Perfectionist's Endorsed Notes to Initialise a Somewhat Efficient Savefile

Starting a new game in L&SSB can be a daunting task, especially if you're a perfectionist or minmaxer and haven't burned the game's mechanics into your mind yet. This guide will hopefully tell you everything that you would need to know to make the beginning of a fresh save - which can be a daunting task that can trip up a lot of players trying to get started without wasting too much time or losing out on earning stats - and steer you towards the opening choices that will work the best for you.

Preamble

This guide assumes that you are playing on Normal difficulty with both randomness settings set to Off. Easy difficulty doubles all non-character exclusive stat changes (LP, KP and so on, but not Kylie's YP or Morgan's MP), all needs gain (drinking a coffee restores 2 Energy normally, up to 4 on Easy) and makes money less of an issue with increased earnings from working and halved weekly rent cost. As a result of Difficult mode being the inverse of this, it adds quite a lot of extra time to any playthrough and you will very likely miss on date-specific milestones the first chance you would otherwise get due to simply being unable to get a girl's LP high enough the first time around.

For example, Bree's second event that lifts the cap on her maximum LP from 20 up to 30 must be done in the Arcade on a Saturday afternoon and Difficult mode makes it extremely hard - if not impossible - to reach that 20 LP threshold in time for the first Saturday. The same goes for bible study with Harmony and many other characters. However, the benefit to this is that you are much less likely to run into so many different character events happening at around the same time as they can chain into one another and cause Mike to go through two or more character events with different girls without the player intending to.

However, if you are playing on version 24.7.0b or later then you may notice that any girls that you have not dated or slept with in the last in-game week lose 1 LP and 1 KP every day. The amount lost stacks with each day that you continue to not date or sleep with them, although this mechanic does not take effect at all if you are playing on Easy difficulty.

It's worth mentioning that you generally should not use the in-game cheats. Enabling them will lock you out of being able to earn achievements as well as unlock the gallery or use that save file for new game plus. They're good for testing and messing around but you shouldn't ever need them.

Finally, there will be spoilers aplenty. Of course, I would hope that since you're reading a guide then you already don't care about that, but it doesn't hurt to mention just in case.

Name & Date

As soon as you hit "Start" on the main menu, you'll be asked to pick a character. Choose Mike here, as a lot of aspects of character creation are different here and BreeMC does not have as much content as of now.

For first and last name, those don't matter and you can pick whatever you like. The game even accepts symbols, adding some extra humour potential should some of the characters later formally address you as, say, "Mr. :P".

You will then be prompted to enter your birthday by clicking on both the day and season that you want to set it to, then clicking Done. Repeat this process to set your starting day and if you don't click anything on each screen then they will be set randomly. True to real life, the game cycles between Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter in that order, but each season in this game lasts exactly 31 days giving you 124 days each in-game year.

Personally, I recommend starting in Winter. The reason I choose that general area is because a handful of events that rely on it being Spring or Summer lets you start gaining some momentum working to earn promotions and build up some savings so you can deal with events how you want to when they come around. For example, the line of events that lead to Sasha's breast augmentation surgery has one that can only fire during Summer and it's also good to have $500 to pay for the surgery or else Sasha will lose a few points, but every event after it is season independent.

The First Question

You will begin this short section on Monday at 10am on whatever date you chose with 10 across all four of your needs, 0 on all three of your stats and $500. Your first choice will be from Bree asking you this:

"Do you like sports?"

Your possible answers are in the table below. My choices here are the ones I've come to vastly prefer after many restarts and hours spent figuring out how the game works and wanting to smooth out the beginning of each new game for myself so pick whatever you like.

