Noman Tattoo (Guide)

Early PoSI Content and Onwards

Acquiring The Face in the Snow tattoo, A Private Tattoo of your Noman, Inscribed in Gant or Memories of a Doubled Spring is a difficult endeavour, requiring a great deal of preparation, timing, and some luck. This guide is meant to help with the first two, and mitigate the need for the last.

Outline

The creation of a Noman can take place at any point from the opening of Penstock's Wicket (on January 5th, when you play the twelfth visit from Mr Sacks) until when it closes; in 2022, this happened on the 29th. The Noman begins with 100 Noman's Friend, some of which is taken away each time Time, the Healer arrives - the exact amount depending on the length of time since the Wicket opened and on random chance. Once Noman's Friend reaches zero, the Noman dies, so in order to get the tattoo one must gain enough Noman's Friend to keep it alive until the second week of the Feast of the Rose. In recent years, the Feast has begun on a non-Friday weekday between the 4th and the 6th; as such, the finishline is likely to occur on 11th February 2027.

The best way of getting a large amount of Noman's Friend is to acquire Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre by warming Vials of Tears of the Bazaar; this has a 4 in 5 chance of giving one PtPT:tToL, and a 1 in 5 chance of giving 2 PtPT:tToL and consuming the Vial. If you have a point of PtPT:tToL, this will allow you to get up to 11-12 PtPT:tToL (depending on luck), with each vial producing 6 on average; then using the Noman card this can be converted to 33-36 Noman's Friend. If you know how to grind Vials, then the tricky part becomes getting that first point of PtPT:tToL, as by this point both the Days of Mr Sacks and Advent will be over. Thus, this method may only be used as many times as you have Unusual Pails of So-Called Snow.

This places a bit of a time constraint on feeding the Noman, as Pails usually melt with the Time, the Healer immediately after the Wicket closes; as such, depending on your exact TtH day and the amount of Noman's Friend you need to acquire, it may be wise to create a Noman sooner than is strictly optimal in order to ensure you get all the converting done. You'll have about a week to draw an Abundant Frequency card at most five times.

Noman Tattoo

The amount of preparation you need to do depends heavily on what day of the week your Time, the Healer falls on and how lucky you feel, but is at absolute most it will require grinding x 21 Vial of Tears of the Bazaar, plus any needed to get the initial 15 Taste of Lacre. The most reliable, though not necessarily most action-efficient, way to do this will usually be to grind x 25 Fourth-City Echo per desired Vial and wait for a Vials week at The Rat Market (Guide).

Step by Step

1. Find your Noman creation day according to the table below. If you are nervous about drawing Noman's Progress enough times between your creation day and January 29, you may wish to amass more Unusual Pail of So-Called Snow and Vial of Tears of the Bazaar than required and do your creation a week earlier.

2. On Noman creation day after your Time, the Healer arrives, make your Noman at The Noman, giving 100 x Noman's Friend. See below for various strategies to gather the required 15 ToL, depending on what you have and when you're gathering it.

3. If you have no Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre, use Unusual Pail of So-Called Snow and Examine it through your Semiotic Monocle to raise Taste of Lacre (ToL) to 3.

4. Once you have any ToL, Warm your Tears of the Bazaar until you have 11 ToL. It is possible, but less likely, to end up with 12 ToL if a Vial is used up when warming at 10 ToL. Vials are used up 20% of the time, so you should use the tables below to calculate how many you need to be safe if you're very unlucky.

5. Once you have maxed out your Tear-warming ToL, convert to (3*Taste of Lacre) x Noman's Friend via "Help me. I beg you." This is on an Abundant Frequency opportunity card. Because you will be turning in 11-12 Taste of Lacre, you will gain 33-36 Noman's Friend (NF).

6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you have one more NF than the maximum NF loss calculated in the below table, or whatever higher number if you aimed for a higher target.

7. Watch as your NF drops week to week, until the second week of Feast of the Rose (Guide). Then get An Incident: Get a private tattoo of your noman and you're done!

