If your internet connections aren’t very reliable or if you plan on editing or backing up your save files, you’ll want to play offline. For most people, though, I would recommend playing online just so you have the security of your save files being updated on a remote server. Games can have problems if they happen to crash right in the middle of saving the game and this game saves VERY frequently! Also, it is interesting to see what others are picking for dialog options. If you find you don’t like playing online, the game will let you pull your save file down and play offline if you want using the Load menu on the main screen. You can’t ever push the file back up to the online server, though.

After an introduction, you'll be asked about your company. There’s a choice as to what your company’s focus mastery will be. I think sense of Belonging is pretty useless but, even if you already picked that, it only costs 1000 to switch and you’ll make that much cash after just a few missions, so don't worry about it too much.

Albus and other characters you gain also get to pick a personal mastery. Again, these choices are very easy to switch later so don't worry too much about the choice.

At the start, you’ve just got Albus but you’ll get more characters as you keep playing. Once you get through the bar fight, you’ll be able to set up your office.

In the bar or your office, Press R and pick Albus to see his character sheet. Here you can see his class, abilities, masteries, stats, inventory, and skills. Inventory is pretty easy to understand. Not all the stats are so easy but you can hover over those to find out what they are. So what is with having skills AND abilities AND these mastery things!?

Skills are just your crafting skills. You aren’t even going to get the ability to craft until after your third character shows up so there’s no need to worry about those for a while. Abilities are the actions you can take into battle (e.g. swinging your sword, casting wind gust, and so on). Masteries are passive skills, like giving your character more hit points or the ability to counter-attack.

You might also notice that you’ve got two levels for your character! The first is displayed in big text in the bottom-center area, which is your character’s overall level. There’s another in the upper left that shows the character’s class level. Your character’s class level goes up as you gain experience, just like the overall level.

As your class level goes up, you’ll gain access to new abilities and masteries. The ‘Change Abilities’ button on your character’s stat sheet will let you switch what abilities you bring into missions. (You can’t switch inside a mission!) Right at the start, Albus only has a few abilities and is bringing all of them so the game won’t even show you the button to switch them around. It won’t take long to advance his class to where he has enough abilities to give you some choices, though. Advancing class will also unlock some mastery recipes.

Eventually, you’ll get high enough level to pick a more specialized class. The new class will have even more abilities and masteries to learn as it advances. They also have additional slots for masteries and abilities. When this option showed up for me, Albus and Sion had both hit the max level for their basic classes so switching to one of the specialized classes was a no-brainer decision. If the character hasn’t finished the base class, though, you’ll have to weigh getting the specific class now or just sticking with the base class until it hits max level.

If you decide you don’t like your specific class (or, more likely, you max it out), go ahead and switch to the other specific class. You’ll get to keep the abilities you learned, but the slots will change so you might not be able to bring all of them into missions. You’ll keep the mastery recipes, too. there won’t be much use for them as they required the specific class but they’ll be there if you switch back. It costs training manuals to start a new class but that’s a one-time cost. You can switch between classes you’ve already paid for all you want. (Though the changes in mastery slots will probably mean you’ll need to pay to remove a few of those. No big deal. You get lots of training manuals.)

(Now there's a brand new character association system that first shows up when you recruit Sion! I haven't gotten to use it much so I don't have a lot to say yet but, so far, it seems like you don't really need to pay that much attention to it at the start. Just reap the benefits of the bonus masteries when they appear. Once you get a good handle on the game, check out the various conditions that will give each character bonus friendship and aim for those. More later once I have more of an idea of what I'm talking about.)

These are similar to abilities except you don’t need to push a button to activate them. (Well, there are a few exceptions.) For instance, a mastery might add to your hit points, reduce the damage from slashing attacks, or cause your character to automatically strike the first enemy to get close. They’ve got their own screen for tracking which ones a character is bringing. Also, there’s… rather more of them then there are abilities. About six hundred more!

