A confusing up-fractal layout with various routes and alternate routes, transport networks, etc. Getting a good idea of the geometry isn't likely but you can at least learn the way different transport networks work.
There's information available that lets you try to figure out routes, however this is a paid service so exploration and experimentation might be a better idea to save money.
Until you can start buying and refining materials, you really only have two options:
Deliveries -- go to some part of the city, pick up a package, deliver it to some other part of the city. There's sometimes a time limit, which complicates things, but you can pick between multiple contracts. Bigger jumps pay more but they're obviously trickier to navigate. Contracts are always available, but until you gain Rep (from completing contracts), you can only do one at a time.
Being a thief -- potentially lucrative if you get lucky and are skilled enough, but the thief system is hard to master and also usually requires some prep (which itself costs money).
You can buy gruel relatively easily at base nodes. This will keep you alive for another day.
To really make progress though, you need to eat other types of food, either prepared from ingredients or bought prepared (this can get expensive though).
Food that isn't gruel influences your stats:
Speed -- how fast you move around the city. Great for getting more done in a day, which is important since you have daily costs.
Strength -- allows you to take on heavier packages without speed loss, same deal with your inventory, and also allows for some interesting thief techniques.
Dexterity -- affects your ability to refine things, cook, and do some more intricate thief techniques.
Focus -- ties into how much refinement/etc you can do before you get bored.
Memory -- affects the things that you know such as thief techniques, the properties of items, the value of things you're stealing, how routes work, etc. At the start of each day you have "mind slots" that you can fill out with what you need for that specific day, and the capacity is based on what you eat for breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, you have 0 mind slots.
Resilience -- keeps you from getting bad status effects in industrial areas (and *especially* things like factories).
Meals
You have a calorie limit for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. Some foods will increase it.
A meal can be taken as early as 6 hours after the previous one, so you can fit three meals into a day with cumulative effects within that 16-hour window.
Starvation
You only need one meal a day to stay alive, and all stats are optional.
If you miss this meal however, you start starving -- each day makes your speed 3/4, and meals will only take down one of these debuffs at a time and won't increase stats either.
This won't lead to a softlock -- eventually you'll be unable to Hab for one reason or another and will go to jail, at which point they'll feed you. Besides, quests aren't always time-limited. It does get tricky with sicknesses, but you still have that softlock.
Hab Centers are placed at convenient locations and are usually accessible (not always though, particularly if you're deep into an industrial sector or something).
It costs money, but each day you can:
Access your base
Buy gruel (single use, if you want multiple meals you need to buy multiple meals).
Rent a Tablet (for city information, routes, etc).
You have the full 24 hours to hab, though this might fuck up your schedule or incur a sleep debt (in normal conditions you need 8 hours of sleep per 24-hour cycle).
Your base has a bed in it and you can sleep whatever minimum is needed to make the day roll over. Or more if you have a sleep debt (more on that in a bit). You can take naps too.
You don't have to sleep, though -- you can do stuff in your base instead during rollover.
If you aren't habbing during rollover, then you get arrested.
You can stay in your base perpetually through several days (sleep and hunger don't matter accordingly), however as soon as you leave, you'll have incurred a hab debt that you have to pay or you'll get arrested.
As mentioned, you need 8 hours of sleep per 24 hour cycle. When you get this is up to you, but utilizing rollover is a generally good idea. Some Drugs will alter your sleep requirements (more on that in a bit)
If you fail here, then you incur a sleep debt during rollover of 30 minutes for every 30 minutes not slept. You sleep in 30 minute increments.
A sleep debt of 4 or less hours isn't a big deal. Sleep it off.
Beyond that, though, it acts the way hunger does in 4-hour blocks (so your speed goes down with 8 hours of debt, then again at 12, etc). This is again eventually going to lead to arrest.
Taking an extended stay in your base and then not paying (or being unable to pay) for the hab debt.
Stealing something, getting caught, and not escaping in time.
