This guide was originally going to be about a bunch of random things I have learned but my beginner tips kept ballooning out of control so I decided to make this a beginner's guide to not starving and taking care of your taxes as I seem to see a lot of complaints on that even though I never had an issue with either problem...

There are many different ways to start the game. In the future the base might be entirely skippable but for now you will need to develop your base to a certain extent, pay your taxes and advance the plot the main storyline quests from your base.

I'm not going to explain to you how to play the game (the in-game help guides should suffice) but instead I will explain different ways in how to achieve your first couple of baby steps. Namely keeping yourself fed and earning money.

You first need to figure out how you are not going to starve yourself to death
Then you are going to need to decide on how to make money to improve your situation and take care of your taxes.
You can go to Delphy and sell gold statues.
You can start fishing and selling fish flakes (bonito flakes) after you turned them to wine that is.
You can go dungeon diving and sell all the random junk you loot from the nefias
You can become a farmer and sell produce.
You can develop your musical skills and become a beggar bard
There are dozens of ways to make a living but I will explain only a few.

One of your first concerns aside from following the tutorial questlines is finding food. Thankfully there is food all around you. From the hearts, grotesque offals, and corpses of your fallen foes to all kinds of vegetation. While you can survive in the immediate moment off of consuming the random flowers (eaten raw) or tuffs of grass (weed stew over a bonfire) I would highly suggest starting a mushroom farm as soon as possible.
If you been doing your tutorial quests and naturally trying to craft each and every crafting and processing station. You should eventually unlock the tinker's table.
You are going to want to craft a sickle, hoe and shovel.
The sickle will let you harvest seeds from fully mature plants whether those be vegetables, flowers or mushrooms.
The shovel will let you dig up the ground and leave it bare removing grass or anything else on top of the ground (assuming its not too hard to dig up with the shovel's hardness) and the hoe will let you plow the ground for better farming results.
The last two of these 3 tools you will likely already have as Loytel will want you to craft them as part of the line of tutorial quests from him. In fact one of the rewards from that quest is 5 mushroom seeds!

Mushrooms are an incredible early game crop. They finish growing in a singular day, meaning you can quickly build up a food store and since they do not require sunlight, they can be grown indoors during winter without the need of mid-game special indoor lighting (sun crystals)!

If you are growing enough mushrooms that you can feed yourself and your party and have extra shrooms it is now worth considering thinking of using those mushrooms for taking care of your next major issue - taxes.

These surplus mushrooms however can now help you if you decide to take one of two paths.
You can either:

• A) Get a brewery barrel and convert the mushrooms into wine that you can easily sell
  or
• B) Turn your mushrooms into bait and turn the fish you catch into wine.

So you decided farming is for chumps and want to fish instead? That's fine; while farming will give you access to a larger variety of stats as you later acquire more than just mushrooms to feed yourself, the path of the fisherman also increases a large variety of skills.
Aside from obviously requiring a fishing rod and at least 1 tile of water to fish; you will need, within your inventory, bait.
There are many ways to acquire bait whether its farming mushrooms or the corpses of your enemies, the most diverse way to both get a large amount of bait as well as level up about a dozen different skills is by strip mining mechanical ruins.




These Ruins walls are composed of copper scrap which your puny starting granite pickaxe and Level 1 Mining skill can partially manage to dismantle.
In the beginning you will only be able to Collect the wall frames for copper scrap. But as you craft pickaxes out of harder materials and level up your mining skill you will be able to mine the entire wall out as well. Do note that collecting wall frames, while requiring a pickaxe, does not actually level up your mining skill. If you wish to level up your mining skill I suggest going to a cave with regular dirt walls and mining those out. Hold onto that dirt however! You can take it back home and either craft soil floors with the floor workshop and ship those off for 3 oren a pop or you can craft a trash bin and dump your soil for ecopos which is a currency for a merchant in Yowyn (I recommend the soil floor as orens will be more beneficial to a starting beginner)

I found this helpful graphic that explains the workchain you will follow if you go this route.
Credit goes to the people of the Elona discord. Unless someone knows who exactly made it!

Now I know there is a lot to process here (pun intended) but essentially we are dipping our toes into something known as hammer alchemy. You see either intentionally by the game creator, Noa, or by sheer accident. There are some items when dismantled end up creating objects that are normally impossible such as logs made from metals.

