A complete newbie guide

This guide will provide explanation on how to beat the game as Druid with basic starting options and without delving too much in advanced mechanics of breeding. By following this you should expect a lot of combat, portal exploration and leveling. Certain descriptions suit for any other main character, but the guide is optimized mainly for druid.

Starting Options
First start a New Game and pick Druid with grass affinity. On difficulty page disable breeding quests and reduce starting money to 500 so you can get gallery unlocks, which are only possible with 100% game difficulty. Set your profession to Scout and pick the following traits: You can spend any remaining points for whatever you like or can spend for, MagicAdapt would be the best option here if you have enough points for it, and raising genes is generally useless since Druid is not affected by them. Proceed to customizing starters and pick a Centaur and a male Lymean. Specific gender is important. All starting traits provide only negative effects, but they give extra points to spend. We are going to use some trick here - select all negative traits and raise the following stats: for Centaur and for Lymean. We are going to get rid of negative traits when preparing for our first fights.
 * Fast
 * Lucky
 * Perceptive
 * Potential
 * +5 to max level
 * +2 to health
 * +5 to strength
 * +5 to max level
 * +5 to mana
 * +2 to magic

Initial Preparation
Whenever you are done hit start and go through the introduction. You'll get to Home screen right after. To avoid being overwhelmed by the diversity of options, try following tutorial popups and hints which appear if you hover over the yellow "?", usually located at the top left part of a window.

Close the Home screen and hit the Right Mouse over the background to open the town map. Visit each location highlighted in yellow, those have active events. The following options are important to select: Feel free to pick any other choices however you like.
 * Tavern - Milk
 * Farm - Fusion focus
 * Portals - pick teleport stone
 * River (it is not highlighted) - Steal armor
 * Shop - Sword

After that, click on Druid's portrait and select options to spawn a Seedling and 3 Spirits.

Now to the tricky part of preparation, open Fusion window located at your farm. Your goal would be to fuse both starters in a way that they lose bad traits, but keep good ones with improved genetics. Select the Centaur and a spirit, preferably one with "strong", "fast", "resilient", "scales" or any other fighter-oriented traits other than "GrassAffinity". If there is none - then select any with the least amount of negative traits.

Select strength, health and max level stats on the Centaur side. This will make these stats "focused" during fusion and the resulting creation will keep these values. Select any good traits from the spirit and then hit Fuse.

Perform the same operation with Lymean and another spirit, prioritizing level/mana/magic and good traits but also selecting the skill focus from the Lymean. Heal is "fixed" skill which doesn't need to be prioritized. Recommended skills focus would be "Focus">"Strengthen".

When you are done open the "Home" screen and click the "Party" button on all of the remaining characters to add them to your party. Close the window.

(Important!) Press "C" or click on "Change" button at the bottom left of the screen to visit Druid's skill tree and get acquainted with provided selections. Select the Seduction tree from the options in the bottom left corner and close the window.

Now open the party preparation window (Q), and equip the Centaur with gear you managed to get from the shop or river event, this would be Sword, Leather Armor or Leather Gloves. If you are missing any of those you can also visit the shop and buy missing pieces. You can also equip Druid with his personal spear, but it is not important at this moment.

Wait for 6 hours to regain some stamina, save your game, go to the arena and pick any simple arena match. Generally, this would be in a plains biome with a battle difficulty of 1, without any additional modifiers and where your main character will fight with a team. Note that arena fights generate randomly each time you start a new game and there is a chance that you won't have anything that falls under the description, so choose ones that are similar instead.

When you start the battle, you can tweak the combat speed to your liking with the panel on the right. Go through the tutorial popup and read the combat descriptions provided with the "?" tooltip, this should help you greatly.

