Getting started

From Andrealphus Games
Jump to navigation Jump to search

After you have played through the Tutorial and the Introduction, you are free to roam around the city. Your story starts on the day you selected at the beginning, which always falls on a Monday (see Calendar for more information about the in-game seasons). At the beginning, you have access to locations like the cinema, the office and the mall. As your game progresses, more locations will become available (see Locations for more information).

This page serves as a little guide to give you a better start. You should also familiarise yourself with the basic game mechanics, especially your needs and attributes, as well as the handling of the romance stats.

Daily routine

Advancing quickly in the game requires getting your attributes up and having a lot of money. As a result, a good early schedule includes working a lot and spending time practicing your skills, while at the same time increasing with the girls that are available. Here are some recommendations for your daily routine:

Morning

In the morning you will need to refill your and stat. Since the bathroom will be occupied by your roommates on most days from 07:00 on, it is advisable to set the alarm to 06:00 and have a shower directly after waking up. If you have breakfast directly afterwards, you can be at work at 08:00. Alternatively, you can eat with one of your roommates later for extra . Bree will be in the kitchen at 08:00, Sasha at 09:00. This is also an opportunity to talk or flirt with them. Drinking coffee in the kitchen gives you +2 , but if you woke up fully rested, it may be better to come back during the day when your has depleted.

Day

In the beginning, most of your day will be filled with working at the office to gain . If you start working at 08:00 when the office opens, you are able to squeeze 3 working sessions into a day. You can replenish your in between by having snacks in the break room and at the mall. Having a coffee break at work yields +1 and +1 . To increase when it is low you can pay compliments to the girls or text them if you have their number. Of course, you can also use some hours of the day to improve your stats and skills, e.g. by attending a class at the university or reading a skill book from the the book store. The mall is open for shopping and meeting people until 18:00.

Evening

There is a good chance that your roommates are home in the evening. You can usually have dinner together at 20:00, or watch TV in the living-room with them. Alternatively, you can go out to have some fun, e.g. at the cinema or in the local pub. You may also meet new people there. When you have progressed a girl's story to the point where you can ask her out, the date will be at 20:00. Don't be late, or you will annoy the girl!

Try to sleep enough hours to be well-rested in the morning, and don't forget to set the alarm! If you want to reduce your rest time, you can purchase the luxury bed at the mall for 200 .

Weekends

In the beginning there will be little to do on the weekends. It is therefore advisable to use them to improve skills and do the weekly chores. It is possible to work on Saturdays but not on Sundays. Keep this in mind when you spend because the rent is due on Monday morning! Sunday is also the only day you can go to church (if you want to meet Harmony).

Later in the game, the weekend will be important for dating since some dates are only possible on Saturday and Sunday. This will be relevant for events that require a specific date location, like the mall, the park or the beach.

Building your stats

It is difficult to give a general recommendation on which stats to prioritise since it differs somewhat depending on the choices during the introductory questionnaire and the girls you want to pursue.

At the beginning, you can earn attribute points for free with the following actions (50% chance each):

  • thinking in the park (+1 )
  • practicing speech in the bathroom (+1 )
  • doing push-ups in your bedroom (+1 )

In general, building up is valuable early on since it allows you to learn more talk topics, factors into your salary and increases the chances of successfully "working fast" for faster promotion, but you should also not neglect the other two attributes. You will need to build up in order to meet Aletta (and be invited to the office party), and also some to defend Audrey. Both are also necessary if you want to avoid Alexis' NTR content.

Be warned that starting on the second week, if you go to the Dark Alley after 22:00 you will encounter Danny. If you have less than 50 , (or less than 25 with martial arts skill) you will lose 500 , so do not do this encounter on a Sunday night!

It is advisable to not max your right away since you can use that stat to keep Kylie in check and control (through Aletta's progress) when Cassidy's investigation event-chain triggers.

Note that outfits and accessories allow you to gain/lose attribute points on the spot (you can change them in your bedroom). This is helpful if you just want to trigger one specific event, but otherwise avoid a certain threshold.

You also need some outfits to unlock certain locations:

  • gym clothes are necessary for going to the gym (+10 )
  • fancy clothes are necessary to go to the club (+10 )
  • the swimsuit is necessary for swimming in the pool and going to the waterpark

Once you have saved enough , you can buy a bike or even a car which gives you access to the beach (to take a girl on a beach date, you will always need a car).

Knowing the characters

There are more than many romance options in the game (21 girls in total plus some teaser/side characters). In order to progress with their stories, you need to comply with the requirements for the next event (see the girls' pages for the prerequisites that you need to meet). The storylines of some girls are interconnected, so that you can only continue with one girl once you have progressed the other to a certain point.

If you want to "pause" a storyline, just ignore the fact that you met the character. Avoidance is normally the easiest way to not proceed a character story.