As of version 24.4.0a, this entire introductory segment have been rebalanced with heavily increased and different stat gain spread for all choices. This guide may or may not be responsible for this. :TeeHee:

• C - Charm, F - Fitness, K - Knowledge
  
• (E) - Easy, (N) - Normal, (D) - Difficult

Skill	Perk description	Beginning stats	Available in-game?
Martial Arts	Halves Fitness requirement to pass some events, mandatory to survive an event in Cassidy's storyline	10F (E) 5F (N) 3F (D)	Yes
Golf	No effect	8C 12F (E) 4C 6F (N) 2C 3F (D)	No
Discreet	Reduces chance of being caught peeking on roommates	20C (E) 10C (N) 5C (D)	No
Cooking	Doubles LP gain from eating food with roommates at home	6C 4K (E) 3C 2K (N) 1C 1K (D)	Yes
Dancing	Changes dialogue during one of Palla's events	8C 12F (E) 4C 6F (N) 2C 3F (D)	Yes
Shooting	Prevents KP loss during one of Aletta's events and slightly increases LP gain during one of Camila's events	8K 12F (E) 4K 6F (N) 2K 3F (D)	No
No, I don't	Doesn't provide a skill, but increases all stats	12C 12F 16K (E) 6C 6F 8K (N) 3C 3F 4K (D)	N/A

I strongly recommend taking Martial Arts here. If you don't, then the process to learn it requires Mike to go to the beach during Summer, which at minimum will require an investment of $100 for each lesson, $200 to buy the swimsuit and you can buy the bicycle for an extra $500 to even access the beach, as well as Mike to burn almost all of his needs across five separate days to learn the skill in 20% increments with each training session. Do that five times, then meet The Master one final time at the beach and you will then learn Martial Arts. Fortunately, this sixth meeting does not tank your needs anywhere near as much as the five training sessions and the dialogue during events is certainly amusing enough to see at least once. But if you're after a pragmatic playthrough, Martial Arts is easily the best choice here so you can skip all of this. If you don't, then it's not uncommon to have to completely alter your entire routine for the explicit purpose of learning this skill since it's just that demanding.

Golf doesn't do anything as of now.

Discreet isn't going to come into play very often unless you peek on your roommates a lot after Minami moves in.

Shooting takes effect during one of Aletta's events and ensures that her KP does not drop along with altering the dialogue; without it you will take a major hit if you're trying to keep her submissive but you can easily bounce back from it once you've made it to a fairly early point in her series of events and can start eating her out in the office. It also gives you a slight boost to Camila's LP but it's a very small amount and has no other in-game benefits.

Dancing is similarly niche, only offering a change in dialogue during one event in Palla's storyline and it can also be learned right after said event.

Cooking can be learned in-game via a skill book and while the frequency that it takes effect bumps its rating up so much to put it firmly in second place, I believe that Martial Arts is still the number one pick since Cooking can be easily learned since the skill book can easily be bought on any Wednesday. It may be good for those who are playing on Difficult mode and wish to still gain 1 LP from eating with your roommates in the kitchen rather than half of an LP.

Finally, choosing "No, I don't" will add an even spread of stats to Mike for the beginning of the game. All things considered, if you don't mind not starting with Martial Arts or Cooking then this isn't a terrible jack-of-all-trades backup choice.

The Second Question

"Do you have a hobby to relax with?"

Skill	Perk description	Beginning stats	Available in-game?
Food	Increases your maximum Hunger to 15, up from the default 10	6C -2F (E) 3C -3F (N) 2C -4F (D)	No
Video Games	Allows you to gain KP from playing video games with Bree and is necessary to begin the Gamer Bree story path	10K (E) 5K (N) 3K (D)	Yes
Fitness	Does not provide a skill, only a bonus to your starting Fitness stat	40F (E) 20F (N) 10F (D)	N/A
Partying	Same as above only with Charm	40C (E) 20C (N) 10C (D)	N/A
Working	Increases the rate at which Mike is promoted at work, adds +5 to maximum promotions and another 5 if Mike becomes CEO	10K (E) 5K (N) 2K (D)	No
Cars	Begin the game with the Sports Car, but with +$200 of weekly debt in addition to weekly rent	10F (E) 5F (N) 2F (D)	N/A
Reading	Cuts the in-game time that passes when a skill book is used by half. Bonus 0.5/1/2 LP gain with Bree	10K (E) 5K (N) 2K (D)	No
Guitar	Necessary to start the Band Harem	20C (E) 10C (N) 5C (D)	Yes
Not really	Doesn't provide a skill, but increases all stats	4C 3F 3K (E) 8C 6F 6K (N) 16C 12F 12K (D)	N/A

