Beginner's Guide to the Overseer Project

Sburb, as presented by Homestuck, is a quest about growth and maturity that is completely intertwined with their character, potential, and fate; Sburb presents a finely tailored role to its players that fits them and help them grow as legendary heroes. Sadly our current technology doesn't let us read destinies and inner psyches, so the best second option was to keep all the paths open, let the players choose what kind of hero they want to be. Naturally some choices will affect the difficulty of gameplay, but in the spirit of Sburb this guide will not be about min-maxing statistics and breaking the game, instead it will give you tips and tricks for success for whatever kind of story you choose.

Note: This guide assumes you've read Homestuck up until the end of Act 5, and you know what all the Sburb terminology means as they're shown in comic. This guide only covers game mechanics exclusive to Overseer, and it's not responsible for any spoilers to Homestuck.

Guide to Null Sessions

Pre-pre-entry

You will need to create an account on the website first. Once you do, you'll be able to create a new character or session. This guide assumes you're joining an existing session, but if you're not you need to create a new one first, and then join it with a character. While creating a character you'll be asked for the character's name (doesn't need to be unique, so feel free to roleplay as canon characters!), the session's name and its password, which are pretty straightforward.

Your dreaming status can be chosen now or later, so you might as well pick it now. They are very similar gameplay-wise, so don't worry about them.

Title: You'll be prompted for your Class and Aspect. They all have their strength and weaknesses, and the game is winnable with any of them. However, you can still do research by clicking on those links before deciding, if you want. The activeness and passiveness of classes will have the biggest effect on your gameplay. If you don't plan on playing often or you have many teammates who are willing to play co-operatively and trade with you, consider a passive class. If you want to play mostly independently, because you can't contact your teammates regularly, try an active class.

Pre-entry

Prototyping: Ideally all players should have sprites that are similar in power, a few people with overpowered (or underpowered) sprites will end up making strife extremely difficult in the beginning. Examine your session first with the Session Viewer, look at the range of numbers of Power bonus for enemies and choose a suitable number within that range, then enter it into your prototyping strength.

Also consider leaving the "second prototyping item" blank, then you can prototype after you enter the session and add to your sprite's power without adding to the enemy prototyping power. However the post entry prototyping is not allowed to be nearly as powerful as the pre entry prototyping to avoid game-breakingly powerful sprites.

Strife Specibus: Unless you want to fight with bare hands, you will need to choose a weapon first. Go to Item Catalogue, which is a list of ordinary items that are potentially lying around your house, and pick up a weapon of your preferred abstratus, then go to your Portfolio and allocate your strife abstratus card- simply select the abstratus that your weapon has from the drop down list. You probably won't be able to change this abstratus for a while!

Computer: Just like with your weapon, you better grab a computer from the Item Catalogue and Drop it in Storage (which represents your house). Simply go to your Inventory, right click it and select Drop to do it. Once you do, you'll have access to the SBURB Server functions.

Server player: You'll need a server player in order to enter the game. You have two options, be your own server player, which is not viable unless you have a really active Session Admin willing to reorganize the Session Chain and let you in, or be added as a server by one of your sessionmates.

If you decide to be your own server, simply select yourself in the SBURB Server dropdown. Otherwise, someone else will have to do it, and you will have to pick a client that doesn't have a server yet.

Your server (and you, for your client) will need to access the SBURB Server page. They can Revise your house (spend your build grist building it, which isn't necessary right now), Recycle your items or Deploy Sburb Devices. They'll need to deploy four items on your house: the Cruxtruder, Totem Lathe and Alchemiter; and a Pre-Punched Card. Once they do, you'll be ready to take the next step and Enter the game.

In order to enter, you'll need to have all four items mentioned above in storage, and have a weapon equipped. If you don't have one already, grab one for your assigned specibus from the Item Catalogue, go to the Portfolio, right click the weapon, add it to your deck and then equip it as your main weapon.

Having a prototyped Sprite is also highly recommended.

A brief refresher about the Inventory page: stuff that's in your storage can't be used since it's placed somewhere in your house, and SBURB Devices and Alchemy in general will deploy created items on your Storage. This means you'll need to sometimes Captchalogue them using your Inventory page before you're able to interact with them in any way. Keep this in mind for the rest of the process.

When you first join, click on the red head and then portfolio to choose your allocated kind abstrati. Afterwards, click on the multiple cards, click Atheneum, and search in the weapons ordered by abstratus list to find a weapon for yourself. Search in all items for any kind of computer or laptop. Click on the single card with a block and then Inventory if it isn’t already shown. Use the bar on the bottom to put it in your inventory (because stuff is sometimes randomly in your house). Drop the computer on no one in particular. Click on the red head and then portfolio and equip your weapon.

Entry

Once you're done with everything, move to the SBURB Client page.

