What are good early-game sources of money?
After playing the game for several hours, here are the easy sources of early-game money I found:
- The City of Engines (southwest of the City of Keys, the starting city) has an automaton that's seeking one of each type of memory that you can stuff into a Memory Box, and it will pay ~350G each. There are about six types of memory that you can stuff into a box, so that's around 2000G total. You'll find the memories semi-randomly as you explore the House and visit various cities.
- The information-brokers of the game will buy a Glimpse of Another World for about 150G. You can find said Glimpses in several random encounters of the House. (Ghoulwatch pays the best for a Glimpse: 90G plus a Fetch-Mirror, which is both useful in-and-of-itself or can be sold for 200G in the City of Keys)
- Several random events in the House give you valuable items:
- Wells are always good: some give you an automatic Glimpse, some can get you a choice between Glimpse or Bottled Darkness. (Bottled Darkness sells for 500G in the City of Keys, once you've found the black market in a random event.)
- A shack with a human cowering in it gives you two items: a Glimpse when you ask how he got there, and a Human Prisoner (which you can press-gang into your lower-deck crew while you're in a city)
- If you're desperate, you can sell your starting Fetch-Mirror for 200G in the City of Keys. You don't really need instant travel until you can comfortably afford to throw away 200G at a time.
- The newspapers in the City of Keys will purchase news from you, for 50G to 100G, plus bonuses for how far away the news came from.
- Incriminating Evidence should be sold for 500G+, but the price differs per broker. You can get Incriminating Evidence: The Governor fairly early by following Rotherford's storyline.
- 10 Lurid Tales can be converted into 2000G in your lodgings. I seem to find lots of Lurid Tales in the Chimeric Empire, a ways north-east of the City of Keys.
In general, A House of Many Doors is much less cash-poor than, say, the very-similar game Sunless Sea. You're almost never going to run so low on money that you die from the inability to purchase fuel. But earning a lot of money is still hard.