While masteries are things your character knows how to do, they act more like equipment. You can remove a mastery from Albus and give it to Sion, for instance. Enemies drop lots of masteries when defeated and you can get multiple copies of them. If this game took place in a cyberpunk setting, they would probably be “knowledge chips” that you could plug in and remove.
When you open up the mastery board for a character, you’ll see they are divided into five different groups: basic, support, attack, defense, and ability. Every mastery has a TP (training point) cost with most costing between 0 and 3 points. Your character’s maximum number of training points is listed at the top (5 in Albus’ picture, 24 in Sion’s picture below). Furthermore, each group has its own maximum TP. When setting up your masteries, you’ll need a slot in such a way that you stay under the max for the group and the overall maximum. (And yes, there are masteries that will increase the limit for groups and for the overall total!)

When you add a subclass, you also get an additional mastery board. You can buy additional ones for TP, too. These let you set up masteries for quick switching. For instance, you might make a board where Albus concentrates on defense while a second board concentrates on his wind powers. Then you can easily swap between the two before a mission. Just be aware that masteries on any board are treated as “in use.” If you want to put Solidity on both of Albus’ boards and Sion’s boards, you’ll need four of them! That makes the boards less useful until you get far enough into the game that you have masteries to spare.

If you put in masteries that work well together, you can unlock a mastery set. For instance, Sion has blunt, piercing, and slashing resistance slotted in his picture. Those three combine to make the physical resistance mastery set, which gives him an additional 15% off physical damage taken.

If you slot in all the masteries needed for a set except for one, you should see it pop up on the mastery set list but with a ? on the mastery that you haven’t got yet. If you hover over the missing mastery, the game will tell you what group it belongs to and even whether you’ve got the mastery, could build the mastery, or if you currently know nothing about the mastery which is a huge help in discovering that last, missing piece. (Or, if you aren’t into discovery, you can check one of the other Steam guides.)

You can see even more information on the Mastery Set screen. This will show you your progress on all the masteries! I don’t really pay too much attention to it for mastery set discovery (it’s hard enough figuring out a mastery when there’s just one left) but it gets very handy if you want to wipe a character’s masteries clean or start a new board. Not only can you look up the stats for the masteries you know, you can also select the mastery set, hit ‘equip,’ and have the game slot all the masteries you need to get the set!

Once you get through the first tutorial missions, you’ll set up your office and get a mission control panel. There you’ll find a few missions. There won’t be many at first but the number will grow.

This will be your first view of the mission screen. It's showing you just one mission option and it's red, meaning it must be done to advance the story.

Now, here's the mission screen from somewhat later in the game:


The first thing you should know about is the “difficulty” column on the right side: this difficulty does not represent how hard the mission will be for you! Even at level 30, that Young-Il Construction Site mission shows up as “hard.” I've got no clue what it's really supposed to represent after 200+ hours of play. Just ignore it.

There are a few mission types in this game. The ones with a little red book next to them, like the Pugo Street mission in the first picture, are the important ones that drive the story forward. The blue ones are repeatable missions you can do as many times as you like, including 0 times. The purple ones, like the one at the end of the second picture's list, is a 'violent' mission. These are just like repeatable missions except they are extra long and have multiple bosses.

When a mission is new, it shows up with yellow text. Sometimes. Sometimes it will have a "new" flag on it. Sometimes both. They will start out near the end of the list, so they aren't hard to find. They will eventually drop the 'new' indicator(s) if you ignore them for long enough.

The second screenshot also shows lots of missions with envelopes next to them. These missions are ones that contain quest objectives in them. The one I have selected can help satisfy two quests: one to find some lost artwork and one to find a lost watch.

But wait, there are no red missions in that second screenshot! No red missions, no advancement! Game over!? No, it's just that the story needs to advance in another way. At the start of the game, that will often be things like 'look at the warehouse' or 'talk to one of the not-young-guys in the bar.' The one that seems to generate the most questions on the forum, though, are the portraits on the right side of the screen, like this one:

Just click the portrait (this one is marked 'suggestion') and a special sequence will play out. It will likely lead to a special mission with no chance to prepare, so make sure you're prepared before clicking!

When you first start the game, you get an email from some guy named Roberto. There's no Roberto around and you aren't given the option to wander around town to look for him, so it's easily forgotten. Sometime after your party size grows to three, you'll get a new option to 'move to a new location.' This will let you go to Shooter Street, where there are many vendors and also Roberto. Go ahead and talk to Roberto. He's going to want to fight, so bring some healing potions! Once you beat him (or maybe even if you just give him a good fight?), you'll open up the quest system.

