Quick start guide - Surviving your first few cycles

This is a quick start guide to get you started in citizen sleeper, as well as a few drives that are really worth exploring.

Introduction

Welcome to this quick-start guide on citizen sleeper. This guide serves as a basic outlook to what you should be doing at the start of the game, and how to eventually have a routine that will keep you playing until you decide to finish the game by one of its many endings. I will avoid spoilers as much as I can, but be warned that a lot of the game relies on discovering things for yourself, so if some surprises or events feel different while using the guide, it's perfectly normal.

Character creation, skills + perks and progression

Character creation

Citizen sleeper gives you a few basic character "classes" to play as. Granted, these are mostly just different starting points, and in reality you can, if you're resourceful, become almost a master of all skills. There isn't one that's exactly better than the others, so feel free to go with taste.

Citizen sleeper isn't exactly a deep character RPG to begin with. Your character never has a name, gender or sex attached to them, and the way you'll interact with the world is mostly how that character will be defined, with a few choices attached. The protagonist of the game, for all intents and purposes, is an interface directed by you, more than its own entity with its own personality and story. In other words, they're meant to be a self-insert for whatever you want them to be.

Skills + Perks

Each classes will start you with a +1 in a skill, and a -1 in another. These are very important, as these modifiers basically alter your chance of success/failure of a task by a whopping 16.67%, both ways. Another important factor is that skills will also involve perks, giving you bonus actions or rewards, and these are also a massive game changer.

Here are the skills in the game:

Engineer

This skill will be involved for any tasks requiring repairs, understanding mechanical systems and projects, and crafting items.

• Perk 1: Efficent Extractor: Chance to gain RANDOM SCRAP ITEM on ENGINEER actions. At first glance not great, but extremely useful paired with SELF REPAIR (See below).
  
• Perk 2: Self Repair: Use SCRAP COMPONENTS at home to repair CONDITION. This one is a game changer. CONDITION is basically the real end game. If you run out of it, you die. This skill literally allows you to survive endlessly if you play your dice right.

Interface

This skill will be involved for any tasks requiring working with computers and software. Hacking, gathering information on networks and some Drives requires this skill.

• Perk 1: Transfer Intercept: Chance to gain Cryo on INTERFACE actions. In the early game, getting cryo to buy stabilizer will be the best way to keep your condition high. Seeing as hacking is an extremely good way to get rid of your bad dices, this can make you a lot of money on throw-away actions and save your life.
  
• Perk 2: Icebreaker: AGENT nodes gives you double data rewards. This is a money-maker perk. Most data rewards can be traded in for monetary rewards once your discover the proper agency/connection to do so, and will pay a good sum for every data you gather. Paired with the first node, you'll never run out of money to buy whatever you want.

Endure

This skill will be involved for any tasks that requires endurance, toughness and physical labor. This will also affect physical drives and keep you alive.

• Perk 1: Photosynthetic skin: 'Sunbathe' DICE ACTION allows energy recover at home. In the early game, useful when you haven't found an easy way to recover energy as it cannot fail even with terrible dice. Mid-to-late game, its completely useless.
  
• Perk 2: Hard to kill: Keep 2 DICE even when condition is BREAKING. Again, it sounds good on paper and could be useful in early game, but completely useless by mid-to-late game. The reason is that the worst your condition, the less dices you get every cycle, which turns into a negative feedback loop as the less you can do each day, the more you'll deteriorate and break each day. You NEVER want to be at 2/5 dice - let alone 1/5, as you're losing roughly 60% of what you can do every cycle.

Intuition

This skill will be involved for any tasks that requires perception, listening, and sensing the motives of those around you. This is also a prime gambling skill.

• Perk 1: Predictive reasoning: DICE ACTION displays potential positive and negative outcomes. Overall, a very useful skill to have when you aren't sure if you want to throw your best dice or your worst dice at an action. This can save you a lot of headache.
  
• Perk 2: Instant Karma: Reroll all your DICE once per CYCLE. Arguably, IMO, the best perk in the game bar none. Somedays, you'll have 4-5 dices and they'll all be terrible, forcing you to waste them on bad-reward actions. Other times, you'll have 2-3 dices that are terrible, with two good dices. GUESS WHAT? You can use the 2-3 good dices, and then REROLL to recycle your bad dices into good ones. This perk makes you good at EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING!!!

Engage

This skill will be involved for any tasks that requires action, conversation, social cues and combat. Thematically, my favorite, but gameplay-wise, not great.

• Perk 1: Thrill seeker: Chance to gain ENERGY after any ENGAGE action A good perk to cheaply fill your energy bar, especially combined with ENGAGE money-making skills giving you both cash and energy. HOWEVER, ENGAGE money making is not unlocked until mid-to-late game.
  
• Perk 2: Obsessive haggler: All CRYO actions are discounted by 20%. A pretty good QOL perk. Cheaper Stabilizers and food will go a long way in keeping you alive and happy.