You'll need to first open the Cruxtruder, for which you'll need to use your weapon. To do this, you'll need to go to the SBURB symbol and click on the Sburb client, where you should see a prompt to open the lid to the Cruxtruder. With that done, you should also be able to access prototyping your Sprite. Then produce a Cruxite Dowel from it. Use the Totem Lathe to carve the totem using the pattern in the card that was previously deployed by your client. Finally, captchalogue the resulting Cruxite Dowel and place it on the Alchemiter. This will drop the Cruxite artifact on your house. Captchalogue, use it and click the Entry link in order to survive.

Time to choose your land! Consorts are pretty straightforward and have no effect on gameplay. Simply pick a color and a species, such as Red Crocodile.

Grist category: It's better to have a great variety of grist in a session, so examine the existing planets first and choose a grist type different from them. It's not a good idea to create dummy accounts for more grist variety because it will bring you more trouble later on.

After that click on the Sburb sign and then server player and drop in everything cruxtruder alchemiter and the other 2. After that go to server client and open the cruxtruder with your equipped weapon. After that click on the yellow head and then sprite to prototype, I advise only prototyping 1 time. Then when you enter prototype again. You could go the hard way or the easy route by clicking on the single card with a block and then alchemiter and putting this in the bar  

>.  cZCMY4Qf  <.

Since it’s pretty much a totem, after that go into your inventory ((single card)) and scroll all the way down and get the totem from your room after that use it and enter.

Post Entry

Now the game properly starts.

Basics of Strife

Quick refresher about Gates: you need to get your server player to build your house up spending Build Grist, and then you need to go to your Player Overview page in order to unlock them. Gates function like in Homestuck, you'll need at least Gate 2 to access your server's house, Gate 4 to access your server's server's house, and so on. But they also need at least Gate 2, since you'd fall to your death otherwise. Keep an unbroken Chain of server/client pairs, all built to Gate 2 in order to be able to strife in all of your session's Lands.

Before strifing, check your power level in your Portfolio, then go to Strife! to begin your first fight. Pick any planet and pick Fight on this Land.

During enemy selection you will be able to choose what type of underling you face off and what grist they're made of. Don't choose enemies that are too powerful for you, start with a low powered imp, then figure out if you can take on a more powerful one or more of them. If you're going to fight multiple enemies at once, you should know that the more enemies you choose at once, the more powerful they become. For example, if you fight 5 imps at once, the first imp's actual power is the same as its displayed power, the second imp's actual power is 1.2x the displayed power, the third imp is 1.3x, the fourth imp is 1.4x, and the fifth imp is 1.5x.

Once strife begins you'll see 4 choices for your offensive action and 4 choices for defensive. Picking an offensive action further down the list will increase your offense with a multiplier, but decrease your defense, and vice versa for defensive actions. Next to the actions there may also be a number, that is an action bonus/penalty granted by your weapon and it will be added/subtracted to your attack or defense. You can experiment with different combinations of actions, but if you want to stay balanced between your offense and defense, choose offensive and defensive actions that are the same distance down the list, such as Aggrieve/Abuse, Agress/Acuse, Assail/Abjure, or Assault/Abstain. Your Sprite will assist you in fights, but don't worry, it'll recover on its own if it's taken down. Eventually you'll outgrow your Sprite and it'll become pretty useless, but oh well.

If the enemies are too powerful, press the Abscond button, you can always abscond safely from any normal fight. Any kind of strife will cause some fatigue even if you abscond. Fatigue stacks up to a certain point, where it then starts stacking penalties on your character. It will start adding penalties as a percentage at the bottom of the page when strifing once reaching 1000, and your offense/defense bar will reach negatives upon reaching 1500 fatigue.

If you win a strife you will climb up one rung on your echeladder (maximum 612 rungs) and gain one power. If you lose all your health, go to Player Overview, choose a dream moon if you haven't already, press Z and strife there or waste some time for a few turns.

Once you've collected a couple of build grist, you should start to alchemize items.

Basics of Alchemy

Your first weapon will probably only have a power of 2-5, to make more powerful weapons you will have to alchemize. Instead of just randomly choosing items from your Captchalogue, Catalogue and alchemize them together, go to the item list and find items that sound like weapons from your abstractus (ctrl+f helps). Then go back to your Captchalogue Catalogue and pick up some items that could logically combine with your basic weapon.

Go to Alchemy to access your alchemy equipment. Before you start alchemizing, it's a good idea to check your Inventory, and write down all the captchalogue codes of your items. That way if you ever need an item again, you can simply look up the code. Use the Code Combiner to get the resulting code from the combination of two items, then the Alchemy form to create it.

If the item does not exist, try alchemizing the same two items together again, but this time change the combination to use from II to &&, this will produce a completely different code. If that code also does not yield an item, try another item combination. Once you've found a weapon you want, write down the code, strife until you have enough grist and try again.

