Val's Basic Guide for Newbies

This guide is for newbies who know nothing on what to do in Torn City (TC). I am using this guide to point my newbie customers instead of flooding their chats with tutorials and links to guides.

Disclaimer: I am a newbie too and I feel that a lot of guides, even ones geared towards newbies, are still somewhat hard to follow. This guide is based on what I did and will be updated every time I get a new experience

I have also put this guide in google doc for better readability >>here<<

Table of contents

1. FIRST THINGS FIRST
1.1. What is important in TC
1.2. Getting to level 15
1.3. Initial sources of income
1.4. How to sell things
1.5. Securing your money
1.6. Weapons and armors
1.7. Joining a faction
1.8. Choosing a job
1.9. Doing crimes
1.10. Getting educated
1.11. Donator status
1.12. Third party applications

2. SOME MORE ESSENTIALS
2.1. Gaining more stats
2.2. Earning wealth
2.3. Hunting for honors
2.4. Daily missions
2.5. Choosing an attack target

3. NICE TO KNOW THINGS
3.1. Casino
3.2. Hospital
3.3. Bounties
3.4. Drugs

4. EXTRAS

Counter start: 14 June 2023
[image: counter10.optistats.ovh]

1. FIRST THINGS FIRST

What to do if you are new (read: under level 15)

1.1. What is important in TC

TL;DR
It is battle stats and money

• TC is a crime-based game, you WILL need to fight and you WILL need to defend yourself
• To fight well, you need to increase your stats, you need money to increase them better and to buy equipments, and better stats will net you more money, and so on and so forth

1.2. Getting to level 15

TL;DR
Level 15 unlock travel so you can import things to sell. Train in gym until you have around 700-1k total stats, then hit the people in Baldr’s list to level up

• The first thing on your mind if you are new is to get to level 15 ASAP
• Why? Because when you hit level 15 you will unlock travel, it enables you to fly abroad to import things to sell thus earning you much more money to better your stats
• To do that you first need to spend all your energies in the gym until you are around 700-1k in total stats. Try to balance each of your stats for now
• After that, you can hit the targets in Baldr’s list. They are higher leveled than you are now but are weak due to their low stats. See now, that is why stats are important
• Hit the one whose total stats is lower than yours
• Make sure to leave them on the street for better exp gain instead of hospitalizing or mugging them (they won’t have money anyway)

1.3. Initial sources of income

TL;DR
Before you hit level 15 I advise you to buy 100 beers, plushies, or lollipops each day. You can also sell losses and still train. If you have money to spend, you can buy Donator Packs to sell

Disclaimer: I have not sell losses

• Before level 15 there are things you can do to earn good money, I will advise not to do some of them
• You are able to buy 100 things in the city each day, you can buy beers and plushies in Bits ‘n’ Bobs or lollipops in Sally’s Sweet Shop to sell in market or traders, it will net you around 60k a day
• You can also sell losses, it’s the act of attacking someone then losing on purpose, people will pay you good money for it, you should earn around 250k per loss. I don’t advise this because it costs 25 energies to attack, you can use those energies to train instead
• Some people argues that you can both sell loses and gain stats, buy Xanax (it gives you 250e each) from the profits, the train with the extra energies, that way you will earn both money and stats
• If you have real world money to spend, you can buy Donator Packs in the Donator House then sell those either in market or to traders, I advise selling them to trusted traders, it will net you around 23 millions each
• Another option would be trying to land a job in companies like an Adult Toy Store, that way you can use points to buy eDVD to sell later, please do read 1.8. Choosing a job before you do this tho

1.4. How to sell things

TL;DR
If possible sell to good traders or sell through a bazaar

• Selling directly in item market will cost you 3% market fee and it also risk you to get mugged by buy-mugger
• It might be better to sell consumable items (i.e meds, nades, alcohols, drugs, or even plushies, flowers, and Donator Packs) to good traders who will buy near or even at market price, try to search for reputable ones with no-mug guarantee
• You can find traders in trading chat and trading forum, try to find at least 3 or 4 good traders whose trading hours does not overlap with each other too much so you can still sell things if your main trader is offline or can’t settle trades for reasons
• You can also sell to me for that matter, here is my trade post
• You can also buy a bazaar in Point Building to sell your stuff, but you need to secure yourself by self-hosping or other means since it is prone to buy-muggers
• You may not want to sell equipments, except temporaries like nades, to traders because they usually will take a much larger margin due to how awkward it is to sell, try to sell them through bazaar or the auction house instead
• You can set trades while in hospital, it is a good practice to do trades in hospitals especially if you don't know who you are trading with