Getting caught in an area where you don't belong (a thief skill will allow you to pass yourself off as one of them), or an elite area without proper clothes (deliveries excepted in both cases), and not escaping in time
Ordering services where you pay later (like a restaurant) and then either not paying or not being able to pay.
Results
You lose any packages in your inventory and go down by 1 rep for each lost.
All items in your inventory are held and you need to pay 50% of their base value to get them back, or you can agree to lose them forever in exchange for 50% of their base value.
If an item was stolen, it's confiscated. Same deal with all stolen items since the last rollover, provided they're on your person (putting them in your base occasionally isn't a terrible strategy). Anything beyond that point is officially "yours" and just goes into the above system instead. Things here increase how much trouble you're in.
Anything illegal is confiscated, with the exception of items that alter the legal process.
Drugs increase how much trouble you're in.
You go to Judgment.
Judgment
Crimes have a "law debt" cost associated with them, and they also give you a "prior point".
If your last crime contained the thing you were arrested for, you gain more law debt, and two prior points rather than 1. If you have priors, you gain more law debt to the tune of +10% per prior (this stacks if you have multiple crimes in one like confiscated stolen goods or drugs).
If you reach 5 prior points in an area, you quit gaining that debuff and instead gain a felony point. This happens as soon as you gain prior points.
Felony points are very detrimental:
Hab services cost 2x as much for each felony point
There's a 50% chance you won't gain Rep for each felony point on a delivery (it's shuffled at least so you'll gain it next time)
Each felony point doubles your final law debt.
Each felony point makes shop prices rise +25% and sale prices of your items lower -25%. With 4FP shops refuse to buy from you and are selling items for 2x their value.
Felony points can be worked off after working off a law debt. Paying a fine doesn't work, you have to explicitly stick around to pay off the law debt. One strategy is to pay the fee, commit a very minor crime and then use that as the opportunity to work off an FP.
Law Debts
You have three choices to pay a law debt:
Work it off (more on this in a bit)
Pay it off (2x the value of the law debt)
Habbail.
Working it off
This involves doing some kind of mind-numbing work for 16 hours per day in maybe 15 minute windows. In return, your law debt will go down some amount. You also can't do anything else, and if you don't take some kind of real-time action in some window of time, the amount your law debt gets worked off goes down. I'm not sure on the exact mechanics here, but needless to say it sucks a lot.
Obviously you'd want to be present for the entire 16-hour block. You get breaks between days at least. I'm thinking a day takes 10 minutes of real time to pass.
FP works similarly, except it's 20 minutes and the windows for time are more brutal. Hard mode, basically. Each one incurs some fixed law debt, and you have to fully work (or clement) off one before you can do the next.
Before you have the chance to work again, you can do one of the following:
Pick the fee option or the Habbail option for the remainder of your law debt. You don't get this option if you're working off FP, however you do get the chance to leave altogether -- the problem here is you have to work off the full FP later on.
Request clemency. The chance of this working is the same number that describes the percentage of law debt you've already worked off. There's a caveat, though -- you can only request it three times before it drops to a static 10%. With a high law debt this might actually be preferable.
Successfully working off (or clementing) a law debt doesn't erase your priors, however working off an FP does in that area.
Habbail
Habbail is a system where you can pay a law debt fee incrementally.
You can set the terms here -- some amount to pay each day for some amount of days, totaling the fee. It does minn somewhere.
Each day you must pay the required amount (or more) at your local hab center.
If you *don't*, then it pulls out of your reserve if you paid ahead. If even that doesn't work, then you have to work off or clement the remainder of your law debt, can't work off FP on this run, and can't Habbail again. This also counts as an arrest, incurring additional consequences (like drugs, stolen items) and adding a prior to the "skipped habbail" crime, which works the same as other ones. An arrest that you can't Habbail out of. Sucks!
Drugs work similar to the way they do in Neptopia. I'm not sure how you buy them exactly, but they definitely don't appear in shops. Legal ones might, and they're typically worse from an addiction standpoint.
