Here are some basics for beginners. this guide was created in Aug 2021. enjoy it.
There is NO auto-save. You can easily lose hours of progress in this bug infested, unfinished game. So manually SAVE every time before you step through a portal to battle, or whenever you return home carrying lots of loot. If the game asks if you should use local save files or Steam save files, use the LOCAL files or again, you can lose hours of progress.
The default name of your character is Succubus. You must change the name later in Customization (body appearance) to change the name of your saved game.
SKIP START-UP APPEARANCE
You can completely change the appearance of your main character ANY TIME at base/home. The game suggests you start out with careful customization of appearance, but it’s unnecessary. See if you like the gameplay before you spend extended time tweaking your main character’s smile.
STORAGE RELOCATION
Find your storage box and move/relocate it into the vendor’s room.
BEWARE THE Y KEY
Y turns off the overlay. For screenshots. But if you enter a name like Sally for your succubus, you’ll be wondering what is going on, until you toggle on the overlay again by hitting Y again.
Access appearance for any companion (or main character) through Customization and Makeup buttons on Inventory Screen.
There are two main categories of appearance change: CUSTOMIZATION screen for eyes, body and skin, and MAKEUP for hair, face, toenail polish, etc.
THERE IS NO UNDO BUTTON.
So if you’ve picked something you like, SAVE IT AS A PRESET before doing more customization.
Each customization has a suggested view, but you can change the view easily and keep customizing. This mostly works, except for hairstyle – you should switch quickly out of makeup and into body customization – torso view, and spin your model, to see what any particular hairstyle looks like. This is annoyingly difficult.
Fine-tuning skin color with the color-picker for is bugged. Sometimes it fixes itself when you restart the game. It’s neat when it works as intended.
Basically, pickup loot. Sell it. Use it to buy the best armor you can.
At a certain point your armor will make you almost invulnerable, so your exact route to victory is like trying on clothes – they all work, but you’ll probably enjoy some routes more than others. If you want to see lingerie models swinging axes rather than leaping about while swinging a dagger, it’s your choice.
GET 3 COMPANIONS
You start with one companion. You max-out your party size with 3 companion succubi. Mostly, this lets you carry more loot (which leads to gold and then to better armor and weapons) but they also help with fighting. If one dies, she automatically revives for the next battle. You get new companions by rescuing them in a mission which is periodically available on the main campaign map. To look for it, drag your mouse around a bit above the place marked Undead Valley. It’s always in the same place when available, and there’s no time limit on how soon you must attempt the rescue. (Note that the rescue missions are higher level than the other missions, so gear dropped can be very impressive, especially if you’ve maxxed out the Scavenger skill.)
The extra companions beyond your first 3 are just there for variety. There are 7 companions so far, and they don’t become available in the same order. When rescued, they start between 2nd and 7th level.
SAVE YOUR BEST ITEMS FOR FUTURE COMPANIONS
When you rescue a companion, she has no useful equipment. So, until you’ve got three companions, you should try to keep your best 4 items of each type of armor and also save any weapons you might want your future companions to use. Use your storage box.
INCREASE THE DIFFICULTY
You can increase the difficulty at any time. However, the archers eventually become too difficult to deal with. If you find a map where everything is encountered at close range, you can survive on INSANE difficulty with dodges and kiting, as shown in a YouTube video on a map I didn’t recognize – see the link in Eden’s guide.
Some skills are not implemented at all yet. Some will change. On easy and normal, it’s not too important what you choose, as long as you get good armor.
What I do:
Attributes, all characters: One point to strength, then Dexterity and Strength only, keep dexterity 2 points ahead of strength.
Main character: Regeneration 1/5 – Frostbite 1/5 – Scavenger 5/5 – Trader 5/5 – Fast Learner 5/5 – Athletic 5/5 – Daggers 5/5 – Phantom Slashes 5/5 – Hardened Skin 5/5
Companions: Regeneration 1/5 – Frostbite 1/5 – Fast Learning 5/5 – Hardened Skin 5/5 – Daggers (vary weapon by taste) 5/5 – Phantom Slashes 5/5 – Athletic 5/5
(Scavenging gets more and better loot dropped – your main source of gold. Trading lets you buy cheaper and sell for more. Dexterity and athleticism lets you keep swinging and sprinting more without resting. Also note that Hardened Skin pairs with dexterity to increase armor.)
Check other guides, like Eden’s “Overall game guide” for builds for harder difficulties earlier in the game.
There are guides specifically about skills and guides specifically about attributes. Check the most recent available.
Go to the teleport portal. Teleport to your current destination (home). The vendors will be reloaded. This is handy if you want to repeatably buy experience scrolls to level up some of your companions. (Leveling up your companions makes inventory control much easier – when various armor can only be used by characters of a minimum level, it’s easier if everyone is the same level.)