Quests come in several variations. Many are just additions to the missions you'll already be doing - like adding some boxes to open. Some want you to collect certain kinds of treasure, like brass spoons. Some are full missions of their own. None are at all required to win the game. They are just quick little additions to get you some more loot. Though, for some reason, the first quests (after Roberto himself) seem geared towards lower level characters.

To see who has missions, just look at your mini-map on Shooter Street using the 'M' key:Question marks are quests in various states. This will stay up as you wander around.

Case Record
If you want to re-do a major story mission, you can do that here.

Activity Report & Jurisdictions
It will be a little while before you get enough cash so you can apply for another jurisdiction but these are nice, little moneymakers. You pay out a good sized chunk of change and, as long as you keep the residents happy by doing missions in that area, they will keep paying you. One key factor to watch is the “Jurisdiction Case List” which shows the missions that help this region. If that list is empty or if the mission listed is beyond your level, you’re not going to have an easy time keeping them happy!

Troublemakers
Your Troubleshooters have to shoot at something, don’t they? This is them!

As you defeat enemies, more information will become known about them: what their stats are, what masteries they drop, and so on. You’ll get a block bonus against them, too. Once you know enough about them, you’ll get a Valkyrie coin you can use with vendors (though not for quite some time).

To Your Health, and Armor, and...
Don's bar lets you order food. This will restore motivation but, honestly, unless you've had to restart a mission a few times, just taking the time to mess with your new masteries will do that. However, there's more to this feature. Try clicking the Hot Coffee and Savory Sandwich. "Start of a busy day!" will show under the menu. Buy it for Albus and... nothing much happens. Now do it a second time. Albus will now have a big grin on his face. If you hover your mouse over his picture, you'll see he has a 'Very Full' buff that helps his defenses.

There's a whole bunch of these you can find. (And even more when you unlock Shooter Street.) Just be sure not to eat or drink too much! If you want to know more, check the guides section on Steam for details.

Jukebox
Eventually, Don will let you mess with the Jukebox in the Sliverlining. There’s also a jukebox in the bar on Shooter Street. This will let you switch the default music in the game. Just select which song you want then click the little pencil next to “Office” to change the music in the Silverlining. Shooter Street is the “lobby.” If you get tired of the music you pick, you can switch to another one or click the circular arrows to withdraw your setting and let the game go back to picking random songs.

Just like masteries themselves aren’t really knowledge but more like knowledge chips you plug into your brain, mastery research really isn’t research. It’s crafting. The process of creating them is a bit confusing, too, or at least it was for me the first time I tried. So here’s the step by step…

When you click the Mastery Research button, you’ll start out with just the left side of the screen showing, like so:
I happen to have some new masteries from a recent mission, which is why Wind Road and two others have a little red “N” on them. Some others, like Treasure Hunter and Understanding have a + on them. That means that crafting the recipe will teach you the recipe for the next higher version of the mastery. Masteries that are in white text are ones where I can craft the mastery right now and grey means I can’t. The first number after the mastery is the TP cost for slotting it. The second number is how many I have.

Now let’s craft the Inner Peace mastery. (It’s a few pages back from the masteries in the first picture.) Inner Peace is a nice mastery that lets you recover 20 vigor when you don’t take two actions in a turn. So I went to the correct page in my list and clicked on it, giving me this screen:
(I could have also used the key word search on “peace” or “vigor” to find the mastery. Even “20” would have worked!)
So now you can see Inner Peace at the top. Below that are the required mastery ingredients. Specifically, an Understanding mastery. Below that are the additional masteries. The required masteries are specific masteries you need to create the new mastery while the additional masteries are broader, requiring any mastery in certain groups. Below that is a plus/minus which you can use to make multiple copies of a mastery. Below that is how many TP points you need. And finally, at the bottom of the column, is the Research button you use to craft the mastery.

If you look back at the left side, Inner Peace is in grey text, and now we can see why: I don’t have any Understanding masteries! Arg. So now I’ve got to back out and find the Understanding mastery on the left side, right? Wrong! Just double click on the Understanding mastery and it pops right over to the following screen for building an Understanding mastery!
This time, the Concentration mastery is required and I do have one of those. In fact, I’ve got 7 of them! But what’s that yellow + doing up there next to Understanding? The plus sign means that crafting this recipe will teach me another new recipe – except that it’s yellow, which means I already know the new recipe. Whether yellow or grey, though, hovering your mouse over the + will tell you exactly what mastery that it would reveal.