If you're having problems with that, you're encouraged to use the Quick Item Creator and quickly create some new weapons. The processs for that is straightforward enough. If you get an unstable code error make sure to check this page to understand why. If you're still having problems you can be a dirty cheater and look for codes in a different wiki , or check the forums for hints.

Besides weapons, you can also try to alchemize wearables and consumables out of basic items from the Item Catalogue. Clothes will add to your defense, Consumables have a variety of effects such as health regeneration and power boosts.

• Consumable alchemizing tips: Try alchemizing Blue ecto slime with base consumables to create healing items.
• There are a wide variety of Fruit Gushers and Faygo flavours, they are all next to each other in the Item List.

More Strife Options

• Assisting: Okay, this isn't really much of a strife option at all. When you see somebody else strifing, assisting them will add your power to theirs. You get the same drops as the assisted player, and it causes some fatigue. Passive classes get a bonus to assisting and active classes get a penalty assisting. You don't have to bother with assisting now, but once the session gets past mid-game it will be nessesary to take down the most powerful enemies.
• Consumables: You can only use one of them every turn of strife, so if you're dependent on healing consumables, you must keep finding new recipes. Between strifes you can use as many consumables as you want, and the effects will apply to the next strife you enter.
• Aspect Patterns: Once you've entered the game you'll notice a new Aspect Vial under your health vial, this fills up at 20% per strife, but only actually fills up when you go to sleep/wake up, like the health vial does. The effects of Aspect Patterns are completely customizable, you can use it to do damage, power boosts, power deductions, grant healing and more. But depending on your title your Aspect Patterns will be awesome at some areas and absolutely horrible at others. You're encouraged to experiment and see what works.
• Roletechs: A bunch of miscellaneous abilities that are specific to class and/or aspect, they'll be unlocked at certain echeladder rungs. Most are passive, meaning they just activate on their own when the right conditions are there, but a few need to be activated, and they'll eat up a bit of your aspect vial.
• Fraymotifs: Let's be honest here, you won't be able to afford any fraymotif for a while yet. Even if you trade all the boondollars in, fraymotifs can only be used one at a time, and once per turn, with a encounter cooldown. The 3 solo fraymotifs (out of 36) available to you are dependent on your aspect, they have a whole sleuth of different effects as well, just know that they're extremely powerful, hence the ungodly price and cooldowns.

Dream Moon strifing is a bit different than normal strife.

• Instead of enemies dropping grist, they drop boondollars. You level up as normal.
• You have no weapons, wardrobe or sprite on your dream moon, your power level is completely dependent on your echeladder rung. Also, your class's active/passiveness multiplier applies only to your echeladder! The strifing/assisting multipliers, while you're awake, doesn't count for too much, but when you're asleep it will affect your power level a whole lot more.
• You don't have your inventory/alchemitor, therefore no consumables
• Fraymotifs, Aspect Patterns, and Roletechs work normally.
• Strifing on the dream moon heals your waking self, strifing in the waking world heals your dream self.

Preparing for the Denizen Fight

The Denizen is the first big boss fight of the game after the Dungeon bosses, the only hard requirement to unlock it is the 24 million build grist needed to build your house up to the 7th gate, and a server player who will build your house. If you have a client player who's ready to fight the Denizen, you can build their house by going to SBURB Server, Revise and enter the amount of their (not your) build grist you want to spend building their house. Then remember to unlock all 7 gates from the Player Overview.

The denizen you get depends on your aspect, It's a single enemy ranging from 20,000 to 28,000 power, most with the ability to remove your own buffs and invincibility and resist debuffs and fraymotifs. Considering that the average player's maximum flat power (including weapon bonuses) is 20,600, the Denizen fight is not impossible, but you won't defeat it by just spamming attack.

Denizen Battle Checklist

• 24 million build grist, all gates unlocked.
• At least rung 600 and fraymotifs out of cooldown.
• First 2 fraymotifs bought.
• Maximum power weapons (If double handed, 9999 power with +9999 bonus in all areas, if single handed, 9999 power with +3333 bonus in all areas)
• Full Aspect Vial
• Several high powered consumables (starman [five or 6], aquamarine faygo, etc.)
• Decked out in wearables
• Most Denizens remove invulnerability every turn so be sure you re-apply it every turn
• Use Assault+Abuse to do as much damage each turn while invulnerable

Appendix: External Resources

Official Overseer Tumblr- Ran by The Overseer, creator of the project. General questions can be submitted through the ask box.

Overseer Forums- Discuss the project with other players. Good place to ask for some general help.

Overseer memo at Pesterchum- You can download the Homestuck-based chat client here. Memos can be found under Client > Memos. Great place to ask for general help.