I cover this in a different guide in much greater detail. You can find a link to the other guide near the bottom of the page.

Once you have your bait its just a matter of going to any body of water even if its just a singular tile of water and casting your fishing rod. You'll continue to catch fish until you are out of bait. At this point you can either cook what you have or go to your sawmill and chopping your fish into bonito flakes which you can either season your food with or turn into wine to make a lot of money!

If you been diligently making all sorts of random junk then through a bit of luck and patience you should sooner or later unlock 1 of 3 brewery barrels that you can craft from the basic workbench (all 3 are identical aside from visual appearance)


Alternatively you can go to any town and acquire a brewery barrel either via spending 20 or 40 furniture tickets (not sure if it depends on the visual appearance or if its because they might have wine already inside), stealing one if you have the pickpocket skill at a -1 karma penalty, or if you are unable to carry a barrel because your pick-pocketing and strength stats are too low and you are willing to potentially take a larger karma penalty you can go to town and smash several of these brewery barrels until you unlock the recipe. Do note you need at least Level 6 in crafting but 11 or higher would be better


I suggest going to Olvina to the direct south if you are going this route as the house to the far upperright corner has 13 barrels you can potentially smash (you will not be able to disassemble them as they have something inside so you will need to pickpocket their inner contents first.
You either need to start as a race (like Fairy) or a class (like Thief) that starts with pickpocket OR you will need to first join the Thieves' Guild to gain access to the guild trainer. Alternatively you will need to be very lucky with boss chests at the bottom of nefia dungeons for the chance of a specialization book on the subject of Pickpocketing

Once you have acquired your brewery barrel either by ill-gotten or proper means its just a matter of throwing your mushrooms or bonito flakes into the barrel and waiting a couple of hours for them to transform into wine.

Regardless of what your alcohol is made of; you can now either sell in large fast bulk via the shipping crate while also earning some gold bars or you can go through the process of selling your booze with sales tags for larger profits. I am not going to cover that, there are plenty of youtube videos as well as steam discussion posts that can cover this in greater detail.

For this money-making scheme you will already need to have some levels into mining already and preferably a pickaxe better than the basic granite one (you might manage with a Silt pickaxe which is hardness 24 if you're almost completely skillless in mining but try to go a bit higher yeah?)
If you ARE planning to come here with a granite pickaxe make sure you have about Level 6 or 7 Mining otherwise you will have wasted your time.

Another thing you will want is to have purchased the Sculpting Table from Fiama.

Head for the lawless town of Derphy















Optionally talk to the guard blocking the entrance to the Thieves' Guild. They want you to lose a total 100 Karma points (doesn't have to be in one go but since we are going to lose a lot of Karma soon consider this a headstart)

---

Once you are finished head for what is essentially a slave market and look for this submerged staircase that I have circled here for you.
This is essentially a backdoor to the Thieves' Guild. While you can approach them safely you really won't get much out of them as you are not a member of the guild. Doesn't matter we are not here for them but rather their shiny backroom.
Take out your pickaxe and go to town tearing up their gold stone block walls. Mining the walls will give you gold cutstones. Take as many as you can! Every wall block you mine will net you 1 Karma loss so this helps with proving how much of a bad boy/girl you are to the thieves' guild as well lol
If you also have a shovel (and digging skill) good enough to do so, help yourself to their floor tiles as well. Once you are Burden! or Overweight head back topside and visit the Delivery Box and drop off all the cutstone into the delivery box. Talk to one of the prostitutes for directions if you don't know where the delivery box is.
All your looted gold shall be delivered to you in a package back in your base. So in the meantime head back down to the guild and mine out more of their walls until you are satisfied. Once done head back home.

Once back home, we can start making money.

Optional - If you don't mind savescumming for unlimited gold we will once again be doing some hammer alchemy! This time what we want to do is take our gold cutstone and a strong enough hammer and dismantle the gold cutstone. You have a 50% chance for that 1 cutstone being turned into 1 gold stone (gold is normally found only as metal ore as a side note for this alchemy process). Now if you take that gold stone to the stonecutter processor you will get 2! gold cutstones essentially doubling your haul. This of course is only if your luck is good enough... or you save scum a lot but this can potentially be done enough to give you unlimited gold and not have to visit the Thieves' Guild anymore for more gold cutstone if you go this route.