So now we need to put in the additional masteries. The required points at the bottom tell us we need 3 points, 1 of which is already accounted for by the Concentration mastery. There’s two slots for the additionals: one for the support group and one for attack. That means I can either pick a 1 point mastery from support and a 1 point mastery from attack, or I can pick a 2 point mastery from support, or I can pick a 2 point mastery from attack. The masteries that work for that are listed on the right side and sorted by how many I have of each.

Let’s pick Tactical Envelopment. I’ve got plenty of them and they are worth 2 points. You can click on the mastery on the right side then click on the Add below but it’s easier to just double click on it to add it (just like the text at the bottom of the screen says).
Because I have 7 Concentration masteries and even more Tactical Envelopments, it’s possible for me to make up to 7 Understanding masteries if I wanted. It’s just a matter of clicking the blue + until I get the number I want.

Also, the Concentration mastery has a gold star by it. That’s what happens when you bookmark a mastery using alt+right mouse button. I’ve found that I like a lot of masteries that can be created from Concentration so I’ve marked it to make sure I try to stay away from using it too much. When you’ve got a big list of masteries on the right, having that star makes it easy to avoid masteries you consider extra valuable. (I also use it to mark masteries that I want to craft later.)

So now the Research button is enabled. Push it and ding! One handy dandy Understanding mastery. (And one less Concentration and Tactical Envelopment mastery.) But we’re supposed to be making an Inner Peace mastery. Do we need to find it on the left side? Nope! At the very top, you can see a history of where you’ve been and there’s Inner Peace right there. Click “Inner Peace” and…
We’re back to crafting Inner Peace, only now there’s an Understanding mastery to craft with! Again, the mastery just requires three points, of which one is being supplied by Understanding. I could use the Tactical Envelopment mastery as I now <ahem> have 12 of them (sorry, I had to re-do some screenshots so the counts aren’t quite the same) but instead I’ll use one support and one attack mastery, like so:
I’ve only got the one Understanding mastery so this time I can’t craft more than one Inner Peace mastery. Now all I need to do is click the Research button and I’ve got my sweet Inner Peace mastery!

One quick aside: the game will actually let you use 0 point masteries like Learning as additional masteries in your crafting. They contribute 0 points, though, so it’s really not a good idea. At least I presume it isn’t... I’ve never actually tried it. Do you think they might give out an achievement for doing something like that? Well, achievements aren’t covered in this guide so you’ll have to find out for yourself. ;)

When you launch a mission, you get a screen showing all the Troubleshooters that will be on the mission. Below each is a list of all their equipment. If you click on the equipment, you can swap it out for other items. This comes in really handy for swapping what’s in your pockets. For instance, if you’re going into a sunny mission, those flash grenades aren’t going to be of much use so you can swap them for something else.

When you first get Sion and start your next mission, Sion won’t be on the screen. You need to click “Member” along the bottom to add another member to the team. You’ll need to do this each time you recruit a new person.

Resistance reduces how much damage you take, but it's a bit complex. The help section gives us the formula. If D is the damage the attack does, R is your character's total resistance, and L is the attacker's level, then the damage done is:
If R is 100 and the attacker's level is 10 then the damage is 2/3rds of the damage you would get with no resistance. If the attacker is level 40, though, you'll take 5/6ths of the damage. To get to 2/3rds again against a level 40, you need a resistance of 225.

So, basically, your resistance will reduce damage, but you'll find you need more and more resistance to reduce the damage as your enemies get stronger.

There are a bunch of resistance sub-types, too. You'll quickly find masteries that increase your blunt, pierce, and slashing resistance. Those will add to your resistance value but only if the attack matches the type.

But what about armor? Well, uhhh.... the help doesn't say. Common wisdom is that it acts like resistance that works against all types of physical attacks. And what about when it's just an addition to your resistance with no type at all? Well.... I guess that's going to help against all attack types, but I've also heard that it only helps against magical attack types.

At least Dodge is straightforward. More dodging means enemies are more likely to flat out miss. Hiding behind obstructions increases your dodge. Being further away helps, too.