Use the following tactics to ensure you can win the fight:
 * Charge as Centaur in the straight line to your opponents. This will perform a free attack on them. Finish first the enemy off before charging to another. If possible, stay close to several enemies at once - this will attract their attention on her.
 * Follow the Centaur as Druid and flank lone enemies, don't be too cheeky as he is not equipped with much gear. His spear impales another additional target behind main, make sure you make a good use of this mechanic and try not to harm your teammates by accident
 * Follow both fighters with the Lymean and use Focus and/or Strengthen on the Centaur as soon the cooldown runs out, otherwise use Heal if needed. Try not to stay close to opponents as they would engage you in combat, reducing AP regeneration to 1/turn. Enemies would probably try to get to your Lymean. Use the Aegis skill if surrounded. There is a chance that you don't have every mentioned skill as they are generated randomly for each starting character or during fusion.
 * Keep the seedling and spirit away from enemies and use Toxin or Rejuvenate skills. Their max health is too low to take damage.
 * Keep the Centaur lust lower than 50% otherwise penalties will be applied. If she reaches higher amount, service her (R) while staying close with any character and put her on Defend (W) for a turn, this will negate the vulnerability applied from sexual actions. Other characters can masturbate (M) for a 2 ap cost, but not Centaurs because of their anatomy. Note that excessive use of masturbation will drain any character's energy, resulting in reduced combat effectiveness.
 * If you notice some kind of hard-hitting enemy while checking stats with the Shift button - seduce them up to 50% lust, this will debilitate them.

Ensure you don't get anyone injured and continue to win three battles. You can always Surrender (with some penalties) and heal injured party members at the Market, but try to avoid resorting to these measures. Grab your first arena reward from Aila and use the provided equipment for Druid in the future. Fight two more times without the main character to spend some amount of party stamina, so you can make full use of daily recovery.

Before advancing to the next day, check the Tavern for simple tasks like "Job", "Research" or "Item" quest types. Most of those quests are detrimental to your supplies (with some exceptions), but the further you raise your tavern rank, the better results become, with up to legendary items, unique eggs with special traits and decent resource payouts. Some items required for quests like DrainPowder can be bought from the shop. Spare no expense on buying cheap items to get quests completed since you'll need some amount of HealingSilk later on, which is mainly rewarded from these quests. Advance the time to next day by sleeping few times afterwards.

Check for new tavern quests and arena fights at the start of the new day and complete some of them. You should aim to level seedling/spirit to level 5 through arena fights. Whenever they reached it open respective creature window at Home by clicking on their portraits and choose to evolve the Seedling to "Monster form" and "Reshape" the Spirit.

When the Druid reaches level three, learn Companion and change his leveling type to a different one. At this point you can choose between two builds and pick leveling tree respectively, see "Skill trees and Equipment" for details. The rest of the guide will use the Support build as a base so make necessary adjustments if you are risky enough to play any other. Do note that Druid lacks enough skill points to fully level every skill tree.

Choose Support tree and start leveling it. Whenever you get enough points - learn SeedBoost skill and replace one of your MC skills with it.

Portal Exploration
Before you start exploring a portal, try to fill all missing equipment slots for you party members. Browse shop and search for defense, health and strength items for Viridion and Centaur, and magic and mana for Lymean. Don't forget to equip TeleportStone, you might need it. Add around 100 gold to your party resources at the bottom of party preparation window (Q), this would help with scouting. Also don't forget to save your game, take spirit and seedling with you. Since you should already have a well prepaired team you can skip easier portal exploration and immediately enter portal #7, one which is usually required for King's quest. In any case it is good to check which one he demands to explore. Right after you entered a portal select Spirit on the left panel and click "Change position". This will add character to reserve slot, excluding it from participating in combat. It will still gain half of team experience shares. With chosen scout profession it is much easier to scout whole map, just roam around, follow exclamation marks for events and loot, pick Light Fairies (yellow spirits) to sustain stamina and search for EverTrees (big tall trees) to scout surroundings (climb tree). Unless you are sure you can handle much fighting, try to avoid combat so you keep your group resources on top. Try to harvest some food with events so you won't need to buy any in town. Refill missing hp and mana with lifeplants or manaplants, and heal with Lymean as much as possible. You can also use some abilities outside of combat by clicking on character bar on the left. Not all events are helpful, some of them can harm your group instead, try to avoid those. If you encoutered an offer to purchase scout info and have a lot of undiscovered tiles around you - don't neglect it, you have some gold for exactly this purpose. Plan your exploration in a way so you start walking back at 10h exploration mark, or when you ran out of team resources to fight. In emergency use TeleportStone. If you hit another max level with a spirit click on it outside of combat on the left side of the screen and click "Reshape". After you came back visit Portals window and claim your rewards for exploration and/or combat. If you've done everything perfectly well you should reach 50% portal exploration and become able to turn King's quest in. In case you didn't - recover stamina in town and try to scout portal a bit more on the next day. In any case don't turn a quest in immediately, you will need some time in reserve for other activity, King can wait for a bit.

