Hallowmas tips?

Good everlasting evening.

Hallowmas is just around the corner. For us new players, any tips on this event?
Should we stock up a specific item? Grind an attribute or buy an expensive item from the bazaar in order to max it up just for this event?
Any tip will do.

I will probably open a similar topic for Mr. Sacks when this becomes relevant.

From memory: a starveling cat is handy at that time of year, as you can get both wounds and nightmares simultaneously by petting it.

Having a sporing bonnet, a modish bonnet, a pirate hat, and scarlet stockings will also help. You want to be able to raise your menaces quickly and easily.

The number one tip is to be as active as possible in getting and giving confessions.

Oh, completely forgot - you also want a point in Scholar of the Correspondence. Or at least one. That way you have a reliable source of suspicion (public lectures in the forgotten quarter).

Not sure I understood the rules of this event. Trust? Confession? What do I want to mass up in order to cash in? If one is able to cash in anythng and win prizes.
Also, I noticed you can achieve destiny. Will this destiny run over my excising one, compel me the new one? If so, I will try to avoid it (since mine is Fate locked).

Okay, I think I am starting to grasp the rules.
This link to the last Hallowmas explains a bit and also answers my destiny question (yes, the new destiny overrides the old one but you avoid activating the destiny’s option)
http://community.failbettergames.com/topic9417-hallowmas-content-for-.aspx

Any other tips or strategies?
(Thanks, RandomWalker)
edited by Gonen on 9/18/2015

Hallowmas is about building up Spirit. You can get Spirit by accepting Confessions from other players, and by deciding what to do with the Trust other players placed in you by accepting your Confession request. At the end of the event you’ll be interviewed, and the amount of Spirit you have determines how good your entry is. There are no unique items, but if you put a lot of effort into the holiday you can get a point or two of Notability from the interview.

Getting a Destiny is one thing you can do during Hallowmas, but if you already have one then you can’t get another without spending Fate to ditch your existing one. No worries, you’ll be able to keep your existing Destiny without any trouble.

Sara, I understood people were rewarded last year for keeping the confessions of year 2013. Is that an option? Was the 2013 confessions saved automatically or did you CHOOSE to keep them (instead of switching them for Spirits, for example).

On your second Hallowmas you’ll get the ability to either devour your old kept confessions or to betray their Trust by digging them up. Keeping Confessions will always earn you more Spirit than betraying the trust of others, so if you’re trying to get that as high as you can it’s best to be completely trustworthy.

Keep your menaces at 3 at all times.
Befriend everyone. EVERYONE! Don’t wait for them to befriend you. Find the profiles on the forums, Tumblr, reddit, wherever.
Keep track of whom you’ve sent requests to to avoid duplicate requests.

When Hallowmas starts, you will only have five days to send as many confession requests to others as you possibly can.

However, after the five day period ends, you can continue to accept as many requests as you have in your inbox for most of the rest of the month. So one pro-strategy is to spend those first few critical days -only- sending requests and not accepting them (though do keep your menaces high so people can send the requests to your inbox still for you to accept after the sending period ends).

Owning a sporing bonnet, a pirate hat, and a modish bonnet is a good idea. With those hats, if you put them on and then take them off again while at 0 menace, it gives you one free level of menace in its associated menace state even after it is removed. So for example if you put on the sporing bonnet with 0 nightmares, then take it off, you now have +1 nightmares even if you are no longer wearing the hat. That trick will save you a lot of actions over the course of the holiday. For a sense of scale, owning those three hats and using them in this manner saved me, like, at least 500 actions worth of menace grinding last year.
edited by NiteBrite on 9/19/2015

Raising menaces reference sheet:

http://community.failbettergames.com/topic9427-raising-menaces.aspx

Can you only share your confessions with a person one time? Or is having multiple contacts just for ease of use?

You’re limited to only one confession per person, so you definitely need multiple contacts.

I was afraid of that…

There’s always a thread on here full of others looking to confess, so you should be fine!