Drugs will alter anything but the legal system in various useful ways.
There's a cost, though -- Tolerance. Each drug has a Homeostasis window where you shouldn't use the drug again (measured in days). If you do, then you gain a Tolerance Point.
Each drug works a bit differently, but the basic idea is that it'll lose some of its potency with TP acquired and you'll also have addiction windows where you *have to* take the drug or you'll get negative effects that mirror whatever the drug's base positive effects are. This unfortunately also incurs TP.
TP will go down over time if you don't take the drug (how this works depends on the drug).
TP does affect the law system in a sinister way -- working off law debt is harder until TP goes to zero. You can just sit there and do nothing I guess as it ticks down.
Each drug also has some threshold for ODing, depending on how much of the drug you've taken in the last day. You can also OD in the other direction if your addiction is bad enough and you don't take it. Unless you've been arrested, this event incurs a hefty medical cost and if you don't pay it you get arrested for that specific crime. More than likely you'd have drugs on you too. Not good!
Multiple drugs in your system gives you more potential for both addiction and ODing. I'm not sure how this works, but it's pretty bad.
The worst part of all of this is that you don't know any of these effects at the outset. You have to explicitly do research.
On the black market, you can buy illegal materials that you can combine together into Goojf items in a potions-like way, that'll affect the law system in various useful ways:
Not getting arrested in the first place is the best one obviously, but hard to make.
Things that affect results, law debt, etc.
Things that affect fees and working it off mechanics
Clemency and habbail mechanics (including skipped habbail).
Things that allow working off FP in other ways than first working off a law debt.
Things that reduce priors.
The unfortunate aspect of this is that the base ingredients are confiscated if you get arrested, so make sure to store them in your base when you don't need them. The downside of *this* is that you can only combine them together as a shady service, which runs into those problematic mechanics.
Turn illegal materials into Goojfs and illegal items.
Sell Goojfs and illegal items
Learn thief techniques
Fence stolen items in a variety of categories.
Shades appear at various parts of the city in alleys and related types of areas. The mechanics here are a bit weird.
Each shade has some set of services and some set of items that they sell (if they do). However you don't know any of this at the outset. Shades also have some title and some syndicate that they belong to (this is *very* important, I'll get to it in a bit).
You have a sort of mad libs style dialogue minigame here where you put in nouns/verbs that are procedural and change from seed to seed from some really broad list. These mean different things and you have to either learn and remember them manually (or with notes), or equip the appropriate shade dictionary into a mind slot to get automatic parenthesed translations (there's more than one here unfortunately, making shady services expensive from a food perspective).
Like, "do you sell drugs" might instead be "do you clamp gasoline". They'll then list out the drugs they sell with their own shade names.
There's a bunch of red herrings in there, and if you phrase something horribly, you need to either pay them or they won't interact with you until you do. Different syndicates will use different terms as well -- thankfully this pulls from a pallettized list of possibilities.
To learn the terms in the first place you have to pay them for each one. They'll know the terms for their own syndicate but not any other. Titles work similarly and describe the services they have available vaguely.
Some titles mean "undercover cop" (ucc). Actual uccs will give you misleading information here. If you use a shady service from one of them you'll get arrested. Until you identify all ucc titles in a syndicate (the hard way), titles will appear with question marks. Uccs when they describe their own title will use one of the general categories (which are potentially possible anyway, so they're hard to figure out. One strategy though is to spend money and identify all titles -- identifying all uccs this way will also remove the question marks.
Some of the transport systems take multiple in-game days.
With these, you have several options:
Hab -- you're just confined to your base for the entire duration of the journey. If a delivery requires transport you'll get a ticket for this option.
Compartment -- you can enter your hab for free and get daily gruel. These sometimes contain shades as well, though the usual ucc caveats apply.
Elite -- three meals per day with a variety of options, some other shops for materials, and on the off chance that you find a shade they're 100% safe. Very useful for a number of reasons, but unfortunately expensive.
