Disco Elysium

• Succeeding in checks isn't always good. Failing checks isn't always bad. Your skills don't necessarily have your best interests in mind.

• Don't obsess too much over your build. First of all, failing skill checks can be more rewarding than passing them. Second of all, you can get a lot of situational bonuses to your skills for things you do in gameplay. Your build goes a long way but there’s always a way to reach your goal, regardless of your stats.

• Psyche and Phys are the less-safe stats to set to 1 because they (specifically the Endurance and Volition skills) give you your health bars; you heal when you sleep (in a bed) and also from some events, but that doesn't matter if you have 1 health out of a maximum of 1 and are thus entirely reliant on healing items auto-rescuing you from death. (You can improve your health directly with skill points though)

• When you get a Critical health/morale warning, you have a few seconds to use a healing item to prevent your death.

• Green outlines indicate either doors, or objects with a dialogue interface. Yellow outlines indicate objects detected with Perception. Grey outlines indicate locked objects. They turn from Grey to Blue if you have an item in your hand which can open them.

• Soft locks and crashes happen. They'll probably still be a thing even after the game is patched. Save manually every so often (or even obsessively) so you don't have retrace your progress.

• Time only advances by choosing dialogue options. It is completely paused when walking around and during mid-dialogue (so you can take as long as you want to read.) Time stops advancing at 2 AM though, at that point you need to sleep.

• If you don't use your partner's police car to call the HQ (or figure out exactly which items you're missing in a different way, but this is the easiest), you'll get hit with 3(!) morale damage in the containers area.

• Money is hard to come by, especially during the first day when you have a big hotel bill.
  • Higher Perception lets you see additional containers, which can contain money, healing items and such.
  • One way to make some money is to internalize the Hobocop thought, find a plastic bag, pick up bottles and take them to Frittte.
  • To specifically get some money to pay off your bill, you could talk to
    Joyce Messier on her boat. If you pass the check, you can receive 130 Real.
  • Another way is to avoid clicking on any green description bubbles until after you have internalized the thought
    "The Fifteenth Indotribe"
    . You can learn that thought right at the start of the game by
    asking Joyce Messier about White Pines and clicking through until selecting the "Eight percent of the world's cargo is a lot" option.

• Click to walk, double-click to run.