There are a few good options here but my preferred choice here is generally Cars. The Sports Car is the single most expensive item in the game costing a whopping $20,000 if you buy it normally, but having it right off the bat is an enormous help. It completely circumvents any need to pick up the bicycle and the downside to picking Cars is only going to cut into your starting cash before you have the income outpace the increased weekly debt which doesn't take long to gain momentum on. In new game plus all of your items are wiped but your money remains, so it's far better to buy the sports car normally for $20,000 which you really should have by the end of any new game if you're going to new game plus. Without choosing Cars, you'll more than likely have to buy the bicycle to go to the beach or forest at some point and if the bicycle is all you have then merely going to or coming back from either will cause two in-game hours to pass. It's also well worth noting that if you intend on going into new game plus then all of your items will be wiped, but your money, skills and stats carry over so if you've saved up enough - which you very likely will due to money mostly being there as an early game limiter - then you can just pick something that isn't Cars and buy the sports car normally on your second cycle. Also, having the sports car is necessary to be able to raise Kleio's KP cap to 100.

Alternatively, choosing Food will boost your maximum Hunger from 10 to 15 which is a lot more useful than its relative simplicity may suggest. On Normal, having a meal in your kitchen restores 9.2 Hunger, meaning that unless you can manage to bring it all the way down to zero which locks out all other activities besides eating, then you're wasting a tiny amount of that Hunger gain at least on Normal and my brain doesn't like that. Hunger is also the only need that doesn't get gradually boosted to a cap of 15 by working on Mike's stats; it can only be instantly and permanently raised to 15 by picking it here or in new game plus, unlike all of the others. All things considered, the extra freedom that Food provides by potentially allowing you to, for example, work three times a day without having to eat again until 20:00 is quite nice. On Difficult where eating increases your Hunger by 4.6 then Food can come in even more handy since you can then space out four to six meals a day to keep your Hunger comfortably in check.

Video Games is what I used to pick when I was new to the game but I quickly realised that it's usually not a good pick. While having the Video Games skill is necessary to be able to go down the Gamer Bree path rather than defaulting to the Maid Bree path, it's very easy to learn by buying the Z-box and playing it 100 times yourself, plus the Gamer Bree path locks her maximum KP at 50 which prevents you from being able to collar her since her KP must be 75 or higher to accept it. If you want to go down the Gamer Bree path as soon as possible then it's a good choice, but you would be better off doing that by buying the Z-box yourself and using it as often as you can before Bree's LP hits 40 to trigger an event that splits her two potential story paths.

There's not much to say about Fitness and Partying. Neither of them provide any kind of skill, only a bump to one of Mike's stats.

Working sounds like a good idea on paper, but money becomes easily sustainable once the important initial expenses are taken care of (luxury bed, guitar skill book etc.) and even without Lucky, weekly expenses just mean that you won't be able to afford much right from the start. The increased promotions cap is nice, but by the time you get to it then money shouldn't be a problem at all. Charm and Knowledge influence how much you earn by working and the latter increases your chances of the "work hard -> work fast" option succeeding for a huge boost in cash and promotion score so that's better to aim for instead.

Reading has a similar issue where it comes in very handy saving time using the many books in the game, mostly the skill books that rotate daily in the book store, but you have no more use for it as soon as you've gone through all of the skill books. Granted, it does save you time if you're trying to blitz through some of the skills that you may want early, including Guitar for the Band Harem, Cooking for the doubled LP gain from eating in your kitchen with the roommates and so on, but without it then you're better off only picking up the ones that you need first and reading those when you've got a few hours you need to kill.

I would not recommend picking Guitar here since the skill book you can buy to learn it organically is available on day two and it can easily be learned long before it comes into play at Sasha's branching path at her 30 LP event where you have the option to join the band.

As before, there's another chance to not pick any skill and instead gain another stat boost across the board.

The Third Question

Can you tell us something bad or shameful about you?"

