviving in the middle of the map. Blind Bruiser requests will always, always take you at least half way across the map, and for starting players that can seriously screw you over. It also signs you up for a life of crime, so, consider if you want to deal with that or not.
Only other thing I'll give advice on is terror management. As long as you're within the light of a buoy, or near the edge of a landmass or island, you won't gain terror. The minute you leave either of those two things, it starts going up. So avoid zailing over open waters when it can be helped. Less terror = more money for you. After a certain point island hopping will only get you so far and you'll have to take a gamble on the open waters. In that situation, always try to zail between light buoys (which are pretty liberally scattered over the zee.) If you go light buoy to light buoy, you are almost guaranteed to find an island or port at some point. If you have found your last light buoy and now you're just zailing in the dark, chances are you should probably turn around. An entire screen filled with nothingness in SS is not something you really want to see. This ultimately is about how you plot your course, which is the basis of creating a profit run based on how your map comes together.
Lastly, if you do lose your captain, you can always pass something on to your next character. Some players get a little cheesy with it and make a captain or two to die so they can buff their real captain's stats a little. So sometimes failing at the start can actually give you a little boost. The stuff you can pass on to your next character only gets better as your current character gets more successful and sees and does more storylets. And, of course, you can always get a few more helpful perks by making a Fallen London character and tying your game to that. That'd be a full time job though, playing Fallen London and Sunless Sea at the same time.
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Topic: Sunless Sea: a steampunk survival roguelike RPG in a Victorian Gothic underworld (Read 40954 times)