Preamble: 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.
Note 2: This guide only covers version 1 of the Overseer Project. The below information may not be true for version 2 of the Overseer Project
Guide to Null Sessions
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 more powerful than the pre entry prototyping to avoid game-breakingly powerful sprites.
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. The minimum number of planets needed to have all the grist types is 5, with careful selection. It's not a good idea to create dummy accounts for more grist variety, because it will bring you more trouble later on.
Server/Client connections: Best to leave this blank for now to cause minimal confusion, you don't want to accidentally end up with one person out of the connection loop. Take your time, you don't need to establish a full loop until you're powerful enough to face the Denizen.
Choosing a Strife Abstratus
Unless you want to fight with bare hands, you will need to choose a weapon first. Go to Shop>Captchalogue 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 Strife Options>Strife Portfolio under 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! If you're worried that your abstratus doesn't have a lot of weapons in it, go to About>Items List and use the weapon tallying tool at the top to see how many weapons are in your abstratus. If there seem to be few weapons but you like the abstratus anyways, remember that you can always submit new items.
Now you can equip your weapon, if your weapon is one-handed, you can go pick up another one-handed weapon of your abstratus and equip it in your offhand. Offhand weapons only have half the power of main-hand weapons.
Basics of Strife
Before strifing, check your power level in your Strife 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.
If the enemies are too powerful, press the Abscond button, you can always abscond safely from any normal fight. Any kind of strife will use up one of your encounters even if you abscond. You have 10 encounters to start with and you gain one every 20 minutes.
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 Info>Player, choose a dream moon if you haven't already, press Sleep, strife there for 5 turns (more about Dream Moon strifing below).
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 Inventory/Alchemy under Players to access your alchemy equipment. Before you start alchemizing, it's a good idea to scroll down, 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.
In your Remote Punch Designix, choose the two items you want to alchemize together, then press "Design it" and you will get a code. Copy and paste the code into the Remote Holopad and press Observe It, it will tell you if the item exists or not, if the item exists it will also show you the item's name, description, and grist cost.
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 just can't find any alchemy recipes, you can go to Feedback/Submit and suggest some new weapons. Or consult the appendix below this guide for a list of resources.
Besides weapons, you can also try to alchemize clothes and consumables out of basic items from the Captchalogue 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.
Selecting your Title and Dream Moon
Now that you've learned the very basics of the game, you can explore other options in the game that will expand your gameplay experience. Go to Player>Info to choose your mythological title and dream moon alignment.
If you didn't choose a dream moon during pre-entry, you should choose one now to be able to recover health besides picking up health gel. The differences between Prospit and Derse is mostly cosmetic, so choose whichever one you like.
You are encouraged to choose whatever title you think fits your character best, but the activeness and passiveness of classes will have the biggest effect on your gameplay. Active classes give you a multiplier bonus to your echeladder power during strife and a penalty while assisting others, passive classes penalizes strifing and gives a bonus to assisting.
- If you don't plan on playing often enough to use up all your encounters, 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.
Once you've chosen your title, 3 new strife actions are unlocked: the Fraymotif shop, DO THE ASPECTY THING, and Roletechs.
More Strife Options
- Assisting: Okay, this isn't really much of a strife option at all. When you see somebody else strifing, or if you've set yourself to auto-assist that player, assisting them will add your power to theirs. You don't get to choose actions, you just sit there and mysteriously channel your energy to them or something, and you reap none of the spoils, and it uses up one encounter. Passive classes gets 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 alchemizations. Between strifes you can use as many consumables as you want, and the effects will apply to the next strife you enter.
- DO THE ASPECTY THING: Once you've selected your title 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 (Unlike the health vial, your dream self and waking self has the same aspect vial). The effects of THE ASPECTY THING is completely customizable, you can use it to do damage, power boosts, power deductions, grant healing or invincibility and more. But depending on your title your ASPECTY THING will be awesome at some areas and absolutely horrible at others. You'll get hints of what your areas of expertise are the more you experiment with it.
- 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, fraymotif uses are limited by your echeladder rung. You can't use fraymotifs below rung 100, after rung 100 you get just 1 use a day, and then you will get one more daily use for every 100 rungs you climb. The 3 solo fraymotifs (out of 36) available to you is depedent 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 daily use limits.
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, THE ASPECTY THING, 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, 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 Player>SBURB Server, scroll to the bottom and enter the amount of their (not your) build grist you want to spend building their house. The build grist cost can be ignored if the player has a jetpack of some kind.
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 or a jetpack.
- At least rung 600 for six daily fraymotif uses.
- First 2 fraymotifs bought (Make sure you have all your daily framotif uses)
- 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
Only thing absolutely nessesary for the battle. Some denizens can be easily defeated with less preperation.
Appendix: External Resources
Official Overseer Tumblr- Ran by The Overseer, creator of the project. General questions can be submitted through the ask box.
Item Development Tumblr- Ran by Blahsadfeugie, head of item creation. Questions about alchemization and items should go here instead.
Overseer Forums- Discuss the project with other players. Good place to ask for some general help.
Google Docs Item List- Has a list of many items, including their codes and descriptions.
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.