Reloading the vendors is also useful if you’re searching for really good gear. Really good gear is not necessary to progress, and repeatedly reloading the vendors is very tedious, but you’ll probably do this at least a few times.
In order of DPS, choose:
Daggers, Swords, 2H Swords, Maces, Axes, Bows. Bows are terrible.
Daggers. Cheapest in the shops – important because you’re constantly buying better weapons. Conveniently, also gives the highest dps, fast gameplay (but you jump around a LOT and may land somewhere impossible to leave – you get may land STUCK every 5-10 hours of playing)
1h swords. Easy. Fast. More expensive in the shops. Satisfying to watch.
2h sword. Very slow – Apparently the safest to use? I’ve never tried ’em. They sell at the vendor for a LOT of gold.
Maces. (Used to be best) Slow but sure. Full damage against armor.
Axes. Similar to mace but with less damage against armor. Includes scythes, and other misc. wpns.
Bows. Currently awful. Will keep weakly armored companions at maximum range from enemies, but as archers, companions will have trouble finishing off one enemy (there’s no experience for damage, only for kills), and companions will not automatically switch to melee if they run out of arrows. About the only use of bows is to let companions kill enemies in towers and on cliffs when they cannot figure out a path to get to them.
They are EXTRA fighters beyond your three companions.
Bleah. I like lingerie models fighting bad guys, but dumb, ugly, vulnerable minions that are always set to CHARGE! don’t enhance the game. You can heal them at base for free, but if they die you have to pay a fee to revive them.
Find a YouTube video to watch how people dodge and kite on the hardest difficulties. On easier difficulties, it’s just a click-fest that’s fun to watch.
If possible, save the game before starting free-pose mode. If you are not at home and cannot save, be VERY wary of using the horizontal drag button, as you may drag yourself outside the playable area so far that it becomes very difficult to relocate yourself back onto the playable area of the map.
The pose buttons are intuitive to use and they work fine. The tricky bit is moving your character in the horizontal plane and the vertical plane. I tuned my mouse to switch between 3600 dpi and 100 dpi but this only helps a little.
Up and down: With mouse set to minimum sensitivity, I can click on the vertical arrow and drag up or down to and raise or lower a character by a quarter of an inch.
Close and far, left and right: Movement in the horizontal plane, even at fine sensitivity jumps a minimum of about 3 or 4 feet. If you want to move your main subject very finely, the most precise way is to walk there before you start free pose. If you want to move an additional model finely in the horizontal plane, you cannot.
Spinning: click and drag on the spinning icon to spin your selected character.
Lighting: Click and drag on the light button to change the change the direction of some of the lighting – works best in dark rooms. Note that many helmets and many magic weapons also give off light. You might want to pack them away before starting. (This may also apply to shields and weapons.)
After horizontal subject placement, the second most annoying thing about free pose mode, is that you cannot zoom very far back from your main character – about 8 feet back is the limit.
The third most annoying thing about free pose – you cannot save a pose and if you hit ESC by mistake, you lose all the careful positioning and lighting.
If you GET STUCK and cannot progress on the map, try this:
Esc, then click into free-pose mode (for screen shots); find the up/down arrow; click and drag that up a tiny bit to rise in the air; exit free-pose mode and you should drop to the ground’s surface, and now be UNSTUCK. (Practice while your game is recently saved.)
If that doesn’t work, you might have to move yourself in the horizontal plane. This is very dangerous (see Free Pose section).
Sometimes, after exiting free pose in a battle, you cannot swing your weapon any more. You can still pick up loot and open crates, and when the battle is finished, you can exit the map. Save your game then, exit, and restart the game.
Avoid Hell rider gloves.
This corrupted one of my save game files:
I got some Hell rider gloves. They didn’t seem to transfer onto my character’s appropriate equipment slot when I tried to equip them, but the character’s armor class rose. So I took the gloves and did the same thing to several companions – I had the item, but it was effectively equipped on several characters.
Nope. The saved game didn’t load properly ever after – I lost my companions, inventory and an alternate view of the campaign map was displayed. Happily, I was only at 7th level.
Generally, if an item doesn’t seem to be working properly, don’t risk using it. Don’t try to take advantage of possible exploits, unless you know how to reload saved games that you’ve copied manually from the Windows folders.
Save the game before trying a new piece of furniture. Some items, like the bloody stone table, can’t be relocated. Many workshop items fall into this class. Some items block other items from being targeted for adjustment. For example, a statue above a bed could not be targeted until I moved the bed away.
Your character’s head often blocks you from precisely locating furniture. First-person view while placing furniture is said to be in the works.
Furniture can currently only face in one of 8 directions.
