Your First 20 Days in Torn
The first 20 days set the trajectory for your entire Torn career. Get these right and you'll be ahead of players who've been clicking around aimlessly for months. Every section here is something you should be doing from day one, simultaneously, not sequentially.
Each of you will be on your own journey. Some of you will become business owners and run a criminal enterprise. Others will focus on crimes and make their way into organized crimes. Some of you will grow your stats into the billions and participate in ranked wars against Torn's finest. Even as a trader, your battle stats matter to help keep you safe.
Regardless of the path you take, your battle stats can only help you travel the mean streets of Torn more safely.
The Race to Level 15
Level 15 is your first major milestone and you should be sprinting toward it. It unlocks your ability to be self-supportive. Through flying and trading the goods you can buy overseas, you can now afford the finer things in Torn life. Mostly drugs and alcohol.
Every share you buy in Torn's stock market generates dividends, but more importantly, hitting certain share thresholds unlocks permanent passive bonuses. Some stocks give you extra energy, extra happy, reduced travel times, or free items. These bonuses stack and they're active 24/7 whether you're logged in or not.
To get to level 15 fast, you need to stack every source of XP available. Gym training gives XP. Winning fights gives XP. Crimes give XP. Missions give XP. Don't rely on just one source — hit all of them every cycle. The players who reach 15 in under 20 days are the ones who never let their energy or nerve sit full.
Once you hit 15, your first stock purchase should be something that boosts your daily gains. Look at what each company offers at the lowest share tiers and prioritize the ones that help your training loop. The stock market guide on the forums breaks down every option.
Training
Your battle stats are the single most important thing in Torn. Nothing else comes close. Every time your energy bar fills up, you should be in the gym spending it. Long term, you want to keep your stats balanced, but in order to be most effective at first focus on speed and strength. This will allow you to hit above your weight. Once you reach level 15, level out your stats.
Happiness matters more than you think. Your gym gains scale with your happiness level, so before you train, make sure your happy is as high as possible. If nothing else, you can buy 100 Lollipops each day at Sally's Sweet Shop to help boost your happiness. This is called the Lolli-hop. But there are happy jumps and console jumps. You can read more about these variants and this happy jump guide to learn what you have to look forward to.
The most influential decision on your happiness at this level is where you live.
Upgrade Your Housing
Housing in Torn isn't cosmetic — it directly affects your stat gains. Better housing means higher maximum happiness, and happiness is a multiplier on your gym training. A Private Island is the best housing in the game, and getting one should be a top priority.
A fully upgraded Private Island pushes your happiness cap far above what any other property offers. That means every single gym session gives you more stats than the same session in a worse property. Over 20 days, the difference is massive. Over 20 weeks, it's the gap between a strong player and a dominant one.
The problem is cost. Islands are expensive to buy outright, and the upgrades add up. But you can rent one from another player, which gives you all the happiness benefits without the upfront investment. You still need to cover rent and upkeep, so make sure your income can handle it before committing.
Finding a spouse helps enormously here. Married couples share a property, which means you split the cost of an island and its upkeep. This isn't about romance — it's about economics. Find someone active and trustworthy. Here's a bonus hint for people starting out in Torn: merits are something all players value, and if someone owns their own PI, has played the game for years, and is only paying upkeep, it might be worth it to them to let you live in it for free. As a newbie, you obviously can't pay, and if you go inactive, they can stay married to you forever and collect the merits related to how long they've been married. It doesn't hurt to ask.
Education
Start your first education course immediately. Not tomorrow, not after you "figure things out" — right now. Courses take real-time days to complete, and every day you delay is a day wasted.
There are only two real options for where to start with education. The first is Sports Science. Because of the exponential nature of gym training, getting this first will significantly enhance all future gym gains.
The other option is to do the Intro to Biology followed by Intravenous Therapy, which allows you to use blood bags to heal yourself. If you plan on joining a very active warring faction, you'll probably be required to have this.