Home upgrades, team management and resource gathering
Check for tavern quests if there is something valuable there. Also start checking recruits for hire in there, search for any shadow type species that can produce Dark semen, you will need it later. Leave your seedling resting at home, most likely it is more exhausted than anyone in your team at this point. You will need it later for ocean exploration. Summon new grass spirit, importantly male or futa gender. You'll need it for further milking. Check market daily and try to sell all extra spirits if creature vendor arrives. Replace from party you current grass spirit with one you summoned recently. Get into your first ranked arena fights so you can get runic wood and bolster your team stats. Pick as many fights as you feel confident with. Each rank up will affect your characters the similar way as level up will. Good if you manage to get your spirit to level 5 to evolve it to PlantGirl. When you are done with arena move PlantGirl to home, assign her to Hunter job. This can be done by clicking on her icon and selecting Task on the right from her portrait. You can do same thing for any other unoccupied character, just keep Centaur, Lymean and seedling resting. If you are not yet eligible for next few lines - skip to upgrades, but don't forget to come back when you get the requirements. Whenever you get shadow-related character, make sure it produces S_Dark (should be male/futa gender and not GhostPlant), if not - fuse with other character or spirit to get appropriate gender and species combination, utilize fusing focus for this. Head to Farm afterwards, hit "Manage", select PlantGirl and your shadow-related character, select "Milk" option and hit heart button "Bond/Update". They will start producing semen daily. You can also assign both of them for hunter job, just make sure you regulary check their morale through Character Overview screen (Map-bottom button) or they might turn the corners if it reach 0. Putting the to rest or let them "Have Fun" can keep their morale or restore some. Open Upgrades window at your Home. Count missing resources for pool upgrade. If you were lucky enough you might have certain amount of wood or stone already. Gather stone from tavern quest or portal milestone rewards, wood can be gathered the same way + you can chop some trees in portals, move to forest tile and hit harvestWood button. You can also mine stone in portals on mountain tiles, but it can become very time consuming if you need large amounts of it, better get it from portal/taver rewards instead. It will probably take some time gathering those resources, when you come back home your seedling should have regained enough stamina for few arena battles, just enough to reach level 5 and be evolved to Seedling Dragon. It will help you with movement in ocean portals by negating speed penalties from moving through water tiles. Go there whenever you have a drake, fly around and scout for crystal deposits, get a bit less than half of your party carrying capacity and return back. Around 20-30 crystals will be suffice for the first time. If you have all water portal closed other options to get some would be either breed some fertile creature for "Crystals" (switch "eggs" option at farm) or grab some amount of money and find Native event (one which provides scout info) and buy crystals from there, 5 for 200 gold. Gold should be present in party inventory, add it with party preparation window.

Recruiting
Check list: Lust-based character; Shadow~; Lymean hybrid (not Spirit, LightLizard, Siren or Fairy); Characters with BeastGirl, Harpy genetics or just EagleGirl. If you still didn't find any shadow related charater now you can spend time getting one. To help with that task you need a character capable of effectively seducing others in combat. The most effective choice here would be hiring a Succubus from tavern. You should be very unlucky if you are not able to find one there, but if you do - enter a portal which contains Succubus species in it. Plan is simple - check roaming enemies with Right Click, find succubus whose level is equal or lower than any highest from your group, attack, leave her last enemy standing and then start seducing. You need to lower her energy pool (white bar) down to minimum to get her exhausted first, most effective way to do so is Servicing (R) her in close range. Current lust level affects chances if character will orgasm and lose energy point, so it would be good idea to arouse her first by other units with ranged Seduction (S). Every unit has its own likes and dislikes which affect if your tease will be succesful against them or not, try finding her preferences by changing exposed parts (Tab). Whenever energy is low enough, raise their lust to 50% and try to Fuck her (F). Note that it is not always succesful, chances depend on target level, character which level is lower than target's will always fail at recruiting. If recruit attempt was unsuccesful try to repeat the procedure. Follow same tactic for every other species you need, you may also want to build Sauna, Infirmary and appropriate housing for new recruits. When you get a Harpy and a BeastGirl (or any hybrids which have those genetics) go to Fusion screen, fuse them with each other while focusing highest stats and good traits. The result should be EagleGirl.