1.5. Securing your money

TL;DR
You can either buy stocks/points/items, putting them in bank(s)/vault, or doing ghost trades

• If there are any certainties in TC it’s that Duke and Lesslie are assholes, and that you WILL get mugged
• Chances are you will get mugged right after you sell things in market/bazaar/trades (buy muggers), sell points, win a Russian Roulette game, win in Poker, or well basically win anything in Casino, use casino refill, being a trader, staying too long abroad especially in Switzerland and Cayman, or generally by being in the game at all
• You need to safeguard your money, never have too much money on hand, or better yet try to always have no money on hand
• One of the earliest accessible things to secure your money in TC is by putting them in the bank. The downside is that you can only take them out in a week at the earliest
• The only mug-able thing is money on hand, so you can also put your money in items or points to sell when you need them. You can buy items in the Item Market and points in the Point Market
• You can also buy stock to put your money in, you need to buy Stock Ticker first using points in Point Building, be aware that their value will always change and you need to pay a fee of 0.1% when you sell stocks
• If your faction has vaults, you can ask if they allow you to put money there. The downside is that you need to ask the leadership to take your money back. The same thing works with Private Island’s vault
• Or you can do ghost trade, do a trade with someone you trust, then put your money in but never accept the trade. Your money will be safe there as long as the trade don’t settle, and it will take 6 hours before the trade is expired and you need to do another ghost trade

1.6. Weapons and armors

• Basic equipments from the first 10 Duke’s missions should be enough for you until you are level 15
• If you join a good faction, they usually lend you equipments for free
• To know which one is a better armor is easy, you basically just have to look at their defense stats
• To pick a better weapon is not so much, you need to decide if you want more accuracy or damage and the size of their magazine clips

1.7. Joining a faction

TL;DR
Higher respects usually mean better faction, but also higher expectations

• You will get many faction recruitment chats/messages when you have not joined a faction yet
• In general you can wait until you have some options
• You may want to choose a faction with higher total respects, because respects are used to buy perks and higher total respects means better perks
• But you also need to read their perks, requirements, and expectations before you decided to join
• Factions usually expect you to be online daily, have a certain amount of energies for training each week/month, and do certain amount of hits in chains and wars
• Aside of better perks, bigger faction usually also offers other things like free medicals, free xanax for chaining and war, equipment rental, etc
• You can change factions but try to leave in a good term and for a good reason, TC is a crime-based game that demands a lot of dedication and time, people can be vindictive here for a lack of better words

1.8. Choosing a job

TL;DR
In the long run I think it is better to earn passive job perks first before joining a company. You can check what company have what perks here and what you can do in said company here

• You will get many company recruitment chats/messages when you are still working a standard TC job (army, grocery, casino, etc)
• There are 3 standard job that will give you passive perks if you maxed them out, and you will still have those perks even if you change jobs, that is why I think it is important to get them first
• There is a guide you can use to pass basic job interviews, you can find that guide here
• Maximizing education job will get you a passive 10% decrease for future education time
• Maximizing law job will get you a passive 10% increase to crime success
• Maximizing medical job will allow you to revives other player for 75 energy (there are ways to decrease this)
• There is a guide I followed to earn those perks efficiently, you can find that guide here (do not follow the Maximizing Battle Stats part because it is obsolete per this update) (the honor for stealing 500 medical items and doing 100 spies has been changed to spending 100 and 10k job points per this update)
• In short, work in the casino until you have 500 intelligence, join education then max it out (use points to raise your work stats), stay in education until you have 14.2k endurance 8.7k intelligence and 5.4k manual (use points to raise your work stats), then join law and stay there until you max it, after that join medical and max it
• You can also pay to join a company for the purpose of buying trains, the director will train you and it is the best way to increase your working stats
• After you are finished with all those, you can start searching for a company to join, you can check what company have what perks here and what you can do in said company here

