Hugins Pre-school guide - things to know when starting off in Torn


Disclaimer: English is not my first language so please be patient with any possible language misstakes. Also pasting in from word made formatting off, done my best to correct. Any other feedback is highly valuable and gratefully recieved.

Starting off in Torn can be mighty confusing, but here are some things to get you off to a running start. You goal this first period is to reach lvl15, which is when you can start flying and make big money more easily, so keep your eyes on the prize. Before lvl15 you need enough money to get by and not be held back in progress, but the progression itself is the important thing.


These are the things you need to have sorted

*Somewhere to live – forget buying, just rent! To find the rental page go to the “estate agents” in the city menu, at the top there is a button looking like a way-finder. On PC it is pretty obvious, on mobile not so much. Rent short for starters, a week max. If you are active your housing will quickly become out dated, try to get over 1000 in happiness as soon as possible and then to a fully equipped PI as soon as you can afford it. There may also be a rental channel in your faction discord.

*Job – get any job for starters (grocery,sweet shop, casino) and then join a private company as soon as you can. Pay is not as important as getting training from the company. Stats will go up quicker in a private company. Your faction may have a few companies, ask around in discord if you are interested. I went for an Adult Novelties company first since at 3* that will allow me to buy eDvds (once per week approx.) for my job points which otherwise costs several millions each. Edvds is something used in the big happy jump which you can read about in other guides. The sweet shop also gives good money items, in the clothing store you can up endurance for points, the flower shop and night club lets you reduce your addiction lvls.

*Education – Biology and sports science comes highly recommended in other guides and when you talk to ppl as courses to start out with. Biology will give you the possibility to fill blood bags after you do the 9th course which is the best medicine to use usually. Sports science gives you advantages on gym training, mainly boosts manual labour and endurance, but also some intelligence. I did the business courses relatively early on and that was a mistake, wait with those until you have done the courses giving a passive bonus on gyms (sports science), kick and others you might think are fun or useful. *you do not have to do the courses in order for the most part, just the first course*

*Armour – get basic stuff for starters, once you have been in a faction for a few days and have joined discord, you can ask to borrow stuff from the faction armoury. Maybe you want to get your own stuff eventually, but probably not for the first 6 months of Torn.

*Weapons - The best guns that are listed and not over 100 thousand are the m16a2 and the BT MP-9. The rifle is about 40 thousand and the smg is about 50. At least attack stat wise. Personally I would use a good mele weapon as my primary so I don’t have to buy ammo (Macana - 110k or Diamond Bladed Knife 875k ). Once you get access to armoury you can borrow weapons from there too, so don’t over invest.

*Starter cash – there are two ways of buying stuff, in city shops (east side of the city) or item market (north side, use quick links). City shops are npcs, number of buys per day is limited to 100 and item market are players, your buys/sells here are unlimited. For getting a daily income you should buy 100 beers in the city market at “Bits and Bobs” and sell them in the item market. Beer sell extremely quickly so you need to be ready to buy as soon as they are restocked which happens every 15 minutes at xx.00.05, xx.15.05, xx.30.05 and xx.45.05. Then you go to item market and post them for sale with a profit of about 80k. If you want candies for your own use buy them at item market and keep selling the beer.


On PC the symols top right have descriptions, on mobile you will only see the symbols.


In mobile, if you click the picture of the chocolate you get the info about the product, if you click the text you get the actions possible.

A very good way to get considerably amounts of cash for a beginner is something called slutting. To slut means you attack a certain target with the intent to lose. Some players pay good money (250-300k per hit) for this and these are best found in the game forum “attacking”. Now don’t get all greedy and spend all your energy on this, it wont progress your stats one bit so remember what you goal is (to get to lvl15). My faction rules also state that you cant do more than 5 attacks like this per day or else you will be kicked from faction, check with your faction leader what rules your faction has. I didn’t need to do more than 10hits to have enough money to sort me on a good property and buying the stuff I needed. A bit later on you might do it to afford to buy some Xanax (gives 250energy, risk of overdosing and addiction) to train or attack.


