Torn City: Guide for beginners in 2026 - My experience
The first year in Torn is like when the 'Last Survivor' enters a jungle full of primates and stays stealthy/low-key, eating little bugs and other disgusting things. Yes, that's Torn as a new player.
Hello, my name is Happy4Weed, and this is my first year playing Torn (today is exactly my 365th day). This guide is aimed at new players with less than a year in the game, sharing my path so you can avoid the mistakes I made from the start.
[image: snipboard.io]
Let's go into the guide:
First steps for a perfect start (Completing the tutorial)
The tutorial requires you to do some things that are very important at the start. They won't affect you for the whole game, but they can give you a better start compared to players who complete the tutorial without thinking too much. So, complete the tutorial taking the following things into consideration:
- Allocate your first merit into ‘Education Length’ to reduce education time. (You can get an easy merit with the ‘Historian’ award, search it on Google.)
- Take the course ‘Introduction to Biochemistry’ from ‘Biology’ to improve your survivability over the next few weeks. You can do this after the first merit investment for the 2% education reduction.
- Choose your first job depending on your playstyle:
- Army: if you want to focus on combat.
- Grocer: a good versatile option, or if you want to focus on money.
- Casino: good if you want to focus on education or work stats.
- Join any faction to complete the tutorial, but afterward, you should look for a good faction or one that aligns with your goals.
- Buy 100 Blank DVDs in the ‘Super Store’ and sell half of them in the ‘Item Market’ for 1$ less than the cheapest listing to make some fast money. With that money:
- Rent a mansion for ~10k to improve your happiness.
- Buy Glasses to improve your success rate in the ‘Search for Cash’ crime.
Note: If you get stuck in the tutorial because you can't afford the property it asks you to buy, do the Blank DVDs step before finishing the tutorial, then continue and complete it.
Now, I'll explain these decisions in more detail.
Explanation about decisions before and guide for trace your path
Education
Your first goal in education should be ‘Intravenous Therapy’ because it gives you the ability to withdraw and deliver blood. That ability improves your survivability in Torn: it makes defending and attacking easier, and if you're lucky enough to have a rare blood type, you can farm a little money with it as a new player.
After that, my recommendation is to complete ‘Sports Science’ for bonus gains in the gym. Once you’ve done that, you can start specializing in:
- Crimes: Completing ‘Psychology’.
- Attack/PvP: Completing ‘Combat Training’.
- Battle Stats/PvP: Completing ‘Self Defense’ and afterward ‘Health & Fitness’.
- Traveling/Money: Completing ‘History’.
- Company/Money: Completing ‘Business Management’.
- Busting: Completing ‘Law’.
I recommend avoiding ‘Business Management’ as your first ‘Education’ specialization because it’s better to reach some milestones first, such as 2B in the bank, some stocks, four courses outside the Business bachelor, and preferably high battlestats.
Merits
Focus on maxing ‘Education Length’ first. Completing all education without any bonuses takes 7 years, so any type of reduction, such as merits, stocks, or the passive from the ‘Education’ job, is always a good choice.
After maxing ‘Education Length’, I would recommend maximizing ‘Crime Progression’ for faster progression in crimes and afterward ‘Bank Interest’ for net worth.
But you can choose differently if you have other goals:
- Crime: ‘Crime Progression’ and ‘Nerve Bar’.
- Money: ‘Bank Interest’ and ‘Masterful Looting’ if you want to be a mugger (‘Stealth’ is a good combo for muggers), and ‘Awareness’ if you want to play very, very chill and don't care too much because it is RNG.
- PvP: ‘Life Points’ and ‘Critical Rate’ are the main ones, and you should maximize them. After this, I would recommend a weapon mastery, mainly rifle for the meta. After weapon mastery, I would focus on stats. That's because if you start by maximizing stats, they're almost useless: 10% of 10k is not much. ‘Hospitalizing’ is a good merit if you like ranked wars.
- Job: ‘Employee Effectiveness’ and ‘Addiction Mitigation’ if you want to scale up fast in companies. The first gives you a bonus to your total effectiveness, and the second reduces the penalty from taking drugs. Both are valued by directors. If you don't take drugs, you can skip ‘Addiction Mitigation’.
Note: A lot of people will tell you to maximize ‘Bank Interest’ as a new player, but if you aren’t a p2f player, you shouldn’t. You don’t have that much money at the beginning, and spending these merits to earn around 20k every 2 weeks really isn’t worth it.