1.9. Doing crimes
This is for crime 1.0, not for crime 2.0 just yet

TL;DR
Do the safest crime you can, failing some type of crimes will reduce your crime exp

• Crime does not pay much in itself, but you need to build your crime exp nevertheless to take part in your faction’s organized crimes (oc), some faction pay you a percentage of the success of oc but usually only for the high-end organized crimes
• You start with 15 natural nerve bar (NNB), it is the nerve you got without any bonus from faction perks or other, you can increase your NNB up to 60 by doing crimes
• There is a guide I followed to increase NNB effectively, you can find that guide here
• In short, shoplift jackets until you have 20 NNB, do thorough robberies until you have 25 NNB, plant stealth viruses until you have 30 NNB, do warehouse arson until you have 40 NNB, then either assassinating mob bosses or do warehouse arsons or kidnapping the mayor until you have 60 NNB
• Citing the guide, it should be around 50 two nerve crimes, 300 three nerve crimes, steal jackets until 30 NNB (about 3800), 1198 arson for 35 NNB, reach 1500 arson and do 10,000 drug crimes, 2750 arson for 40 NNB, 4324 arson for 45 NNB, 5950 arson for 50 NNB, 9171 arson for 55 NNB, 12862 arson for 60 NNB.
• You can do drug crimes by transporting amphetamines when you have settled on 35 NNB. I don't advise doing drug crimes all at once early, it will hurt your crime experience a lot, I advise aiming 10k arson with drug crime in between maybe once or twice a week or go all at once after you have 60 NNB
• There are items that you can have (some you need to equip) to raise crime success rates, each items increase the success rate of one particular crime, you can check those items here
• It is also a good practice to fail a bust every once in a while, especially after you are doing arsons because if you are caught by another players then your jail time can be up for days, you may want to go to the jail and try to bust a high leveled player one or two times a week, you will fail but that way your potential jail time should reset
• You should consume beers when you are not doing any jumps yet, drinking a bottle of beer will add 1 point to your nerve bar so you can do more crimes, it will tremendously help you boost their initial crime exp

1.10. Getting education

• There are so many arguments on what is the better education path for newbies to take I don’t think I have much to share with you
• A lot of newbies try to get their first bachelor on Sport Science because it gives passive boost to your training and I agree
• But do not forget to do other important classes in between
• You do not need to finish Computer Science course to plant computer virus crimes, you can just buy the virus in market
• You need to finish Driving License course to do arsons, transporting drugs, and arms trafficking crimes
• You need to finish Networking class to do hacking crimes
• You need to finish Intravenous Therapy course to fill and use blood bags
• You need to get your bachelor in History Studies to unlock museum to exchange sets into points
• There are other perks and unlockable in doing studies, you can check them here

1.11. Donator status

• If you have money to spend, donator status increase your energy bar and energy regen by 50% among other things like the chance of getting a book for your monthly bonus item
• You can either buy a subscription or buy a Donator Pack that last you a month of that bonus in Donator House

1.12. Third party applications

• If you have an android device, you can install TornPDA, it have alarms, quick links, notifications, and targets manager among other things
• On PC there are websites like Yet Another Torn App (YATA) and TornStats to track things
• There is also Torn.Report which can visualize all of your Torn data including activities, but it need a full access API, you may want to delete the API each time if you are not comfortable with that
• If you use a chrome-based browsers you can use TornTools, it is an extension that do a whole lot of things

2. SOME MORE ESSENTIALS

2.1. Gaining more stats

TL;DR
Buy/rent a Private Island (PI), then do Happy Jumps (HJ) or Choco Jumps (choco jump) once you have the capital to do so until you are around 1-2 millions in total stats