TL;DR: IMO, the best skill in the game:

• Intuition: Rerolling dices perk can allow you to succeed almost every challenges and counter bad RNG.
  OR
  Engineer: Ability to fix yourself with scrap gives you a lot of freedom to do other things than working for CRYO and buying Stabilizers.
  
• Interface: Gives you a ton of money to buy stabilizers, food and let you focus on whatever you want to do. Also, Interfacing is a great way to discard bad dices.
  OR
  Engage: Allows you to recover energy while making money, and discounts on the entire economy of the game.
  
• Endure: The perks aren't great, and the actions involved aren't really worth it.

Awakening and surviving

Thankfully, Citizen sleeper is a game that starts relatively slow. You'll have a very few activities to do, and a fairly generous time-limit to complete them. However, don't feel too constrained by the original time-limit of the scrapyard job. The actions to explore districts in the city is how the game really begins.

Most importantly, you'll realize soon enough that you don't have any easy way to regenerate energy and stabilize yourself. These are extremely important, condition first, energy second.

CONDITION

Condition is the condition of your entire body. Sadly, you'll learn soon enough in the game that you aren't exactly like most other people. You don't want - you NEED a drug to keep your body from turning into useless parts. These are stabilizers, the last way to keep people such as yourselves from being free from a corporate grind. Every cycle, your body deteriorates. It is inevitable, it is incurable, but it is treatable. Thus, you must find them and hoard them as much as possible if you want to prolong the call of the void.

In the early game, your main sources of stabilizers will be random events, and eventually a certain doctor's clinic that will sell them to you at a cryo cost. Your first priority will be making sure that you always have at least one stabilizer handy, and to make sure you can afford the next one.

IMPORTANT NOTE: One dose of stabilisers will always restore you to FULL Condition. This means that using them when you're low gives you a lot more than using them when you're still mid or high. HOWEVER, I recommend reading the section below about Dices and Actions to understand when and why to use them.

ENERGY

The other critical stat, energy functions more similar to HP in your average RPG. You can lose it by doing dangerous jobs or doing wearisome activities like farming or scrapping. It depletes faster than Condition, but it is MUCH cheaper to recover and maintain. Losing too much of it will accelerate the deterioration of your body (IE double your Condition loss), just like intense amount of stress and fatigue will destroy your own.

In the early game, your main sources of energy will be a friendly cook in the starting regions. Make sure to go there every time your energy runs low to eat some delicious ramen and keep yourself in (relatively) good health.

Dice, Actions

The key part of the Citizen Sleeper gameplay loop. Every cycle, depending on your Condition, you will generate a number of dice. These are d6, and you've probably seen them elsewhere before. In this game, low numbers are bad, and high numbers are good. Thus, you want to use your 1-2 dice on stuff that isn't mission critical, dangerous or important, and you want to use your 5-6 dice on stuff that's important. Sounds simple enough, right?

The key part is this: Your skill points and perks affect these dices. Sure, 5-6 are always going to be fantastic. HOWEVER, with the right perks, 1-2 can become 3-4, which isn't great but are definitively use-able. PLUS, as stated above in the perks list, you can sometimes reroll these dice OR use them for special actions. Make sure to be careful about these -1 to skills though...

Since every dice is an action, and you can have up to 5 actions per day, I recommend not waiting too long before using stabilisers unless you're in a really bad spot. My reasons:

• The lower amount of actions you have per day, the faster you'll deteriorate without doing anything meaningful
  
• In-game limited events will happen, and they are based on cycle. Meaning if you have barely any actions, you won't be able to keep up.
  
• Negative feedback loop. The less actions you have, the less money you can make, the less chances you have for great dices, and being stuck with a bad dice when you only have 2 might make the difference between a game-over and continuing.

So, that being said, I usually use my stabilisers when I'm on the edge of 3 to 2, or when I'm going to start life-critical timed-event and I can't afford to lose actions.

Thriving

Surviving is to meet one's base needs. To thrive, one must be able to entertain themselves.

As stated in the section above, surviving's all about working to make CRYO, and then using that to buy stabilizers and food. To thrive, you'll need to spend your extra dices carefully.

Exploring

The most important part in Citizen Sleeper, beyond surviving, is exploring. All the sections of the station can be explored, and even if you don't have the right skill or a good dice for it, you still should commit time to it. This is the best way in the early-mid game to spend your free dices, as they'll unlock tons of alternatives for key elements of the game and give you great opportunities.

Plus, due to early game events, at one point you won't have much of a choice anyway.

Interfacing

Depending on your character choice in the early game, Interfacing will either be a good side-activity or a main way to make your CRYO. Let's face it, not every cycle is going to have you pick from amazing 4+ dices. Putting those low dice on real actions could lead to bad outcomes or you getting hurt. Thus, it's always useful to plug in and explore the ship's net for any where you can use them. Sure, there's dangers lurking in there, but interfacing will give you a lot of opportunities to make cash, explore the station further, and complete gigs.