Job
First of all, you should start searching for a company job from day 1, but in the meantime, join one of the city jobs we talked about before. A good first company for a new player is a ‘Clothing Store’, which has useful perks such as mug reduction and, mainly, 100 END for every 10 job points. It's basically like getting a FREE train from a director. It's also a good option because, as a new player, you can get into a 7- to 9-star company more easily. There are other options, but I chose this one and it worked well for me. It gave me the possibility to move to higher-star jobs than other players around my level because of the 100 END every one or two days.
Other good options are:
- Music Store for gym progression.
- Sweet Store for money.
- Game Shop for happy console jumps and travel.
- Flower Shop for traveling and reducing rehab costs in the long term (money in general).
Note: Look at the job specials and how many stars they need to unlock the perks mentioned above.
After finishing the tutorial
After finishing the tutorial, your next objective is to unlock the rest of the game, mainly the travel option. Everything is unlocked at level 15. There are some guides on how to reach it quickly, but in short:
- Level up your battlestats to 1k.
- Attack high-level players with low stats (there are some lists and tools).
Your daily routine before level 15
- Spend all your nerve in ‘Search for Cash’ if you have an 85% success rate or higher, if not, do ‘Bootlegging’. If you move to harder crimes too early, you will fail and the game will penalize your CE (Crime Experience is an invisible stat that improves your success in all crimes, including Organized Crimes from factions).
- Spend all your energy in the gym that gives you the most stats. You can check this by opening your current gym and looking at the bars. Train the stat with the most green, but try to keep your stats as balanced as possible, if 2 or more stats are equal, balance them.
- Buy lollipops from ‘Sally's Sweet Shop’ and Blank DVDs. Lollipops are for training: eat the maximum amount of candy you can before your first daily training session to get more gains (more happiness = more gains). Keep in mind that the happy bar resets its maximum every 15 minutes, so take candies at, for example, x:00, x:15, x:30, or x:45, once the reset has already happened. Blank DVDs are for selling or using in the ‘Bootlegging’ crime.
- Try not to let your energy and nerve bars fill completely, or you will lose efficiency.
After level 15
It is mostly the same, but at the end of the routine above, you should travel as much as you can. Travel is a bit complicated because I remember, as a new player, hearing everyone say “travelling is good”, but when I started travelling, I sucked big. You don't have enough net worth to buy good items, not every location is worth it when you're a new player, you don't have a Private Island, you don't know where to travel, there are muggers, you have no suitcase, etc.
So, my best recommendations are:
- Don't waste your energy. Try to take trips that let you get back to Torn before your energy bar fills.
- Use the Torn PDA app to check item buy and sell prices and to set fast alarms.
- Calculate the full round trip so your energy doesn't fill while you're away. For example, if your bar fills in 5h and the outward trip takes 3h, the return trip takes another 3h, so you would waste 1h of energy regeneration.
- If possible, increase your travel capacity to 28 items or more so you can transport more objects per trip.
- Travel with only a little more money than you need for that location.
- Rent a ‘Private Island’ and hire a pilot to reduce travel time.
Optional: merit farming.
Tools & scripts
As of today, Torn City should be called Torn Scripty. Jokes aside, the reality of Torn is that you will use some or a lot of scripts depending on your playstyle. These are the MUST-HAVE tools and scripts:
- Tampermonkey: for installing scripts.
- Torn Tools: enhances general gameplay.
- Torn PDA: similar to Torn Tools, but for mobile, with extra features such as travel tools and fast alarms/push notifications.
- FFScouter: lets you see estimated battlestats for other players.
- Torn YATA & Torn Stats: both are must-haves for you and your faction.