• Once you are level 15, the next thing you need to do is to rent a PI in the Estate Agent. It is important because higher happiness (the stat, not yours) will give better stat gains when training
• Search for PI around 3000 happiness or more, and make sure it have a landing strip installed so you can use a private jet for flying, it should cost about 400-700k per day but you can pay that and more if you are flying enough
• If you don’t have enough capital to rent by yourself, you can search for a spouse so the two of you can split the cost
• Once you fill your happiness, you can either do HJ or choco jumps, they basically raise your stats explosively in training by doubling your happiness
• The only difference between the two is the cost and the stat gain
• To do a HJ you need to use you energies until it hit 0, then you consume 4 xanax (you need to wait 5-7 hours after each one), you should have 1000 energies now, WAIT for the drug cooldown then consume 4 eDVDs and then an Ecstasy AFTER to double your happiness then train all those energies in the gym. The whole thing should cost you around 20-23 millions
• To do a choco jump, you need to wait for your maximum energies to fill, then you consume 1 xanax, WAIT for the drug cooldown then consume 24 Big Box of Chocolate, then an Ecstasy AFTER to double your happiness then train all those energies in the gym. The whole thing should cost you around 2-3 millions
• There’s an argument that doing half choco, 12 Big Box of Chocolate instead of 24, and doing it twice a day net you quite close to HJ’s gain for lower cost
• An advice from me, do not do choco jumps with 2 or 3 xanax, you will waste your natural energy regeneration
• Try to do at least one each so you know what you are going to do until you hit 350k-450k stat each
• Once you hit 350k-450k in each stats, just burn your energies and use 2-3 xanax everyday, do not do jumps anymore because the gain on happiness won’t give you much compared to just train your energies away

2.2. Earning wealth

TL;DR
Fly often, invest in bank, or play Russian Roulette if you think you are lucky

• Traveling and importing flowers/plushies will be your early main active income
• Use websites like ArsonWarehouse or application like TornPDA to better plan your flights
• You can invest your money in bank usually every 2 weeks-2 months, whichever have better gain, especially so if you buy the Bank Interest merits, just keep adding to it
• Some friends of mine made their wealth by winning Russian Roulette games, but they are also mugged very often and marked as enemies by a lot of people
• You can also start trading once you have enough money, buying things to sell later or buying plushies/flowers to exchange for sets, you need to finish the whole History classes to unlock museum to exchange those things
• An advice from me, don’t start trading too soon. It will eat at your traveling amount, at least do so once you have earned all the honors related to traveling

2.3. Hunting for honors

• You should get as much honors as possible to buy upgrades with your merit
• There is a good guide about easy to get merits, you can read that here
• Once you are somewhat done with the easy merits, you can use tools like Yet Another Torn App (YATA)’s award page, I usually sort by percentage to know what I should concentrate next

2.4. Daily missions

TL;DR
Do missions the best you can, save around 2k mission points for books, you can spend the rest on cheap items or special bullets

• Do missions the best you can, I usually retry once or twice maximum before I deem one is not worth the energies lost for trying
• You may want to always have at least between 1.8k-2k points on hand, you will never know if a good book will come by and it will be suck if you don’t have enough mission points to buy them because you never save points
• I usually buy weapons marked with high quality sign that is priced below 40-50 mission points, but even then it will still be a gamble because often times it is not that high in quality at all
• You don’t want to use mission points to buy items you can buy in the market, especially consumables like medicals
• Once you are somewhat comfortable with your equipment and have enough mission points saved, you may want to buy special bullets and try to get the honors relating to them

2.5. Choosing an attack target

Tl;DR
To get targets that will give good respect yield, do missions to get inactive targets or look in the Hall of Fame for more active ones. If you can’t spy or pay a someone to it for you, then use TornTools and TornPDA to determine your target’s strength

• Doing missions is a good way to get inactive targets, you can also search for players near your level and battlestat rank in the Hall of Fame menu
• If you are not using tools like TornTools and TornPDA then the least you can do is looking at their age and the best you can do is spy your target or pay someone to do so
• If you are on PC and using TornTools, you can see your target’s estimated total stats on top of the action bar in their profile, the better way to do this to see under User Information how much xanax and ecstasy they have taken compared to you
• If you are using an android and installed TornPDA, you can see your target’s estimated total stats and how much xanax they have consumed on top of their profile page

