Hello, fellow adventurers. Welcome to the Outside, one of the finest games in the multiverse. Although this can be a great game with many in-game tutorials on specific skills, it does seem that comprehensive overall levelling guide is missing and I am hoping to fill you in. This guide is generally for players who have completed the college tutorial, reached level 22-40 and might be struggling with mid-game leveling. I am not going to cover tutorial content, as you can find help elsewhere. I am also not going to cover end-game content, since I don’t feel qualified to do so.



The Outside starts you off in early game with a number of preset attributes, all which can be somewhat modified later on. Some of the key ones are: Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower and Charisma. In older meta-game strength and agility were useful, but in the current meta, it’s all about intelligence and charisma. Willpower is one of the most misunderstood and over-used attributes in the entire game. Hopefully I in this guide I can put forth and clarify the primary mechanic of willpower:



The primary mechanic of willpower is enabling you to cast spells from HP (Happiness Points).

That’s all there is to willpower. Just for background, there are a number of simple spells/skills in game that only require MP (Muscle Points) for many character classes. Examples include Jumping or Dancing skills or a Wing-Chun repeating punches spell. Muscle Points have a high regeneration rate and repeatedly depleting them (but not to 0) can be seen as a good way to grind XP and complete daily Exercise quests.

High Willpower, however, allows you to cast a far wider range of spells, for example: “Sit All Day in Cubicle and Not Complain” spell. However, it doesn’t use up Muscle Points, but instead does so at the cost of Happiness Points. Abusing this mechanic can lead to very un-desirable results. Unlike Muscle Points regen, almost no characters in game have built-in Happiness Regen. This isn’t so bad for many RPGs, however, the Outside lacks items and activities to make up for large HP loss. If your character has a so-called emotional reaction to the following photos, you might have been casting too much from Happiness.







One of the primary difficulties of the Outside is difficulty of finding permanent HP regen.

Temporary HP regen is common to many activities, although the amount of regen varies per character class. For example, “Hiking”, “Dancing”, “Cuddling” and “Massage” activities all grant some temporary HP regen to some characters. High level characters sometimes report that Mindfullness and Concentration skills can help with HP regen as well, although leveling those is beyond the scope of this guide.

Some characters mistakenly assume that items can grant permanent HP regen, however this is generally not the case. Even expensive items such as +CHA suits only come with a temporary boost in HP at the time of purchase. Gold piece per gold piece, activities tend to better sources of temporary HP than items.

Using temporary Happiness Points regen is extremely important and doubly so if you ever wish to cast from HP using Willpower. However it’s best to simply avoid casting from HP. Instead doing that, it’s best to concentrate on building up your Rationality skill which is basically a better version of the Willpower attribute, allowing you to cast a wide range of spells without HP drain. Note that Rationality skill is very different from the intelligence (INT) attribute. The Rationality skill can be trained by anyone, even for characters low in INT and WPR.



Here are some examples of basic Rationality spells:

One example is casting the “Remove should” spells, to get rid of the “should” curse”, or a “guilt” curse. The super-short version is simply:

Just stop doing things because you “should”.



Another one is also casting a basic “New homunculus” spell , which is meant to help dis-spell the “sunk cost” curse. The super-short version:

Close your eyes, and pretend you’re arriving in this body for the very first time.



There are more examples of rationality spells, found here



Several players who encounter the claim of being able to play the Outside without willpower use will complain about not being able to appropriately handle the Addiction mechanic:



The Addiction mechanic is the ability of some items and activities to grant temporary HP boosts, while providing negative HP regen to end up lower in the long term.

Addiction mechanic is triggered by things like cursed potions of booze and occasionally by cursed activities such as the Outside’s game within a game called Second Life. There is a sort of hidden attribute, which I named “addiction resist” which is positively affected by HP and positively affected by Rationality skills.

Since addiction resist depends on HP and addiction mechanic lowers HP in the long run, this tends to lead to a so-called “death spiral” if left unchecked for too long. The best way to handle this is to find some activity, such as “hiking”, that provides non-detrimental HP boosts and/or regen. Therapist classes or simply other characters with high Listening skills can increase addiction resist in the short term, but it’s always helpful to find some HP boosts anyways.



Low-Willpower characters who sometimes get caught up in the mechanic will mistakenly assume that High-Willpower characters have access to some sort of permanent addiction resist. This is not the case. All that high-willpower characters are capable of is casting spells from HP to temporarily raise addiction resist. This is useful to do from time to time. However, this mechanic itself prone to backfiring, since casting spells from HP over and over again lowers your addiction resist. This makes Willpower/HP based spells harder to cast. If this is again left unchecked, at some point, the cast threshold breaks and addiction mechanics takes over. If this happens, this is a great time to learn: “Missing by as little as possible” Rationality spell. Still, the problem of using willpower to fight addiction over and over again is not that much better than the addiction itself in the long term.

Hope you enjoyed the first part of the guide! Stay tuned for further sections. Remember to have fun playing the Outside!