Blocking increases your chance of partially blocking damage and also reduces your chances of getting hit by a critical strike. Damage from a blocked attack is reduced by at least half, but any other special effects still happen. Blocking a fire attack will do less damage, but you'll still be on fire.

Finally, there's good old hit points. More HP means it takes more damage to put you out of action. (It will take more healing to get you back to full health, too.)

There’s a great description of how experience is divided in the help and you can get a good bit more xp by using the masteries in the game. Basically, the person who actually gets the kill… sorry, “arrest” gets most of the experience. So, if you’re trying to get somebody caught up, it’s good to give that character the ki… the arrest.

The XP isn’t diminished by bringing more people, either. When you first get Sion, don’t leave Albus behind to try to level up Sion faster – it won’t help. In fact, you can get XP even faster with the two of them by giving Sion the Yearning mastery so he’ll get an XP bonus every time Albus earns XP.

Most missions will include a bunch of loot boxes. The ones with crosses on them contain healing and, for the first several hours, will be the only source of healing potions in the game. The ones with squares on them contain loot of some sort. Once you get access to the vendor guys in the bar, potions won’t be a problem anymore but the other loot boxes still have nice stuff *IF* they aren't too low of a level. The best gear will drop from bosses.

Quests can reward you with items that are part of a set (see image on the left). Individually, these items aren't much, but when a set of them is worn, they give some extra stats and bonuses for collecting gear. Further quests can give you the recipes for the items, which let you upgrade them into better versions.

This is a tad odd. Say you’re in a mission and you’ve got two healing potions. You use one of them. When you get back, you look and find you have used exactly one potion. Makes total sense, right? Next mission, you use two potions. When you get back… you’ve only lost one potion!?

Items seem to come in packs. If you don’t use the item at all, it will stay in your inventory when the mission is done. If it’s used at all, it will be gone when the mission is done. I wouldn't worry about it too much, though. It's easy to buy replacements once the old vendor guys show up at the bar. Shooter Street has even more variety.

The best stuff to use is the cops’ stuff – you don’t get penalized for those at all! You don’t get to decide what they bring so it isn’t always the most useful gear for a situation but, hey, it's free!

The cops may not be as versatile as your own characters but they’re definitely handy to have around! Just be sure to keep an eye on their vitality because it runs out fast for them. If you don’t want to bother with them, you can use the little flags in the lower left part of the screen to set them to automatic commands. They can pick up loot and healing just like your characters can and will return the items to your party once the mission is done.

If you get a cop killed, you aren’t penalized (at least that I can tell). Presumably, the same system that’s putting the villains back together that you “arrest” with your two handed sword is also bringing the police back to life after the mission completes.

When you finish a mission, your characters will be tired. Characters that are injured or put out of action will be even more tired. This is reflected by having lower motivation. If you’re getting blasted in a mission or fail it, you can use the menu options to go back to the latest checkpoint or even retreat completely - with a motivation penalty and a little of the loot you've gathered going to the store instead of your inventory.

Starting a mission with low motivation will cost you some vitality regeneration points which can be painful, and it's so easy to avoid! You can restore motivation by eating at the bar or simply waiting. Motivation comes back in real time, even if you aren’t playing the game! Often times, everyone's motivation will be back by the time you check out all your new items and masteries. If it isn't, get your characters some food. Or exit the game and get yourself some food!

Besides all the typical sounds and video options, there’s some interesting options in this game you should be aware of. Under Gameplay…

• Quickly display X’s actions: makes your allies or enemies move faster. Speeds up the game a lot but it isn’t as epic, either.
  
• Camera movements: handy if the camera is disorienting to you or makes you motion sick?
  
• Tile information: tells you what material the tile has under your pointer. A little handy but only rarely in my experience. Turning it off reduces screen clutter.
  
• Simplify/Short stuff: more options to speed up the game. You won’t want to have these on when you’re first learning how everything works but you might want to turn them on down the line. Waiting for that level up window can get a bit tedious, for instance.
  
• Always show overcharge: a character’s overcharge ability(ies) only shows up when the SP bar fills up, unless you switch this on. Then it’s always there and only enabled when the bar fills up.
  
• Hide the ratio of the choice: In online mode, you can often see how many people have chosen each dialog option. If you don't want to see that, just turn this option on.
  