Education is entirely passive. You enroll, you wait, you collect the bonus. There is zero reason not to have a course running at all times during your first 20 days. Stack up those permanent bonuses while you're still new and they'll compound for the rest of your time in Torn.
Job
Get a job on day one. City jobs in the six starter sectors — education, legal, gambling, medical, military, groceries — are available immediately and require nothing to start.
Before you get started, you might want to follow this guide to earn an easy merit that you have to be without a job to earn.
The salary doesn't matter much early on. What matters are the working stats you build and the job specials you unlock. Different company types train different stats, so pick one that aligns with your goals. My preference is Education — it allows you to rapidly increase your work stats compared to other career tracks. When you're between jobs, you can drop into Education and work on getting to Principal, where you'll see a 10% drop in education time. When the average time to complete all education is around 4 years, this results in cutting 6 months off your education.
While you're working a city job, be on the lookout for a player company job. You can check the newspaper for job listings.
The top three jobs you should be considering are in a 3* Adult Novelties company. This will allow you to buy Erotic DVDs with job points, saving you millions of dollars early in your career. If you can find yourself in a 10* eventually, it doubles the stats at which a happy jump remains effective. But for now, focus on 3* or higher. The higher the stars, the more job points you get and the faster you can accumulate eDVDs.
Another job worth considering is a 5* or above Toy Store. This will allow you to console jump instead of happy jump. At 7*, you will be able to carry 5 additional plushies, which for the time being is the meta on how to make money after level 15 for beginning players.
Lastly, consider a 3* Music Store, which provides 30% extra gym experience. This will result in being able to upgrade your gyms more quickly and lead to faster battle stat gains. This is considered the ideal job for the average beginning player at this time.
Factions
Join a faction as early as possible. Solo Torn is half a game. A good faction gives you organized crime access, medical and booster supplies, armor and guns you probably couldn't even dream of affording, and — most importantly — people who will answer your questions and watch your back.
Look for factions that specifically recruit new players. They exist, and they're usually happy to have active members regardless of stats. What they care about is whether you'll show up, train, and participate. Activity beats raw power at the low levels.
Once you're in, participate in everything. Organized crimes, chains, wars if they happen. The respect your faction earns from these activities unlocks perks that benefit every member, including you. Being dead weight in a faction is the fastest way to get kicked.
Don't join the first faction that invites you through a mass-recruit spam message. Look at the faction's page, check their respect level and member activity, and ask questions before committing. Ideally, you'd join a faction with 2 million+ respect. This is the base level for having all the major perks in Torn unlocked. You'll need them all once you hit level 15!
There are many types of factions and each one will have different requirements and goals. There are the ranked war factions that dominate the faction list, but there are also factions that focus on crimes or revives. Be sure to ask how you will get paid. You should expect around 1 million per hit.
Crimes
Start doing crimes from day one. Open the crimes page, pick the lowest-tier option available, and start grinding.
Early crimes pay almost nothing. That's fine. You're not doing them for money — you're doing them for crime experience. Crime XP contributes to your level progression and unlocks higher-tier crimes that actually pay well. Think of the early grind as an investment.
Use your nerve every time it fills up, just like energy. Nerve sitting at max is wasted progression. The cadence should be: log in, spend energy in the gym, spend nerve on crimes, log out, come back when they refill.
As your crime experience builds, you'll unlock more profitable options. The jump from early crimes to mid-tier crimes is significant, and from mid-tier to high-tier is where real money starts flowing. But you only get there by grinding through the low-paying stuff first.
As a general rule, you should be most of the way through getting your crime skill to 100 before you start on the next crime. The crimes are structured such that almost everything you need for the next level is available to you by reaching a crime skill of 100 in each of the lower-level crimes.
For a detailed step-by-step walkthrough of which crimes to do, what enhancers to get, and when to move on, read the Search For Cash Guide.
Merits
Merits are permanent upgrades that you earn through leveling up and achieving other aspects of Torn. You get one free reset per year around Christmas time, so consider these permanent.
The two best merits to get to 10 total are bank investments and education reduction. These will unlock your ability to grow your perks via education and your net worth via bank investment.