Skill	Perk description	Beginning stats	Available in-game?
No, nothing...	No downside, but you will not get the fourth question which allows you to pick a third positive skill	4C 4F 4K (E) 2C 2F 2K (N) 1C 1F 1K (D)	N/A
I am unlucky	Reduces your odds of winning the lottery at the pub and makes it more difficult to meet Emma	4C 4F 4K (E) 2C 2F 2K (N) 1C 1F 1K (D)	No
I have some big debt	Must pay $200 per week for 50 in-game weeks until $10,000 has been paid off	None	N/A
Animals hate me	None	N/A
I have a small penis	Reduces pregnancy chance and sleeping with most girls will cause a sharp gain in DP	None	Yes
I am prone to erectile problems	Causes Mike's sexual stamina to recharge much more slowly	10K (E) 5K (N) 3K (D)	N/A

As always, there's an option to pick nothing again but this time doing so will cost you the ability to choose a third positive perk from another unique set which is well worth choosing something here for. If there's ever a time to not pick this, it's now.

Unlucky is undoubtedly the least ideal choice here. Unlocking Emma requires the player to have increased luck and having the Unlucky trait means that you will have to get both boosts to your luck that are available in the game, namely obtaining Lavish's lucky panties from her storyline and using a lucky clover which can be found by searching the park during the early hours of the morning and only lasts the remainder of the day that it's used. It also reduces your chances of winning the lottery at the pub by quite a lot, to the point that it's no longer worth trying to use at all unless you're save scumming to reroll it for a win, at which point you might as well use the in-game cheats.

Debt will saddle you with the same debt - that being $200 each in-game week until $10k has been paid off - that picking Cars does. This actually isn't too bad a downside and keep in mind that picking the Cars trait from the previous question makes the debt option unavailable here. The same goes for other contradictory traits such as the two staff and libido modifiers. Generally, I'd recommend picking debt if you don't pick cars, don't want your manhood to start out defective and want something positive from question four. If you do choose this, taking Lucky in the next question is an excellent counterpick as the $500 cash boost helps to offsets the initial $200 debt - assuming you don't overspend, that is - so you can buy a few essentials (luxury bed, Z-box 360, Guitar skill book, fancy clothes etc.) before having to even work once.

For the last two choices which just to happen to do with Mike's ding-a-ling, you can either pick small penis or low libido. This one is up to you as the former can be removed with a one-time 5,000 purchase on a bigger staff pill at the drug store and the latter can be counteracted by accumulating enough sexperience to allow Mike's libido to recover naturally quickly enough to negate it, although I'm unsure of the exact amount you would need. This one is up to you as you will either take a DP hit when bedding most girls which you may not want, or it will be slow going with the various naughty scenes since Mike's yoghurt cannon will take a whopping 240 in-game hours to reload which is double the default of 120 hours at the start.

Overall, I'd recommend picking low libido with small staff also being okay if you're aiming for dom stuff with Sasha or intend on getting nasty both early and often. The hot tub costing 5k, lower level bathroom costing 5k, a car costing either 5k or 20k depending on if you want the flashy one plus other new game expenses add up to make small staff's one-time cost to counteract tougher to counteract than low libido so it ever so slightly wins out for me.

The Fourth Question

"Do anything of note, or is corporate lackey all there is to you?"

Skill	Perk description	Beginning stats	Available in-game?
I won a marathon	No skill, but increases Fitness	40F (E) 20F (N) 10F (D)	N/A
I am a people person	No skill, but increases Charm	40C (E) 20C (N) 10C (D)	N/A
I won an eating contest	Reduces natural Hunger loss by 25%	10F (E) 5F (N) 3F (D)	No
I am pretty lucky	Increases your chances of winning at the lottery and helps to unlock Emma	None	Yes*
I was the best in my class	No skill, but increases Knowledge	40K (E) 20K (N) 10K (D)	N/A
I don't sleep	Reduces the amount of hours Mike must sleep to regain Energy by 1	10K (E) 5K (N) 2K (D)	No
I am hung	Increases pregnancy chance and sleeping with most girls will cause a sharp gain in KP	20C (E) 10C (N) 5C (D)	Yes
I have a very high libido	Causes Mike's sexual stamina to recharge much more quickly	20C (E) 10C (N) 5C (D)	No

Lucky is a pretty good choice here for a few reasons: It fulfils the Lucky requirement to unlock Emma without you having to obtain Lavish's lucky panties or use a four-leaf clover. Two, it increases your chances of winning the lottery at the pub and it can come in handy in a pinch if you ever desperately need to win the potential maximum of $10,000. Use this power wisely.

