Screens, Turns & Saves

A quick orientation for a new game: where everything is, what a turn actually is, and how saves behave.

The hub

After starting or loading a game you land on the building management screen. The top shows the building’s name and the in-game date; from here you branch to everything else:

• Girl Management - assign jobs for the coming week.
• Staff - hire and manage gangs: guards, kidnappers, catacomb crews.
• Building Setup - rooms, upgrades and the policies you set for that building alone (a switch or a number with a slider). One screen shape for every building; the Farm’s magic policies are an example.
• Dungeon - captives and prisoners.
• Town - the slave market, shops, the bank, and the rest of Crossgate. Its Properties button lists buildings for sale and the ones you own (from content packs that add them): buy one, then open it to move workers in and set their jobs.
• Turn Summary - the report of everything that happened last week.
• Accounting - where the money went.

Prev and Next page between buildings once you own more than one.

The readout on the hub shows the building at a glance: customer happiness, fame, rooms in use, last week’s profit, your gold, filthiness, beasts owned, plus two numbers about you rather than the building: your disposition (how good or evil your reputation is) and your suspicion with the local law. Keep the second one down or expect trouble.

Game messages appear in a text box near the bottom of the screen; left-click steps through them.

The window has no title bar of its own. Drag the game by its top bar to move it (on the main menu, by the top edge of the window). On macOS the usual close, minimise and zoom lights sit on the left of that bar; on Windows and Linux the game draws its own minimise, maximise and close buttons on the right. If moving or resizing the window is awkward on your desktop, open Settings and switch on System window frame to get the normal operating-system title bar back.

Turns are weeks

One turn is one in-game week. Next Turn ends the week: the game autosaves, every job runs, money moves, and you get the Turn Summary. Nothing happens in between turns, so take your time setting up assignments.

Scene images in the Turn Summary

Turn Summary events show an image from the character’s content pack, matched to what actually happened: a bar shift shows bar art, an oral scene shows oral art, and so on. If the pack has nothing matching, a related image or the character’s portrait stands in.

Since 1.18.1, scenes between women and group scenes are stricter about this: they only use art that is really of that kind. If the pack has none, you get the character’s portrait instead. Earlier versions would substitute a generic scene there, usually with a man in it, which is exactly the wrong thing to see; that is fixed.

So a portrait where you expected a scene is not a bug. It means the character’s pack simply has no matching art. More art in the pack, sorted into the right folders, fixes it; the pack authoring docs cover how if you want to add some yourself.

Saving

• Autosave - every Next Turn writes autosave.gam, one fixed file that always holds the start of your current week.
• Save Game - saves to a file named after your current building.
• Save As… - saves under any name you type. Use this for real bookmarks; there is no slot limit.
• Load Game - lists every save it finds. The main menu also has Continue, which loads whatever you saved or autosaved most recently.

All of this lives behind the gear menu in the top bar while playing.

Weekly limits the game doesn’t show you (yet)

Several actions are rationed per week, and right now the interface mostly tells you by refusing rather than by counting down. Until the counters reach the screens, here is the list:

• Interact With (the conversation button on a character’s details screen) works 10 times per week by default. When you run out, the button simply goes grey until Next Turn.
• Walking around town to look for recruits works once per turn. There is no marker on the button; if nothing happens, you already walked this week.
• Torture works once per captive per week, whether you use the big Torture button in the Dungeon or the torture option inside the conversation. (Before 1.18.1 the conversation option didn’t count against the limit; now both share it.)

Moving captives out of the dungeon

A common early question: captives do not join your workforce by themselves. Open the Dungeon, select the captive, and press Release to move her into the current building. The building needs a free room, so build rooms first if the button refuses. Release All does the whole cell block at once.

Cheats

Two are built in:

• Name your first building Test when starting a new game (or keep playing a save file named Test.gam) and cheat mode switches on: free gold every week and friendlier odds all around. This easter egg has survived since the earliest ancestor of the game.
• The gear menu also has a Debug entry with direct switches: add gold, max fame, clear suspicion, and similar. It is meant for testing, but it is there, and using it is between you and your conscience.