These are the things you should do daily

*Spend your energy - Spend your energy on gym or attack – until you figure out your own way do it about 50% in gym and 50%attack, I would start off by doing more gym in the beginning of your week and only do attack for tutorial/missions. Your attack stats go up more the happier you are so try to gym on as high happiness as possible. Eating candies makes you happier and you can push your happiness over your personal maximum for up to 15 minutes, it resets down to your personal max the same time the beer restocksat xx.00, xx.15, xx.30 and xx.45, so be mindful of when you start eating it so you have time to gym before reset.

*Do your crimes – The nerve bar (red bar) is for doing crimes. You better start off with the lowest crimes and stay there before moving on to more difficult crimes. A safe crime means there is no possible outcome you will end up in jail. If you do end up in jail, your crime experience will drop a certain %, how much no one knows exactly, meaning you will have to do even more crimes to make up for that loss. A consequence of this is that it matters less in the beginning when your crime experience is low. There are excellent crime guides for each crime by Emforus: intro. In that intro guides 2nd post there are links to individual crimes.

There are also items that you can hold in your inventory that will boost your success rates. Check with your faction if you can borrow from someone or buy it yourself at the item market. For further reading and full list of recommended crimes check out Baldrs guide here on the forum, it is complete on most things :)

*Spend your 75 Casino tokens (see honour explanation below)

*Buy your 100 items (beers) to sell in Bits and Bobs

*Check if there are any events on in your faction

*Look for items on the city map – once per day there is a chance to find items in the city map. Either you can install an addition to your browser named “doctorn” or "torn tools" or you can look for yourself. These don’t drop every day so if you want you can just go looking once a week or something. As long as you log in every day items will have a potential of dropping that day. Sometimes you find very valuable items so this is well worth doing


The black dot is an item that can be found


*Max out your booster cooldown and use drugs
To get ahead as a new player you can max all the CD(cooldowns, except medical) as effectively as possible from day 1 - So like, out of the 100 beers, drink 24 for the nerve to progress crimes faster. Or stuff your face with candy before gym to progress battle stats. Be mindful of your drug addiction (little brain symbol in the bar with your gender etc, it will only show once you are addicted and is reduced a bit at each torn night) but try to pop a Xanax or if you cant afford that, a LSD per day to give you that extra energy. If your drug addiction gets to 5-7% you might be kicked out of education and your efficiency at work will drop.
Before you can afford to take Xanax regularily you can buy LSD to increase the amount of energy you get daily. (a better explanation of CDs are found below)

General thoughts

*Mission credits
Never buy stuff for mission credits that you can buy for money. You will need those tokens later on to buy books and weapons modifications, which are stuff that cant be bought for money. Exception might be the Piggy Bank which you get access to early, you can only buy this one once, it cant be sold, and once you open it, it is gone.

*Merit points – Honours and medals
You get honours and medals for doing certain things, and each honour will give you a merit point which is vital in this game and used for reducing education time, improve stats etc etc. Some things like attacking honours will come by just going about your business and won’t be mentioned here. There are a few low hanging fruit though you should pick as soon as you can. All merits should be invested in education first, then once you have 10/10 there go for the banking ones. Awareness is much less useful than you think so skip that and nerve bar increase completely.

*Invest any sum of money for any time (I put in 1000$ for 1 week. Bank interests are low in the beginning so you shouldn’t bother with banking until later)

*Donate 100k to the church (when cash is not so tight). The priest wont be happy anyway, but yeah, no way of pleasing the church.

*But if you do pray once a day in the church for about two weeks you may be forgiven for your sins and get an honour bar for that.

*Eat 500 bags of candy, just stuff your face before training and do it regularly and you shall have diabetes in no time! Think of it like brushing your teeth but the other way around.

*There is a merit point for writing a newspaper article and one for doing a comic strip and getting it published in the daily times, but I don’t know how hard it is to get accepted.