Further gameplay strategy
At this point your gameplay should be a lot different than any others and therefore the guide takes the form of general tips and directions rather than tutorial:


 * Although King's quests are optional for Druid, failing to do them in time results in reputation decrease, which is main loss condition for Druid. Try to beat King as soon as it is possible for your team, spare him and keep doing his quests for doubled resource rewards. You can also ingore quests completely without harming your reputation, or you can pick the other path by executing the King and get some part of a game lore.
 * Destroy Creation's hives whenever you meet them. They are tentacle-like structures surrounded with slime tiles.
 * Explore more portals and town events to get powerful characters in your group. Some examples include:
 * 1) Liza: a decent tank/fighter with mana and health recovering abilities, easy to sustain resources during long runs. Doesn't suffer from water as much as others because of aquatic origin.
 * 2) Seliel: a long range archer, can put down any nasty enemy unit before they reach her.
 * 3) An_3: a powerful mage, can easily deal with any water-submerged unit with lightning damage.
 * 4) Yavoli: a fast stormtrooper with mana and health recovering abilities.
 * 5) Aila: an arena champion, nuff said.
 * 6) Phy: a versatile combatant with a useful skill set, she can both increase your team potential and deal decent damage during fights.
 * 7) Sylvie: she is good in everything, fighting, seducing, breeding, despite of being fragile.
 * Don't skip artifact portals, failing to complete those in time result in your opponent's power increase.
 * Keep an exploration difficulty up with your group's strength, don't stay at easier portals for too long but neither try struggling at ones with very high difficulty. This way you should keep experience gains optimized because by doing easier portals you'll get less experience depending on combat participants from your team and their current level. It is recommended to leave only 4 or less units in combat slots, other 2 can "observe" in reserve slots while still getting half of experience shares.
 * Level and reshape a spirit to maxlvl 20, afterwards you can either evolve it to a different stronger form or you can fuse it with any humanoid character to increase their genetics and max level. Don't forget to select stat focus while fusing so you won't get average values.
 * When you get an Adaptation from a skill tree, find some good traits to learn, create new seedlings, adapt traits on them and then repeatedly fuse with each other, adding new traits after every fusion. This way you can get seedlings with 10 traits and "Strong", "Wild", "Potential", "Heavy", "LustEnchanced" would be the most preferable ones.
 * Note: both summoned spirit's and seedling's power is affected by base druid magic power. If you have it high enough, you can instantly spawn a maxlevel 20 seedling, and it might be effective to spawn some and fuse them with your party members to increase their maxlvl and/or traits. The drawback of this method is that Seedling species genetics are added to fused character, the result can only be pure species. Fusing it again with other species can negate this issue, just mix parent genetics properly.
 * Optionally recruit more units for milking and working at a brothel, the latter will be a good source of money income if it is used properly.

Skill trees and Equipment
Here you can find a description of what leveling and gearing options you have as a druid for this guide. Everything is ordered by priority and availability at a specific game stage. Skills can be changed at a character window by clicking on a skill slot beneath a portrait and replacing it with one provided from a list of known skills. Seedling support (recommended for the first time): Heal (support), SeedBoost (support), Invigorate (dexterity), HardenSkin (Endurance), Strengthen and Seedling evolution +1 (strength), Seedling genes+ and Adaptation (dexterity). Put remaining points to armor>mana, try to take DrainMana passive from Support tree. Whenever you get Adaptation start learning traits from characters at home and adapt any seedling with learnt traits. Strength based fighter: Companion, Heal, Jump, Charge, Focus, Companion2, Ram, Crush. Stack strength>armor>health afterwards however you feel like, this build is sufficient for a Lone Wolf run at high game difficulties if used correctly. Although new players don't have access to it, taking Light as a starting affinity will randomly provide a healing unit in combat which is able to regenerate mana. Both builds can take Companion as the first skill, which provides combat distraction. It is harmless to lose the companion while you setting up your team or taking down enemy units. Support equipment:
 * Any weapon with mana increases: Obsidian sword, Tide Caller, Void Sword, Crystal Sword. Bows and staves should also be fine, but they are quite specific to use.

Armor:
 * HealingRobe - crafted from 5 plantgirl and 5 lymean semen, 10 Heal silk (tavern quests) and 5 fur. The latter you can buy at a crafting tab (restocked daily) or get by slaying animals such as wolves, striders, mules and etc, basically terrestrial creatures.
 * LavaScaleArmor - drops from Leviathan boss. Similar stats to healing robe but can be harder to get.

Misc:
 * RuneAmulet - 4 rune wood, 2 healing silk.
 * WispAmulet - Kitsune boss drop.