Jobs, Careers

Picking a job that fits your skills is important, but finding one's more difficult. Typically, in the starter area, the jobs you'll get will have very small penalties even if you have crappy dice. But as you explore the station and unlock more and more jobs, they become even a great way to use your bad dice. See, if you have +1 or +2 to the skill for the job, you'll rarely have to worry about failure, and you'll be able to bring 20-30 CRYO per action easy. Using 2-3 meh dice to buy your next stabilizers? Hell yeah!

Trading scrap

The station has traders that come and go every once in a while. It can be very lucrative to buy scrap and scrounge through it. Sure, sometimes you'll get absolute junk, but you'll typically be able to get part of your money back. Sometimes, you'll get great parts you need for Drives or exploration. And finally, sometimes you'll hit the jackpot and get a shipmind part. These are worth a lot of CRYO per pop... but you may want to save for them.

Once you explore the station enough, you'll find a place that can assemble shipminds out of three parts. Once you have a shipmind, you can complete some very important Drives in the game... or sell them for a massive profit. Hell, sometimes it's worth it to buy shipmind parts if you already have 1 or 2 just to make a large lump of cash.

Drives

The meat and potatoes of Citizen Sleeper. Once you're done surviving and making money and getting comfortable with this new world, you'll want to complete these ASAP. These will unlock interesting dialogue and relationships with fun characters, give you skill points to improve your character, and most importantly, lead to an eventual ending to the game itself. Once you have your necessities sorted out and feel like you can splurge, these will be very important to focus on.

Ending the game

Well, I won't go in spoilers here, but complete enough drives, or explore enough, and eventually you'll come across these key events in your character's and other character's lives. This will present itself as an opportunity to you to finally end the game. There's tons of ways to do it too, but I'll let you discover them. You can always return to a previous save once you've done them, but feel free to only commit to the one your character would do themselves.

Beyond

The game has been receiving new updates and events, but I want to use this section to warn you in advance before starting them.

THESE ARE VERY DIFFICULT, VERY TIME SENSITIVE, AND STRESSFUL. I recommend only starting those when you've really done all the other in-game events you wanted to participate in. They will require 75-100% of your attention to complete if you want to 100% them. On my first playthrough, I started them too early, and in between a end-game event and the DLC, I was unable to really complete any major sections of it, leading to a pretty bad outcome.

That's all!

Conclusion

Thank you for reading this guide.

I've written it mostly for people who have decision anxiety or might want some further information than the game gives you. It can be stressful when you don't know if you're doing something right, and my first couple dozen cycles in Citizen Sleepers were definitively pretty stressful, but once these were over, it was a very chill and fun experience. (Well, except the DLC, but that's because I wasn't ready)

[mopek entymemat Δ]

Regarding character creation - "There isn't one that's exactly better than the others, so feel free to go with taste."

I don't feel that's true. In the early game Engineering and Interface are way more useful than other skills, especially compared to Endurance which is essentially useless. That said classes almost represent a start difficulty level with Operator being easy, Machinist medium and Extractor hard, respectively.

[Valescere]

That being said--you're still right, in a sense. And I think it's because of how Drives work. Your pushed to explore the Bright Market to find a doctor. You'll often also find the food vendor. A new drive encourages you to buy your food from him, not the bar. It's intuitive to continue to explore the market. Once you purchase your first stabilizer you're encouraged by drives to move past the Lowend gate and continue exploring forward. If you want to find additional engineering work you're encouraged to work through the shipyard. Early game drives and options don't point towards the bar. Also, it's not apparent that there is a job there. You have to buy 3 drinks, which while cheap are still more expensive per energy then the food vendor. On my first playthrough I didn't explore the bar until well into the midgame.

[Valescere]

I disagree. Drago's work, while immediately available, also ends quickly and with it easily available engineering work. The exchange requires more exploration--it's the 3rd location found in the Bright Market, while the Overlook Bar is the 1st found on the Rotunda. Also gambling is harmful on a negative result. Interface Hacking is limited to 45 CRYO without substantial exploration and the first job isn't available until cycle 5. Endure cargo work on the ship is only occasionally available, and is dangerous on a negative result.

Of the two first always available jobs (gambling and bar tending) the Overlook bar is faster to find and safer.

[Feuver]

I didn't include the Overlook bar because while it is early game, it requires exploring and searching around a lot more than the other options which are available from the start. (Interface hacking, Endure Scrapping/Cargo, Engineer repairs and Intuition gambling.)

[Valescere]

I would offer a small correction, if I may. Engage money-making is available early game. In the Overlook Bar, in the Rotunda, you can take a bar shift after buying 3 drinks. (Total cost of 18 CRYO for 3 energy.) It's safe work, resulting 10 CRYO -1 energy on a negative, 13 CRYO on a neutral, and 15 CRYO on a positive. Because of how early it's available and how safe, it makes Engage upgrades very powerful. Even without those upgrades, it's a great early game spot for bad dice. (As long as you have the energy to take a -1 energy hit from a negative result.)

[Feuver]

Thanks!

[Torus]

Great Writeup. I read it after my first playthrough, and you found a good level of explaining without too much spoilers.