None of these have rollover consequences, incidentally, so the only way to be arrested is via ucc on a compartment journey.
If you get really bored, you can just sleep. You still have to eat, of course. Typically though compartment and elite transport are just really good opportunities for doing stuff in your base. Occasionally a delivery with high rep will give you a ticket for one of these.
When you start making some serious coin, it might make sense to join a Club. These are an upgraded hab center that offers some of the conveniences of elite transport.
There are tons of these. They are, unfortunately, areas where you need to be dressed appropriately, belong there (or appear like you do), or escape in time if you get caught.
Clubs require some exorbitant flat fee and then give you permanent benefits, which include:
No rollover penalties while you're in the complex.
Random shops that restock every day.
3 meals per day with some variety of options
The ability to link an arbitrary hab center to the club for free. This is highly useful as it means the club is essentially everywhere, and can also be used to form your own transport networks (granted you can only have one of these active at a time).
They might also contain:
100% safe shades with various properties here that don't need the dialogue minigame to interact with.
Occasional gifts of compartment or elite tickets.
If you're dressed right, you can come in and wander around, and join the club if you like it. You can belong to multiple clubs at once if you can somehow afford it, which also means you can set up a lot of transport networks. Sure does get expensive quick though.
Unless you're on a delivery, some POIs and subareas will have clothing expectations. If you enter them without that tier or higher of clothing and get caught and then don't escape in time, you'll get arrested.
Some specialty areas also have more elaborate requirements -- specific colors, fabrics, whatever. Since higher tiers of clothing are more expensive this drastically impacts the accessibility of these areas, since you'll basically need a full wardrobe.
There's also uniforms -- they're almost always cazz or biscas (occasionally sharp) but each item of clothing is very specific. Uniforms come into play with private areas -- unless you're explicitly on a delivery you can only enter with the uniform and the "blending in" thief technique. The upside is much better loot.
Clothing shops sell clothing, obviously. Typically limited to some selection of types, colors or fabrics. General shops also exist but have a heavy markup -- these are bespoke and just make whatever you tell them to. The tier of clothing needed in a clothing shop is one below the clothing in question or higher.
Areas such as shops and houses have NPCs in them that wander slowly around subareas randomly (or might just be fixed for longer windows) in real time.
In Thief Mode, you're aware of all NPCs in the area and their status, which is one of these:
Elsewhere -- they just aren't going to notice you.
Nearby -- they can notice you, but won't necessarily do so unless you do something suspicious. This means they're either in the same sunroom or an adjacent one.
Saw -- they saw you do something suspicious. There's a cooldown before they go back to Nearby.
Alerted -- if you do something else suspicious they'll move towards where the suspicious activity happened. You now have to get away until they return to Elsewhere status, at which point it'll reset.
Getting Caught
The same rules here apply when you're somewhere you don't belong or are wearing the wrong clothing. Only in thief mode do you know where NPCs are, however.
In any case, when you get caught you now have to get at least two areas away from wherever you are before the timer runs out. NPCs in the same subroom can slow you down as well, and you've got navigation hell problems more generally.
If the timer runs out before the condition is met, then you get arrested. Hunger and tiredness will also affect the timer here.
Furniture has to actually be opened in many cases. This counts as a suspicious activity. Also can require strength depending on the furniture item.
Pilfering has a progress bar and you're suspicious as long as it's active. You can halt it and wait, however, which changes your status but doesn't make the timer go back down. The actual bar depends on the item in question. Also dexterity is involved.
Lockpicking requires filling multiple progress bars to some specific range of values. However lockpicking counts as suspicious and halting will reset your progress on that tumbler. Overfilling the bar will automatically reset this tumbler as well as the previous one, which goes to a halted state.
Different lockpicks do different things with this engine, possibly making challenges easier. They are, however, illegal items. They have different dexterity requirements as well.
Thievery can be quite lucrative, particularly at higher end establishments (more of an investment though for sure).
