Getting Started

Getting Started
Once you have downloaded Portals of Phereon (can be found in the game's Discord or Syvaron's Patreon) and opened it, you can start a new run.

One of the first things you should do is to decide how you want to play.


 * If you are new to the game and want to learn more about Main Characters, you can check their pages. For beginners, default 4th Main Character, Oriel, may be a better choice, as she has a more extensive tutorial and an easier start. When selecting your elemental affinity, it doesn't matter too much which one you choose if you are new to the game.
 * You like having a time limit? Start with the "Normal" game length. If you prefer to take your time and learn the game as you go, choose "Free play". Other game lengths might be harder, as "Fast" has an easier final fight, but gives you less time to prepare, while "Long" gives you more time to prepare, but you'll have to face stronger opponents.
 * You prefer to power through everything and recruit stronger units as you go? Fusing is a great option for you, as it's quite simple and lets you choose what kind of unit you want to create. However, if you prefer a more time-consuming and harder-to-control, but cheaper and more growth-oriented method, then Breeding is for you. Mixing both methods is also a great idea and usually the best option.
 * You can change the difficulty to make the game easier, but you should try setting it at or above 100% so that you can unlock new things.
 * Choose whatever profession and traits you like. Default starters should be quite good for the beginners, but you may want to increase their main stats with the free points available.

If you want to learn more about these settings, check here.

You can also check some start-up and breeding guides here.

FAQs and Things To Know
There are many components to the game, and understanding how they all work is very important in order to avoid drowning in debt and falling far behind your rivals. Therefore, let's start with some basic things to ensure you're familiar with some of the most important stuff.

Firstly, there are several commonly missed things that are good to know, also known as the FAQ. Feel free to visit this section if you're ever unsure about something. Alternatively, visit the game's Discord channel, where people are often eager to answer questions.


 * 1) Press the "Tab" key to access the journal. You can check there when the next artifact or story portal will open. It also displays such information as Brothel stats, daily events (e.g. eggs spoiling), rival status and Achievements.
 * 2) You can heal injuries in multiple ways:
 * 3) *Using Bandages, which can be crafted;
 * 4) *At the Market when the healer is there;
 * 5) *Meira's unique skill HealingWeb;
 * 6) *Building Infirmary home upgrade.
 * 7) If you raise someone's salary, it will remain that way forever. It's recommended to never touch it, as it rarely matters.
 * 8) Pressing "V" will quickly take you to the crafting screen, while the middle mouse button takes you to the character overview.
 * 9) The Character Overview is a valuable time-saving tool. It's good to be used to it.
 * 10) *You can use it to assign symbols to units by simply draging them onto the desired symbol, making it easier to organize your units as you can sort by symbol.
 * 11) *You can quickly find and move your units to the Farm in order to breed or fuse them.
 * 12) * You can manage the brothel from there.
 * 13) *You can toggle different important information, e.g. whether you can submit the unit to the Library or if you can perform a Ritual with them.
 * 14) You can craft many things by using Crafting window, but there's more to it.
 * 15) * You can buy and sell Materials there. Items that you can find there change daily, and the yellow number in the top right show their value.
 * 16) You can sell items from "Prepare Party" (Q) screen by pressing the sell button in the bottom left. You can also sell them at Lumira's Shop.
 * 17) Stash/Inventory
 * 18) *The Stash contains all the items you've collected and stored.
 * 19) * Inventory is what items you're taking on an expedition. You can also add food/crystals/money/stone/wood at the "Prepare Party" (Q) screen to take them as well.
 * 20) **If there is a certain amount of resources that you always want to take on expeditions, you can press "Keep resources" button. Taking at least 15 units of each resource is a good idea.
 * 21) Hovering over resource on the top bar shows how many units of it you spend daily.
 * 22) Hovering over units level when in their detail window will show you what growths they have. It's useful for figuring out if you really want the selected unit and how their stats will look at max level.
 * 23) Dating can be confusing at first, and a lot of things about it might be very unclear, but hovering over things will provide more information. Hovering over the yellow number on a dating card also provides a lot of information.
 * 24) Putting units with high bonds together at farm will result in better productivity. You can also press the "Humanoid" button at the top to switch to creature breeding. More below.

To sum it up, hover your cursor over everything.