*The Casino has a few points so you should get started on those even though you might not get an immediate return. Easiest is probably 1000 Roulette spins and black jack. Also the “Win the daily, weekly or monthly Lottery jackpot” might be achievable with some luck, so start buying those lottery tickets as soon as you can. Once the wheel opens up to you at lvl7 you should start doing the two lower wheels once a day.Russian roulette is the single most popular way to shoot yourself in the foot, do go for it! Two merits are gained by winning against 10 different players and for 50 wins total.
There are also individual goals for the other ones but none are particularly low hanging fruit so you can read up on those by yourself.

*Attack any player who has the domino banner behind his name (don’t put this banner up yourself once you get it or you might be getting attacked a lot)

*There are merit points to be had for streak wins, and while you are under newbie protection the first two weeks they might be easier to get since players not under protection cant attack you. These streaks are: 10 wins in a row, 50, 100 wins and 500 wins. You will also get points for your 5th attack – 20th – 50th – 100 – 250 – 500 – 1k – 2k – 3k –4k – 5k.

*Defeat a fellow faction member. Yes, do eeet! But ask first! And don’t go after the boss because you will surely lose.

*Be mugged for 1$. This is obviously tricky but you can increase the chances of this happening by keeping 20 – 21$ in your pocket. Try to combine this with the person you are doing the friendly fire with and you both might get something out of it.

* Defeat someone after losing to them within 10 minutes. Again, could be done with a faction friend close to your own size after pre-arrangement.This is also a tricky one that require some thought but if you are not aware of it you can’t even try for it.

* Win 250 unarmoured attacks or defend – will most likely come later when you have your stats built up, just putting it here for awareness

All honours can be found here with explanations: https://wiki.torn.com/wiki/Awards

*Boosters, drugs and cooldowns
There are consumable items in torn that you can use to up your stats temporarily or that have other effects. When consumed these items will usually give you a cooldown period and in some cases other side effects. There are three types of CD bars: Boosters, Medical and Drug.

*Candy/Beers/boosters – ups your happiness/ nerve bar/other, max cooldown is 24 hrs. Cans and edvds are also boosters.

*Medical items – usually gives health and/or shortens time in hospital, max cooldown 24 hrs

*Drugs – a variety of primary effects, secondary effects include overdosing (you end up in hospital), addiction. Drug cooldown means you cant take another drug until your timer expires.

*Owning a company
Don’t set up a company until you have years to invest in it, you wont make any real money from it, more likely it will cost you. For starters it is much better to be an employee. You get paid and eventually get trained. Starting a company before you have done most of the business education, owning the right stocks etc is just a waste of your money.

*Finding targets to attack
In order to lvl up in Torn good lvl targets are vital, but unless you have the donor pack you can only search by a players name, not levels or inactive time. This makes it slightly difficult for us low-lifes to find easy/good targets, but fear not for Hugin knows how to mitigate! When you find a good target or do your missions you get some nice targets there, don’t just throw those away, save them in your friends and enemy list for use at a later date. You can save up to 10 “friends” and 10 "enemies" there.
In terms of good targets (some can be found on Baldrs lists), you want someone who has high lvl but poor stats. Other ways to find targets is to ask someone who has a donor pack to give you a raw list for you to evaluate. How to evaluate targets you can read about here:
If you are looking to improve your attacking respect, always always leave your target rather than mugging or hospitalising.
.
*Driving license
Why does everybody want a driving license? Go kill some fellow players instead!
The Driving License is obtained by taking the course under General Studies and is used for vehicle-related crimes. This isn't really necessary for brand-new players. A Racing License, on the other hand, is purchased for 50 Points in the Points Building and is used to enter races against other players (this is also where physical car items come into play).

*Donator pack
It lasts 31 days, gives you 150 energy bar, faster energy regeneration, 50 points and search function. Can be bought for real money or for 25mil in game money

Settings to be aware of
Change these settings top right corner, the cog (if on mobile be aware of drop down menus)

*General settings – revive settings

*Attack settings – choose your preferred weapon fordefence (if not set it will be random)

Email subscriptions – go to Resend Seasonal Newsletter if you haven’t already, gives 250 extra energy






Good luck and swin easy! Many thanks to DoctorManhattan for valuable feedback.


The scalloped hammerhead is the king of kings!