Fighter equipment: Weapons: Armor: Rune shields are generally good for both builds, crafted from 5 rune wood. As an alternative you can use a CrystalShield, it is much cheaper to craft. You can get CrystalFragments from harvesting floating crystals during portal explorations. For consumables I can recommend using a StonePotion, but it is quite hard to obtain. S_Stone is milked from Gem- and Crystal girls, CaveFish can be fished by any character assigned to this job, or manually by yourself. For the EagleGirl and the Centaur get an equipment that has strength, health or armor modifiers, for the Lymean - mana and magic. The trick is in getting more armor for weaker characters, this way enemies will less prioritize those units in combat.
 * Great Sword - 15 arena objectives milestone reward, craftable from 5 iron which you can buy from a materials shop or mine from portals, or you can randomly get it from portal milestone rewards, tundra events or rare item chests. You should probably have 8 arena objectives completed already, fighting 7 more times should be an optimal way of obtaining one.
 * Breaker Sword - 3 mythril, can be obtained from King's quests, 1 piece per quest. Improved variant of the greatsword.
 * Scale Armor - a quite cheap armor variant which can provide a decent protection. All ingredients can be either purchased from a materials shop (both ingredients are usually sold in pairs), or you can get them by killing fanged and scaled enemies.
 * KnightArmor - while it gives whole bunch of different stats, it makes character slow and vulnerable to seduction. Aila's 25 objectives milestone reward, random legendary drops.
 * FrostArmor - slow but steady. Provides hp and defense at cost of mobility. Random legendary drops or tavern quests.
 * LavaScaleArmor - improved variant of Scale Armor. Obtained from Leviathan boss.
 * MythrilArmor - an elite armor for fighters, crafted from mythril. Amazing for solo runs.

FAQ
Q: Why should I select those 4 specific traits (fast, lucky, perceptive, potential) and what do they do? A: Lucky and Perceptive affect events in portals, they will become more common with better outcomes. Potential allows Druid to raise each skill tree to level 25 and get more skill points. You don't have many good options to choose for remaining points, so picking up Fast trait is a good way to spend them, increasing versatility of the main character.

Q: How do you heal the injuries? A: You can fix injuries by:
 * building an infirmary and raising morale+stamina of injured character to 50+, they would be healed on day rollover
 * paying for healing services of spider medic at a market, only possible for first 3 days and then each 10th day
 * crafting a magic bandage and applying it to injured character

It is also possible to heal injuries by certain characters only during portal exploration at cost of 2 food and wood units, or by taking doctor MC profession (automatic healing).

Side notes

 * There's a unique character that the author of this guide is either not aware of or is knowingly ignoring - Meira the healer. She offers both an alternative source of healing injuries and an alternative source of healing webs. Considering that both are mentioned in the guide it is strange that she herself is not.
 * While fusing negative traits off your starters is a viable strategy, it's worth noting that it comes with a price. Since the guide is aimed at newbies this is, imho, worth explaining. Fusing is a process of creating a new character and everything that can't be carried over is sacrificed in the process. In this particular case you lose the starter and loyal specials. The later is not very important for a described start (though does matter for a start with a Familiar MC advantage), but the former allows the character to spend 50 of their stamina to increase their non-genetic max level. Meaning you could normally take your starters all the way to 20 (which, of cause, only matters when you can actually make some worthwhile starters).
 * A lot of options in this game are gated behind the unlock mechanics. But some unlocks do not actually require a lot of effort on the players part. You also don't have to actually keep playing after achieving them. This creates certain expansion opportunities that new players should be aware of.
 * For example many unlocks require levelling characters (gallery unlocks, hybrid starters) once you have (or can make) a character that you need to level and are in a decent enough financial situation you can just make a save to return to and then just skip days by resting while training the character using Aila's combat training option.
 * Likewise, when a trait unlock requires you to breed a certain character you don't need to actually stick to that time line. Once you're sure you're likely to succeed at it, make a save and breed that character in a dead-end branch. It's a bit tedious, but it is definitely less tedious than actually gaining those unlocks the normal way, and you never know when you'll be inclined to start over (often at the next update) meaning that the more you can cross of your list "here and now" the better.
 * Also there are many unlocks that require you to finish the game, so it's highly recommended to stick to shorter length games for your first few runs. And if you want to be pragmatic to the point of choosing the main character, then the druid is probably the best option for short runs, since, unlike the other two, he does not depend on rituals (and thus on wide range of species with high genetic max level) for skill points, making him perfect for focused runs where you do not want to waste any effort.