• Show dialogs when a character talks: Show English subtitles when your characters shout something. Turn it on if you want to know what they are saying. Turn it off if you know Korean or want to keep pretending that Albus is calling some of his enemies gits.

Under Interface…

• Battle cam rotation angle: if you want a little more fine control over the camera angle, drop it down to 30. It will take longer to spin the camera all the way around but you’ll be less likely to be stuck choosing between two bad camera angles.
  
• Display local time: puts a clock in the upper right corner.
  
• Lobby camera controls: the “lobby” is Shooter Street, when that opens up for you.

Ah, sweet sweet loot! You can get loot from boxes on missions and enemies drop some of the stuff they use when arrested. Legendary bosses may drop legendary items that are really handy. Quests often reward you with special items, too.

Identification

You might be a little too poor to identify everything in your first few missions but you’ll soon get more than enough cash to identify everything you get. Identifying will make an item worth more if you sell it, plus it obviously helps decide what your characters should use. Sometimes identification costs a little more than the gains you get for selling an identified item but, once identified, you know what an item is so you don’t have to identify any more that you receive later. Once I got enough cash, the first thing I do after a mission is get everything identified.

Crafting

You’ll understand how to craft a few basic things as you gain new Troubleshooters. Crafting a few of them will open up the ability to craft higher level things. Crafting a few of those open up even higher level things… and so on.

If you go into the crafting screen and select the green 'item crafting' on the left side of the main window, you should see an entry for the Greater Healing potion. You make that by combining a few small healing potions. Those little healing potions are practically useless, so go ahead and click the craft button in the lower right. Ding, ding, yay! You've got another potion!

You'll also see a progress bar for workmanship and some 'next phase craftable items.' As you practice making things, the things you make will become a little better. Eventually, you max the bar out, which is when the 'next phase' items unlock. Make another Greater Healing potion and you should unlock the next phase: the Bravery potion. Make two bravery potions and you unlock the Strength and Patience potions.

Except, they don't unlock. Albus is the only character that can make potions ("drugs") and he's only level 1. Patience and Strength require level 2. So, how do you raise Albus' drug-making level? You don't. You hire a new Troubleshooter with better skill.

Early on, crafting is mighty unimportant. Later on, when you keep your items around for more than a few missions, they become more interesting. Much later on, crafting will become the main way you improve your gear!

Extraction
Some materials can be extracted from nodes out in the field. It's pretty likely that you'll find these nodes before you get an extractor to extract them with! No worries. Just leave them be. You won't need their materials for quite a while anyway, and by then you will have access to much better nodes.

• Watch out for traffic jams! You’ve got a lot of people to move around. If there’s a lot of stuff out there, it’s easy to trap people so they can’t move the direction you want – or even move at all if you really box them in. Keeping diagonals open often does the trick but not always.
  
  
• Quick aside: you’ll be asked by the bar owner if you want to pay rent every 15 missions or every 5. The answer is pretty irrelevant, actually. The rent is really low compared to how much cash will be rolling in so, unless you cut it insanely close buying some new gear, it isn’t going to matter. The same goes for your employees when you’re asked how to pay them.
  
  
• I’m not sure what determines the ranking you see at the end of a mission, I've gotten "perfect" on missions where I definitely wasn't perfect, but it doesn’t seem to affect anything anyway.
  
  
• One of the most common problems I've seen on the forums is from people getting their progress stuck. The missions with the red background and a little book icon are the ones that push the story forward but sometimes no such mission will be on the board. Sometimes there will be a picture of somebody on the right side of the screen in your company office room that will give you a special mission for you to do. Rarely, you'll need to go to your warehouse room to get a little tutorial on how that works, or talk to the older guys in the bar that act as stores.
  
  
• Got new masteries popping up with a count of 0? You don't always need to find masteries to know about them. Gaining class levels, for instance, will often give you access to masteries. You'll have to build them yourself via mastery research if you want one of them.
  
  
• You are not playing XCOM! Yes, the battle system is similar, but the rest of the game design is nothing like it. If your team gets wiped out in XCOM, you re-load a saved game or you put a whole bunch of pictures on the wall of the fallen. For a team wipe in this game, you mess around with your skills and gear a bit, maybe buy a cup of hot coco for everyone, and try again. Failure is fine! Experiment with anything you think might work. You won't lose the game if the idea does a Ric Flair flop.