Milk
Drink your milk. No, seriously, always go drink the milk at the tavern once a day. It gives you stamina at zero time cost. It adds up over time, and stamina is invaluable. I do not recommend drinking the blood.

Food
There are a few key things that happen each day that you need to pay attention to. The first is food upkeep. Make sure to stay on top of it, otherwise, you'll go into debt really fast because you'll auto-buy food for upkeep. I suggest setting everyone to just fish and getting a Fishing Hut upgrade for the house early on. I prefer fishing over hunting because there are a lot of useful fish that they can get you. The rain and sun ones are used in XP potions and they sell for a fair amount of money alongside the other fish. If you're desperate for more food, then optimizing the units that can hunt to hunt is better.

Gold
Gold is also a part of upkeep, and it can be a challenge in the first week. By making sure food is taken care of, you can stay ahead of gold by completing Arena fights or portal expeditions. Tavern quests can also be useful when they're doable, so make sure to check those every day. But the most important passive income to start working on right away is the Brothel. Prettier units naturally make more gold, and trained units make even more. You can manually train them by spending some time at Home doing sex training. Once done, set up some units as soon as possible, and then keep working on expanding it as you go. The brothel buttons can be hovered over for more details, but that's a guide in and of itself. It'll help make you a lot of money, and after a certain point, you should never have issues with gold again. When your gold income is stable, make sure to buy equipment and Items from the Shop.

Crystals
Crystals are pretty important but also the rather difficult resource to manage. Most upgrades require some amount of crystals and fusing almost always requires them. One of the best ways to obtain them is by turning Ice Spirits (or Rock Spirits) into Crystal Girls, giving them a good room and then spending their stamina to make tons of crystals.

If you haven't unlocked the other elements yet*, then your best options are either to use mana collectors in water worlds, which can yield a fair amount of crystals with proper placement, or preferably, to breed mana crystals. You can do this by going to the Farm where you set your pairings, and clicking on the "Eggs" buttons that can be found next to the "Instant" button. If you click them, they will turn into "2x crystals" buttons. This makes the pair produce more crystals instead of eggs. Destroying eggs you already have can also yield some crystals.

NOTE: Get a Spirit to level 20 to unlock Elementalist profession, then pick Elementalist as your profession at the start, and then get whatever Spirits you want unlocked to level 15.

Wood and Stone
Generally, it's best to try to obtain these resources by completing Tavern quests or receiving them as Portal rewards. Scouting can be done fairly quickly if you enter a portal, go to a mountain tile, and Camp with "Scout" action chosen. It will reveal quite a bit for little stamina investment. Units with abilities such as Heightened Sense, Magic Vision, Eagle Eyed, and so on can make scouting even better. Otherwise, obtaining these resources requires a lot of work. You can go to a mountain or forest and click "harvest/mine". It takes time and stamina, and while it's quick to do in real time, it requires stamina, which is really important not to waste.

General Gameplan Notes

 * If you plan to use breeding, make sure to do it with all futa units, as it doubles your production and the semen you can harvest can be invaluable.
 * Until you get the hang of things, don't worry TOO much about having enough housing for all your units, especially if you're breeding a lot. Just make sure your usable units and high-priority units have rooms. However, this might lock you out of several recruiting events.
 * Don't forget to assign jobs to any new units you get.
 * Make sure to check your hatchery everyday if you're breeding.
 * Always check events as they're a huge part of the fun of the game. I recommend starting with as many event-related perks as possible when you start.
 * Try to level up a lot of units to at least level 10 as this unlocks them for future runs. The "Delayed" hatching room upgrade makes this a breeze.
 * Those level 10 units are great to donate to the library. You can burn through library quests quickly doing this, and it's also permanent guaranteed income.
 * When starting out, it's a good idea to choose portals with low hostility levels. Also remember that portals will close after a certain amount of time unless they are stabilized.
 * During exploration, keep an eye on your carrying capacity. If you become overburdened, consider dropping some low-value items or materials.

This is all pretty general stuff just to keep you afloat or get you ready for all the interfaces. Once you're comfortable, you can do all sorts of things with builds, game plans, styles, and even special runs like the Seal runs. Those are pretty neat.

This is also tailored more towards starting up and beginner runs. For more advanced things, check out other Guides, Tips and Tricks or check the Discord.