Merit farming
Some merits that you can farm as a new player:
| When / Requirement |
# |
Merit |
Notes / Cost |
| Prioritize on day 1 |
3 |
Gone Fishing |
|
| |
21 |
Landlord |
|
| |
22 |
Historian |
|
| |
45 |
Pocket Money |
|
| |
25 |
Forgiven |
|
| |
— |
Get married to someone |
From day 1 |
| |
— |
The Affronted |
|
| After day 1 if you couldn't do them |
5 |
Pious |
|
| |
2 |
Clotted |
Hospitalize yourself |
| Unlock Russian Roulette |
16 |
Foot Soldier |
|
| |
48 |
One in Six |
|
| Once you have enough stats |
1 |
Lovestruck |
|
| |
6 |
Domino Effect |
|
| |
8/9 |
Going Postal and Friendly Fire |
|
| |
27 |
Finale |
|
| |
29 |
Flatline |
|
| |
30/31/32 |
Semper Fortis, Manu Forti, and Vae Victus |
|
| |
34 |
Riddled |
|
| |
41 |
Kill Streaker 1 |
|
| |
42 |
Surplus |
|
| |
— |
Semper Fortis, Manu Forti and Vae Victis |
|
| Coordination with someone + stats |
17 |
Deadly Duo |
|
| |
18 |
Yoink |
|
| |
19 |
Guardian Angel |
|
| Costs more than 500k |
11/12/13 |
Foul Play, Stinker, and Wipeout |
500k |
| |
20 |
Wholesaler |
500k |
| |
23 |
Who's Frank? |
300k |
| |
24 |
Alcoholic |
350k |
| |
26 |
Eco-Friendly |
500k |
| |
28 |
Energetic |
3.5m |
| |
33 |
Carnage |
500k |
| |
36 |
Self Defense |
500k |
| |
46 |
Lavish |
1m |
| |
50 |
Fresh Start |
500k |
| |
51/52 |
Backdrop/Hairy |
500k |
| |
53 |
Radaway |
500k |
| Coordination + level 15+ + no active kill streak |
14 |
Church Mouse |
|
| |
15 |
Phoenix |
|
| |
18 |
Yoink |
|
| |
35 |
Invictus |
|
| |
37 |
Blood Money |
|
| |
38 |
Vengeance |
|
| |
39 |
Boss Fight |
|
| |
40 |
Dead or Alive |
|
| |
47 |
Daddy's New Shoes |
|
| Special / rare |
30/31/32 |
Semper Fortis, Manu Forti, and Vae Victus |
|
| |
43 |
Booboo |
|
| |
44 |
Souvenir |
|
| |
49 |
Twenty One |
|
Note: Keep your kill streaks going as far as possible until they get broken once other players can attack you. To help with this, keep your stats around 500 or increase them more slowly.
Gameplay lock styles
There are 2 gameplay styles that you have to decide on before or while you are playing.
SSL (Sport Science Lab gym)
One is ‘SSL’. It refers to a playstyle where you don't take more than 150 Xanax and/or Ecstasy in total. SSL means ‘Sports Science Lab’, the gym with the best gain ratio for all your stats as a player. In general, it's a trap and not worth it, but as always, play however you want.
Smurfing (Hold level up)
The other is ‘smurfing’. In Torn, you can hold your level for as long as you want, so you can be rich as fuck and have trillions of stats while staying at level 1. Some players, like me, smurf for fun, for easier defenses, or for other reasons. But, like the ‘SSL’ playstyle, it's a trap. There are some strategies around it, but when you level up, you gain life, and life is the fifth battle stat. Furthermore, almost everyone uses scripts that give an estimated battlestat value, but as always, play however you want.
Selling looses as “gameplay style”
You can sell looses that are that you attack a player and loose the fight. The player that sells it can give you usually 250k-350k. The thing is that all that stats/numbers remain in your account and otherwise, torn will give you the title of looser
Best cheap weapons and armor
- Primary weapon: SIG 550.
- Secondary weapon: BT MP9.
- Melee weapon: Macana.
- Helmet: WWII Helmet.
- Chest: Bulletproof Vest.
- Gloves: Leather Gloves.
- Trousers: Leather Pants.
- Boots: Leather Boots.
What can you do in Torn City?
- Become a healer.
- Become a prison guard to get people out of prison.
- Become a businessman running a company.
- Create a faction to conquer territories and wage faction wars (PvP).
- Become a trader buying and selling things.
- Earn money through stock investments and banks.
- Become the best worker from any company from ‘Companies’.
- Become a hacker.
- Become a bounty hunter.
- Become a mugger.
- Become a racing driver.
- Become an expert in crime.
- Become an importer buying and selling items from other countries.
- Become an animal hunter.
- Become a poker player
- and so more...
How to save money
I recommend to you to save your money in stocks or in a good faction where you can trust.
Conclusion
As you can see, there is a lot of information and many things to take into consideration. This guide is focused on efficiency while still giving you the freedom to choose your own path with some advice. The game has a lot of things to do so, have fun and good luck!