Chapter Text

BUGS, GLITCHES AND EXPLOITS FOR DUMMIES

(it's 2020 now and lo-fi ASCII art is so out of fashion, trust me)

[0000] ATTN: THIS IS NOT A WALKTHROUGH

Due to the very nature of the game, which the rest of this document expounds upon, it is honestly quite impossible to write a detailed walkthrough of DDLC that will account for your specific experience and hold your specific hand. Asking for that, really, would be equivalent to asking how to ask a girl out in real life, and as we all romance-deprived loners living in their parents' basements know, a lot of factors come into play, and for the most part, holding hands isn't going to do much here. Some, I think, gather into this "incel" group which tries to define why they, in and of themselves, are "forever alone", but I don't even think that is a leading cause.

Luckily, while one cannot guide you through the entirety of the shit Salvato managed to cram into a single week or two of in-universe material, with all the intricate options and routes, into a concise walkthrough (or a walkthrough of any sorts, really), one can tell you, almost guaranteed, that there aren't even that many choices to make in the long run, and from there, picking the right choice is mostly a matter of common sense.

TL;DR: Don't be a dick to the girls, try and stay faithful to just one of them and roll a d120 for the absence of glitches (yeah, they actually sell d120, and the probability of a glitchless run does seem to be in the rough ballpark of 119 to 1).

While we're in the proverbial TL;DR section, which I suppose you are reading with care, I should also mention that it is quite impossible to spoil this game due to how it's generated, so while this is optional, absolutely do take notes on your first playthrough. Better yet, before you start playing, download OBS and record your entire reaction - just remember to turn the recording off when I tell you. If you do stick around and become One of Us, invariably, you're going to treasure it.

If you were looking for a concise walkthrough, you can leave now. In addition, if you were looking for a concise walkthrough, you should leave now, since believe me, this guide is going to dump more technical knowledge on you, all at once, than required by the most demanding professions, and given the amount of shit discovered, that Salvato has put in, if there isn't an undergrad, graduate and PhD DDLC course before the decade is out, I will promptly print the entire hefty document out and eat it all, live on Twitch.

cue the audience leaving, Downfall parody style, just before the part where Hitler blows up

[0001] ATTN_2: HOW TO READ THIS DOCUMENT

Well, I suppose, this is where I blow up. However, unlike our favorite dictator, I won't blow up in anger per se; instead, I will blow up with information, since, as mentioned before, there is just Too Much to unpack, as far as DDLC goes.

This is where you simultaneously don't need to worry and do need to worry. Technical knowledge needed to explain the game will be provided, in small chunks, from the beginning of this guide to the end. However, there is a lot of stuff to unpack, and getting all flowery purple prose-y simply isn't going to serve us any good, and pretty soon, you might - nay, will - feel like shit is being thrown at you too fast. In that case, the simple advice I can give is to pause the reading, rewind a bit to the technical terms that you failed to understand, re-read their descriptions, perhaps take to a classroom with a notebook (and yes, there does seem to be a dummied-out notebook mode in the game for... I think this is too advanced stuff for now) and really study until you get an A+ on every single subject.

As far as knowledge of actual school subjects goes, I'm tempted to say that you'll need to be well-versed in computer programming, but odds are, your usual programming knowledge isn't going to do you any good here, since the vast majority of DDLC is coded in a language that you have never heard of, I had never heard of before starting to crack the game open like an oversized piñata and which seems to transcend every single programming language paradigm all at once. Still; if I don't clarify any mainstream programming terms, you are free to hit up any of the multitude of "learn programming" sites and go through them. (If you are wondering which programming language to pick, just go for Python. Not even going into how it's an "easy" high-level programming language that you can easily get into, DDLC's "outer shell" so to say is actually written in Ren'Py, which is a Python library for visual novels and does, by default, allow for inline Python, allowing you to do some basic modding of DDLC if you choose to do so.) Your typical programming terms are going to be in code , while terms specific to DDLC and its positively arcane gameplay and code mechanics are going to be in bold italic.

Chapter headings are going to look like [****] CHAPTER TITLE, and should be easily searched with Ctrl+F, should you feel the need to look up a cross-reference - or go back to the part of the text that prompted you to look up the cross-reference. Alternatively, thanks to the magic of JavaScript (more programming languages may or may not have been involved), the version of the document on my website (https://​dokidocs.​net/​glitch_​faq/) has a dynamically updating table of contents, allowing you to click through between the chapter and its TOC listing. (That is, unless you have enough screen real estate and the TOC just chills there, to the left, forever.) Another cool thing that this version allows for is dark mode: if you've noticed the little sun doodad on the top right, you can click it and it'll turn into a moon doodad, as well as turn on dark mode, and then you can click it, again and again, to your heart's content.

However, even though the AO3 version of this document might be a little less technologically advanced (due to reasons that should honestly be obvious), AO3, itself, is plenty advanced as a service. You could probably just find a dark mode sitewide skin somewhere, and a complete TOC with real chapter headings is going to require a slightly different hack, that I discovered while writing a similar-ish essay document: presuming you're reading this on somewhere that has the "Inspect Element" mode, enter it and just find a way to enter this to a stylesheet (be sure to "View Entire Work" before executing this):

p, ul, ol, blockquote, div.preface, .meta, #header, #feedback, .landmark {display: none;}

#main {padding-bottom: 0;}

Voilà. All the body text is now gone, and what remains is the headings, providing a table of contents.

Other than that, another TL;DR (don't worry, we're going to run out of TL;DRable info very soon) is simply: pay attention, brush up on your programming skills and remember that I'm presenting information in a strictly ordered, noob-friendly manner.

Still with me? Still ready to invest upwards of 10,000 hours, which some people seem to have declared the limit at which you can call DDLC your profession and expertise? Well, let's go.

[0010] PLACEHOLDER: HOW TO READ THIS DOCUMENT - IF YOU ARE JUST A CASUAL PLAYER PASSING BY

Although I don't think there's much to be found for the casual player, I reserve this section if I need to cater to that specific audience. I go into this slightly more in depth in [0300] HOW TO PLAY DDLC.

[0050] CREDITS AND COPYRIGHT

Doki Doki Literature Club! is © 2017 Team Salvato. This is an unofficial guide, created entirely through the effort of a multitude of fans across varying fields of expertise, and is designed to be read after playing the game itself. DDLC can be freely downloaded and played over at https://​ddlc.​moe. For further details on using the intellectual property, as well as any others introduced by Team Salvato, please consult the latest version of the Team Salvato IP guidelines over at http://​teamsalvato.​com/​ip-guidelines.

This guide highly concerns itself with reverse engineering of the game. Said reverse engineering is believed to have been conducted entirely using clean-room techniques, and therefore, not infringe on any copyright or patents. Throughout its lifetime, the guide will closely monitor the sources of the claims that it makes, and if any of them appears to directly violate copyright or patents, it will be promptly removed.

The guide itself, for the most part, is © 2020-whenever me, Creativity­The­Emotion, and does its best to not rely on any external writing exclusively, except when necessary, in which case explicit links are provided. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled [L000] GNU FREE DOCUMENTATION LICENSE.

In addition to allowed expandability upon the guide in your documents, subject to the license above, content may be freely contributed, adding to this guide, by any and all aspiring contributors who aren't snobbish assholes looking to keep awesome DDLC insider knowledge to themselves, and whenever content from external sources is contributed, it will be clearly labeled as follows:

[0051] AN EXAMPLE GUEST CHAPTER

Contributed by [your username can be here!], either © or explicitly released through a libre license (either the GNU FDL or a compatible license, such as Creative Commons).

[This is where your guest chapter's text would go...]