Most importantly, you begin the game with an additional $500 which allows you a nice cushion with early game spending. With this trait, you can grab the luxury bed, fancy clothing to allow visits to the club as well as help keep you afloat from the $50 fee each time you party for Charm grinding,

The slowed Hunger drain from picking the eating contest isn't bad, but if you want easier Hunger management then picking Food from earlier allows it to hit 15 along with your other needs once your stats are all maxed for a nice even fifteen across the board. If you want easier Hunger management, you could do better since the eating contest here only gives you an effective cap of 12 Hunger.

"I don't sleep" is tied with Lucky for my perk of choice here. What it does is reduce the amount of sleep Mike needs to get by one hour. Normally there is a warmup period which requires Mike to sleep for two hours before each hour of sleep past that gives 1 Energy. The luxury bed reduces this warmup period to one hour and it stacks with "I don't sleep", eliminating the warmup completely and allowing Mike to restore 1 Energy for each hour he sleeps. This will save a lot of time in the long term, but your maximum Energy increases alongside your Fitness which gives you plenty of flexibility for when and how long to sleep anyway as long as you remember to adjust your alarm clock will work just as well. Longer games will benefit more from picking I don't sleep, whereas if you've got an achievement in mind or something then lucky might suit you better.

Finally, high libido's effect on Mike's man cannon reload speed can be replicated simply by accumulating sexperience and that's easy enough to do without picking this, if a bit time-consuming. However, I can imagine it being useful on Easy difficulty where all non-character unique stat gain is doubled as well as the initial Charm from this giving you a whopping 40 so you'll be flying through events quite often. You could do worse than this, that's for sure.

My Four Choices

For the beginning of a fresh game, my choices are usually the following:

1. Martial Arts
   
2. Cars (if on Difficult) / Food (if on Easy)
   
3. Low libido
   
4. I am pretty lucky

Most traits carry over between game cycles, but inventory items do not, so depending on your savings when beginning NG+ and the difficulty you have chosen, you may find it much more beneficial to pick Cars for Q2 on Difficult rather than simply buying the sports car. Fixing the hot tub costs $5k, fixing the ground floor bathroom costs $5k, altering the size of your flesh flute if you want will cost a minimum of $5k each time you do it and these costs add up, especially on Difficult when work earnings are so low and even moreso without Lucky when the lottery is harder to use for an emergency Sunday night cash bump.

Helping Sasha Move In

Once you've finished picking all of that, you'll be thrown directly into a brief event with Sasha where you'll give her a hand moving in and encounter two points where different options can be picked. Additional options will be available based on your stats at this point and any undesirable outcome here can easily be made up for later.

Option	Fitness requirement	Stat change
Invite her in	0	0
Help her	0	3 LP (Easy)/2 LP (Normal)/1 LP (Difficult)
Take the boxes from her	5	3 LP (Easy)/2 LP (Normal)/1 LP (Difficult)
Go grab more boxes outside	0	2 LP (Easy)/1 LP (Normal)/1 LP (Difficult)

Weird how "Help her" and "Take the boxes from her" have the best effect but only the latter has a stat requirement, isn't it?

Option	Charm requirement	Stat change
Be awkward	0	DP gain (2 Easy/5 Normal/8 Difficult)
Laugh	4	None
Joke	8	LP gain (2 Easy/1 Normal/1 Difficult)

The only thing to take into account here is how the potential LP/DP gain with Sasha can slow down progress through her storyline or towards her breast enlargement surgery if you care to do that, so don't sweat picking something less than optimal here.

The End of the Beginning

The game begins proper at 11am on a Monday with your choices reflected in your traits and stats. I advise buying the luxury bed on day one to give yourself an extra hour during the day to do things, the Z-box 360 to double the speed of Fun gain in the living room and setting your alarm for 6am so you can immediately hit the shower, have a meal at 7 and then do as you will at 8am.