Now regardless of if you did the optional step or not. You can now take your gold cutstone to the sculpting table and start making art.
These gold sculpture can then be sold for some serious cash.
Just 6 basic gold statues sold via the shipping crate is enough to pay for your taxes and you should have easily hauled about 10 times as much in your singular visit to the thieves' guild.
Keep in mind that towns reset in a month so you can easily take care of your tax issues.

• Craft everything!
  
  
• Got a new hard rock or ingot and don't know what you should prioritize? Pickaxe first so you can mine for more of those harder materials. Then hammer so gacha junk of harder materials can be dismantled for resources. Afterwards its kinda up to you. The shovel can help dig up harder floors, the starting iron axe should be good enough for any tree you encounter but nothing stopping you from getting a better one for slightly faster speeds (harder to notice at higher skill levels)
  
  
• As of the time of writing, armor and weapon crafting really isn't a thing as we are lacking many basic stuff. Beyond making ammunition for your guns and bows or making a magic cane, you should instead source your armor and weapons from either the nefias (dungeons) or from blacksmiths / blackmarket npcs.
  
  
• Mages! Build Magic Canes as soon as you can! Spellbooks are hard to get in the early game. You should be saving your spells for tougher enemies. Magical Canes can help you with the more common fodder. I would suggest getting several types as some enemies might be immune to one type of damage. My elemental suggestions? Lightning for the common golem weakness. Holy for few things are resist or outright immune to holy damage. Sound as it can inflict Dim statues on enemy spellcasters.
  
  
• Don't sleep on ranged weaponry. Even if your party members lean more on melee damage. Being able to deal damage before you reach it helps clear out large swarms of enemies. Whether its boomerangs, putits in amber, or panties make sure people can do some ranged damage.
  
  
• Tired of party members running off to chase enemies? Open up your character page (V key) and under the Strategy tab in the "Ally Strategy" section tick on the "Always stay by you while in combat"
  
  
• Stuck somewhere with no way out? Check your "ability" spells for a skill called Self-Harm. At the cost of some HP and a few seconds, you can teleport to another random location in the map. Good for those instances where the game either bugs out, or a nasty teleport trap puts you in an area without a way out. And in the worst case scenario assuming its not a perma-death mode file, suicide can always take you back home.
  
  
• As your weightlifting improves and thus your carrying capacity improves consider bringing additional containers. You already start out with a non-essential purse for currency but you can always toss it out for a bigger bag. The cooler box you get from rescuing Poppy is good for keeping meat fresh while away from home.
  
  
• Beware of fire and ice! Make sure you either buy from a general shopkeep or craft from a Loom fireproof and coldproof blankets. They will protect your precious inventory and equipment from burning to ashes or shattering to frozen pieces.
  Alternatively look for gear with fire and cold resistances! 20 points in any resistance will give you immunity to that element!
  
  
• Want a nice bed early on? Go do a quest or two for the people of Tinker's camp. Then with your earned furniture tickets buy the hammock that's close to Nino. Hammocks are among some of the best beds to give you a good rest and they are super light so you can carry them for your traveling sleep.
  
  
• Base needs electricity? In the beginning you can probably make do with residents having a hobby that has Natural Power Generation such as Exercise but if you want a free Generator travel far north to the Truce Grounds for a free generator. (check the other steam guides for a world map)
  
  
• Things stored in the ★Storage chest don't add weight to the chest. Feel free to stuff your heaviest loot inside and carry the storage chest. Be aware however that as you upgrade the chest (get your upgrade wrenches from Miral in the snowy east) it will require electricity to open and operate so maybe don't take it with you dungeon diving.
  
  
  
• You can find more Tips and other questionable bits of advice in my other guide! -- https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3401513288

V1 - Release
V1.1 - 1/16 - A bit of proofreading. I ate some of my words didn't complete some sentences woops lol

Future changes / additions
I'm thinking of writing a bit more for what to do once you are settled (tax man nor starvation are going to come kill you) but frankly with how open the game is I can only give brief tips.

I might just point people towards other guides if I think someone else already covers something in particular that I don't think I can add enough to really be that different.