Three girls are available right from the start of the game: The roommates, Bree and Sasha, and Morgan. Starting from the beginning of the second week, more girls are gradually introduced into the game, but it is rather challenging to try to handle them all at the same time. Instead, it may be easier to go step by step and concentrate on these three at first. If you read up a bit on their stories they will be fairly easy to proceed, and under normal circumstances you should soon be able to have your first dates with them. Just be careful to not accidentally trigger the Home Harem by having sex with Bree and Sasha within 7 days!

Sasha

If everything runs smoothly, you will trigger Sasha's events soon enough to proceed her story. If you want to avoid Sasha's NTR events with Scottie, it is best to get her over 50 fast. Be aware that you need the guitar skill early if you want to join the band. If you did not pick it in the Introduction, the book can be bought in the bookstore on Tuesdays.

If you are interested in playing Sasha's femdom/foot fetish events, you will need to encourage her dominant side by raising her and learn the massage skill (the book is available on Mondays).

Bree

The biggest effect with regard to Bree's storyline is whether you picked "video games" as a hobby in the introductory questions. If you did, you can play her gamer path, otherwise only her maid path is available. Only the maid path will allow you to make Bree into a subservient sex slave though.

Morgan

Morgan needs to be met before Kleio calls you to go to the mall. If not, Morgan will not be available and you will miss all her content. This is pretty relevant as both are events that can happen pretty early in the gameplay. It is advisable to start with Morgan's story right away and proceed to the waterpark/mall date. Once you reach this point you can leave her storyline until Kleio pops in. At this point you will have to carefully proceed both stories.

Meeting more girls

As your game progresses, more girls are introduced. Some, like Samantha or Kylie, simply appear after a certain number of days have been played through. Others make their appearance once you have made progress in some way. For example, Shiori has her interview after you have been promoted at work for the first time, and Alexis will call you after the third promotion. Aletta takes notice of you once >= 30, and she will then invite you to the office party which in turn introduces Lavish and Cassidy.

Alexis

If you start the game in spring or summer you will have to focus on working and playing through Alexis' story to trigger her summer event at the beginning of your play-through. Otherwise you will have to wait for one year until you can progress with her story. Note that in order to avoid all NTR content with Alexis, you will need to raise your and over 25 before she calls you for the first date.

Kylie

Kylie has a special Yandere mechanic () that is somewhat limiting for your interactions with other characters. However, it is rather easy to avoid her altogether until you feel ready to take her on. You will meet her at the university after at least 7 days have been played, but she only becomes generally available after the second encounter. This happens only on Tuesday or Friday with >= 30, so you can keep her at bay by having your below that threshold or not going to the university on these days.

Prevent locking characters

Some decisions or events lead to character permanently leaving the game or not being available as a romance option anymore. The character pages describe how to avoid this scenario.

Additionally, some characters can be locked by advancing another character's story too far or in the wrong direction, and this is harder to keep track:

Cheating

As you may have read in some forum, there are ways to cheat in the game. Since version 21.6.0, the game has a built-in cheat menu that can be activated by clicking the "?" button in your smartphone. It allows you to manipulate certain values, but the game will notice you cheated and block you from starting a New Game+.

It is not recommended to use the console to directly manipulate values. This may lead to unexpected behavior of the game.

Save often!

The bottom of Love & Sex: Second Base's Save/Load screen will show icons that correspond to pages of save files and each page can contain six saves each. There is one page for autosaves (A), one page for quicksaves (Q), nine pages for hard saves (1-9) and buttons that allow you to scroll through one or several pages at a time. Each save file will take up roughly 200-300kb and it is highly recommended to make a manual save using the numbered pages each time anything noteworthy happens, such as the beginning of each in-game week, or a character event, and so on. There is no reason good enough to stick to one single save slot during an entire playthrough because you may very well sink dozens of hours into one run and save yourself into a corner. It may not always be necessary to restart from scratch and simply marrying any girl to unlock new game plus may be preferable depending on the situation, but the game has so many save slots that it is far better to save too often than only use one.

While there is a dedicated autosave page, they will overwrite any manual saves the player makes on that page so the player will be better off using the quicksave page if for example, some unfamiliar dialogue from a newly added event pops up. It can save you in a pinch but it is not reliable enough to fall back on even when used in conjunction with the text rollback feature. Initially it may only look like you are limited to nine pages of hard saves, but scrolling past them will reveal more pages of empty save slots and there is no limit to the amount of saves you can have. You can also name each of your saves when creating them to make it easier to tell what they are at a glance.

Finally, assuming you are playing on PC, the game's save files are stored in the game's installation directory ("Love & Sex Second Base\game\saves") as well as identical copies in ("AppData\Roaming\RenPy"). Backing up only one of them is necessary should you want to keep some sets of saves separate from others and the simplest way to delete both at once is to hover over the save with your mouse and press the Delete key. Every save file is numerically coded based on the page they were saved on followed by the position on that page they were saved on, so a file named "13-5-LT1.save" will be on the thirteenth page in the bottom-middle position in-game.

And now have fun...