3. NICE TO KNOW THINGS

3.1. Casino

• Don’t spend too much money in casino, like the real ones, they are geared to make you lose
• I personally play in the casino only to get its related honors, some people won a lot of money from poker and russian roulette so if you have the skill and/or the luck then you may want to try those games because you are playing against other TC player in those games instead of against the computer

3.2. Hospital

TL;DR
You can’t get mugged when you are in hospital. It is also one way to run from war. One of the best way to self-hospitalize is by using a wrong blood bag or ask someone to bounty you

• You can’t get mugged when you are in hospital, so it is a nice place to sit for a while if you want to run a bit from war or is currently selling expensive things because you can still do trades and can save your money in ghost trades before you get out, just make sure to allow no one to revive you in the setting
• There a ways to hospitalize yourself (self-hospitalizing), you can use a wrong blood bag and that will give you 90 minutes hospital time, asking someone to bounty you and that will give you 3-3.5 hours hospital time, losing Russian Roulette will give you 15 minutes hospital time, opening a parcel with Small Explosive Device inside will give you 5 hours hospital time, or fail a crime like arsons or kidnapping but I won’t advice that because you are losing crime exp that way
• If you allow revives in the setting then actually got revived, it’s a good practice to pay the reviver 1 xanax or 1 million, they did spend energies and plenty of their time to get the necessary perk to do that and also you don’t want to make enemies out of them, especially so if you asked to be revived
• If you are hospitalized overseas, you can ask or wait for a reviver, the cost is usually 1 million instead of 1 xanax and you can pay it once you land back in TC

3.3. Bounties

TL;DR
You can use bounties to hospitalize yourself or you can use them to hospitalize others, be careful and use it preferably only for good reason because you can’t cancel them. There is a service where you can buy bounty slots

• You can put bounty to others in the newspaper menu, you only have 10 bounty slots and you can’t take them back once they are posted
• You can put anonymous bounties but it can be revealed by people working in Cyber Cafe for 25 job points
• If you are working in a Private Security Firm, you can exchange 20 job points for 48 hours of bounty protection
• There is a service called Bounty Depot where you can buy bounty slots if you think 10 slots are not enough, you can access that service here
• Be careful on who you put bounties on

3.4. Drugs

You can refill your happiness by doing rehab, if you do rehab try to leave 1 rehab, there is an insurance service for Happy Jumps

• If you are overdosed, you can fill your happiness back up instantly by doing a rehab in Switzerland
• If you are doing a Happy Jump and afraid of getting an overdosed, there is an insurance service that will insure your jump, you can access that service here
• If you are doing a rehab, try to leave 1 rehab so you will still get one overnight decrease on your addiction level

4. EXTRAS

• If you hover a chat in the chat box, you will see the timestamp of said chat

reserved

reserved

Guide is doesn't mention piggy bank, 0/10, basically unplayable

Easy to read and to the point! Good guide!

Makes me wanna be a newbie :)

Overview of major March 2023 edits:

[background color=var(--bbc-body-bg-color)]March 29
[/background]

• [background color=var(--bbc-body-bg-color)]Added faction expectations under 1.6. Joining a faction[/background]
• Added basic job merits and companies perks under 1.7. Choosing a job
• Added 1.8. Doing crimes
• Added 1.9. Getting education
• Added 2.3. Hunting for honors
• Added 2.4. Daily Missions
• Added 3.1. Casino
• Added 3.2. Hospital
• Added 3.3. Traders

March 30

• Added 1.4. How to sell things
• Moved 3.3. Traders under 1.4. How to sell things
• Added ways of getting mugged under 1.5. Securing your money
• Added buying trains and basic job interviews under 1.8. Choosing a job
• Added beer consumption under 1.9. Doing crimes
• Added TornTools under 1.12 Third party applications
• Added PI cost splitting under 2.1. Gaining more stats
• Added 2.5. Choosing an attack target
• Added ways to self-hosp under 3.2. Hospital
• Added 3.3. Bounties
• Added 3.5. Drugs

I looked through a couple few guides to recommend for a new player for jobs and this was the best one that I saw. Bump

very helpful

Bump for various tiny edits over the weeks

TY

very nice