In the long term, I would recommend only buying skill books that you need early such as guitar and sexperience books so you can unlock the Band Harem and get started on improving Mike's stamina cooldown ASAP, but buying every single one of them will deprive you of money now for things you won't really use until later on. I also generally don't recommend buying the three stat machines available in the electronics store, but you may be able to get away with one - I recommend the Charm machine - if you took the Lucky trait.

That's it! Hopefully you now have a highly overthought but very efficient long-term save file started.

New Game Plus

New Game Plus in Love & Sex: Second Base is unlocked by marrying any girl without having enabled in-game cheats at any point during that save. Doing so will also unlock the Gallery where you can freely view images of any and all scenes you saw during that save, although it does not function as a way to "replay" them like how you would see them when encountered in-game.

To marry a girl, all you have to do it get their LP high enough - it varies but 90 is typically enough - buy a wedding ring for $5,000 from the jewellery shop and use the interact button "Propose" on her. If she accepts, then the wedding will take place on the next Sunday morning. If you are proposing on a Sunday morning then this will result in the wedding taking place literally immediately, which I hope never changes.

Entering NG+ will carry over most of your skills plus all of your stats and money from the moment the game ended. It should be noted that what does not carry over is the following:
- All inventory items (Including the vehicles and sports car, even from choosing Cars in NG)
- The "Hated by Animals", "Hung", "Small ♥♥♥♥", "High Libido" and "Low Libido" traits

Credits

• The entire Andrealphus Games team for making L&SSB. You can join their Discord server[discord.com] if you would like to easily connect with the playerbase. Just be sure to read the rules first. ;)
  
• The Wiki[wiki.andrealphusgames.com] for having far more information on it than I could ever bother putting into a text guide on my own.
  
• You, for reading this far. :)
  
• Me, for typing all of this up. B)

[Chunky]

Thank you, this is amazingly helpful for us obsessive min-maxers!

[ThePostalGamer]

(2 of 2)
In comparison, you can counteract the effects of low libido by accumulating enough sexperience - although I'm unsure what number you'd have to reach to effectively negate that trait - and completely cancelling the small staff only requires a one time use of $5,000.

I also still haven't finished updating this since the intro rebalance took place due to me being busy elsewhere, but the tables for stat gain are accurate since that was the most major change that was made and I've yet to even put in my new preferred choices for each question so thank you for the reminder that I need to get on that!

[ThePostalGamer]

@Nutrodamus
Animals hate me definitely isn't bad, but the biggest downside with it in my opinion is the fact that it's not possible to eliminate it during the course of one game. Picking it makes it much easier to instantly die by entering the forest if your Energy is <6 (up from 3 without it) or for a seagull or dog to attack you and tank your Fun. In turn, the latter creates a need to bump your Fun back up afterwards at best, the former doubles the height of the gate blocking you from even entering the forest at worst and the only way there is to remove both is to go into new game plus which is a bit too far away to do on an average run and too limiting for my liking.
(1 of 2)

[Nutrodamus]

What about animals hate me instead?

[itslydiabxtch]

ponstal gamr

[ThePostalGamer]

@yunus!b~emre
Making a 100% guide was my original idea for this, but I ended up deciding that it wouldn't be worth the effort for me to go that in-depth with it since there are already other Steam guides as well as the Wiki and the Discord that can all be used to learn the game and achieve a desired series of choices in one run, whether it's character paths, achievement hunting runs or anything else. On top of that, there's still content being added to the game each month even now with several DLCs on the way so I would have to keep up with that as well and what someone else might want out of their character paths will almost certainly differ from what I usually do (eg. Maid Bree/Gamer Bree, Sub/Dom Sasha, keeping Kylie or unlocking Camila and so on) so I ended up decided to make a guide for the beginning of the game rather than the whole of it.

[yunus!b~emre]

Hello, first of all, thank you, it was very useful for the beginning of the game. Are you planning to expand this guide? Like a 100% completion guide, it would be great if you do it. I've made it down to your basic getting started guide.

[tony11041956]

Very enlightening, thanks.