How many people will we need to share confessions with to get the maximum regale bonus?

You get 4 Spirit for each confession you consign to the Bazaar, and the highest reward needs 500 Spirit. You also get 1 Spirit whenever you accept a Confession request, so 100 Confessions given and 100 Confessions accepted will get you there. I personally didn’t make it up nearly that high, but the next tier down requires only 250 Spirit. Reaching 500 will be easier after your first year since you’ll probably have some old Confessions to cash in for 6 Spirit each.

The biggest issue is PoSI vs Non-PoSI confessions. Non-PoSI confessions cap out at like, 6 (edit: level 6, not 6 cp). If you aren’t a PoSI, you can’t get a lot of spirit. And if your contacts aren’t PoSI you can’t get a lot of spirit. So when asking for confessions it is important to specify if you are or are not PoSI. I had hundreds of contacts I just couldn’t confess since they weren’t PoSI last year and that was a problem.

PoSI confessions take 3 actions to send. There’s 144 actions a day, and five days to send. That means if you are super active, you can send at most 240 confessions (worth 4 spirit each) assuming you have that many PoSI contacts and don’t waste any actions. So you could in theory hit values as high as 960 spirit that way, but that would be very unusual due to contact scarcity. Basically it is possible to hit 500 spirit your first year under the right conditions, but it’s really hard especially if you don’t know a lot of end game players (and a good portion of the people asking on the forums will be non-PoSI).

It’s a bit of a tricky problem to find lots of fresh PoSI contacts every year. I thought about it a lot, and my current plan has been to use the patron/protege mechanics to hand raise as many new players to PoSI status as I can in the hopes that some of them will stick around long enough to experience Hallowmas with me and my friends. Its not many that you can create this way, since you only get 5 free evenings a week, but every little bit helps you know? Yeah.

Edit: Tricky for me that is. I suppose I could put together a list of my past Trusts and create a pretty good list of a few hundred PoSI that people could confess that I can no longer personally confess. That might be useful for newer players, but the risk would be a lot of those players are from ~the past~ and some might not be active anymore. I dunno, let me know if there is any interest in such a thing.
edited by NiteBrite on 9/20/2015

Does one need to be on my contact list to get or send a confession or do I just type their name?
(If I need building acquaintances thats another action to calculate).
What happens if I send a confession to a non POSI and he reach the limit before accepting mine? Is that action loss to me? Stays unanswered?

[quote=Gonen]Does one need to be on my contact list to get or send a confession or do I just type their name?
(If I need building acquaintances thats another action to calculate).
What happens if I send a confession to a non POSI and he reach the limit before accepting mine? Is that action loss to me? Stays unanswered?[/quote]
You don’t need to be acquaintances to send and receive confessions. Hallowmas predates the Notability system. You just type their name to send a confession (that will add them to your contacts automatically). Others can send you confessions without you adding them to your contacts first. The game automatically adds players to your contacts when you receive a social action from them.

If a Non-PoSI hits their confession limit before accepting your confession request then they cannot accept it and will have to decline. You lose the action you used to send the request. Conversely, if you send out too many non-PoSI confessions and have outstanding requests to other non-PoSI after you hit your cap on non-PoSI the outstanding requests can be accepted giving you trust but you don’t gain any points in confessions. Gaining trust 1 but no points in confessions makes this a double loss since 1. you now have trust meaning you can’t fresh confess them next year, and 2. you need points in confessions to convert trust 1 to trust 2 in order to make it useful for the following year.

I believe, that in the following year, FBG will give you enough CP in confessions to turn your outstanding trust 1s into trust 2s (or betrayals) specifically to mitigate this scenario. I and others got a few mystery points of confessions at the start of last year and I believe it was for that reason, as there were rumors to that effect. This means if you overshoot, its bad this year, but all is not lost and you can make up for it in the next year. Intentionally overshooting non-PoSI request could be a very powerful game break, but it’d take like 3 years to pay out and so probably no one would ever think to do that.
edited by NiteBrite on 9/20/2015