Gathering Initial ToL

The strategy presented here relies on purchasing a Noman at its most expensive, which is 15 ToL. You can fund most of this with the free Pails and Taste of Lacre from Advent, Snowbound, and the 12 Days of Mr Sacks but any shortages (either from picking different options during the Days of Mr Sacks, getting Incarnadine Robes from your Snowbound, or just having already spent it) will have to be replaced with Tears of the Bazaar or purchased Pails. Here are a few ways to get to 15, although there are many other routes:

Starting early December

Uses 7 Pails, 4 uncapped ToL gains; requires Dangerous 334 (or close to it)

• 0->3: Use 1 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 3->4: Gain 1 ToL from the Advent calendar
• 4->5: Use 1 x Pail to Dip a Soul
• 5->8: Use 1 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 8->11: Gain 3 ToL from the 12 Days of Sacksmas (Days 2, 5, 8)
• 11->15: Use 4 x Pails to Feed it to a Boar. Saving a Mood Card may help you get 100% on the Dangerous challenge.

Starting early December, low Dangerous

Uses 3 Pails, 4 uncapped ToL gains, and 1-2 Tears

• 0->3: Use 1 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 3->4: Use 1 x Pail to Dip a Soul
• 4->7: Use 1 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 7->11: Use 1 Tear, or 2 if you're unlucky.
• 11->12: Gain 1 ToL from the Advent Calendar
• 12->15: Gain 3 ToL from the 12 Days of Sacksmas (Days 2, 5, 8)

Starting early December, conserving Pails

Uses 1 Pail, 4 uncapped ToL gains, 1-4 Tears

• 0->3: Use 1 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 3->11: Use 1-4 Tears (average of 1.33)
• 11->12: Gain 1 ToL from the Advent Calendar
• 12->15: Gain 3 ToL from the 12 Days of Sacksmas (Days 2, 5, 8)

Past Sacks, no Tears

Uses 11 Pails; requires Dangerous 334 (or close to it)

• 0->3: Use 1 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 3->5: Use 2 x Pail to Dip a Soul
• 5->8: Use 1 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 8->15: Use 7 x Pail to Feed it to a Boar. Saving a Mood Card may help you get 100% on the Dangerous challenge.

Past Sacks, with Tears

Uses 6+ Pails, 1-2 Tears

• 0->6: Use 2 x Pail to Examine through a Monocle
• 6->11: Use 1-2 Tears. May get you to 12, saving you a Pail in the next step.
• 11->15: Use 4 x Pail (or more, based on your Dangerous and luck) to Feed it to a Boar

The Numbers

This guide is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.

What needs work: Noman melt rates have been changed this year, and the below information can only be used as a rough guideline. The difficulties of these achievement are apparently similar, but caution and over-preparedness are advised!

Each time Time, the Healer arrives, you will lose between (1.75 × D)+3 and (1.75 × D)+36 Noman's Friend, where D is the number of days since January 5th - so for example, if your TtH came on the 6th (and you'd already made a Noman) you'd lose between 5 and 38 Noman's Friend. Meanwhile, the Taste of Lacre cost for making a Noman only increases by ~0.8 per day, to a maximum of 15 (reached on the 17th), so generally it's a good idea to wait until after the last of your Time, the Healers which falls in the period the Wicket is open to make your Noman.

The numbers that follow are estimates for Christmas 2026, assuming that the Wicket closes on the last Friday of January (the 29th), the Feast opens on the first Thursday of February (the 4th) and the Noman's Friend loss scales as it did last year. These assumptions may not hold true, and adding a healthy margin for error on top may be wise.

Christmas 2026 (Noman Tattoo)
TtH Day	Noman creation day	Expected Noman's Friend loss	Maximum possible Noman's Friend loss	Safe number of Pails	Safe number of Vials
Monday	25th	146	179	3	10
Tuesday	26th	150	183	3	10
Wednesday	27th	153	186	3	11
Thursday	28th	157	190	3	12
Friday	22nd	136	169	3	8
Saturday	23rd	139	172	3	9
Sunday	24th	143	176	3	9

Note that the worst-case scenario most years is a loss of 276 Noman's Friend; as such, you need only acquire an extra 176, which (as noted above) may be done with 6 Pails and an average of 7 vials - even if you're incredibly unlucky, you'll need at most 21 vials. On years when the Feast begins particularly early, depending on your Time, the Healer day, you may need no additional vials at all.

Fortunately, it is possible to reach ToL 15 with five pails left over even if you started the season with no ToL, so you'll only need to purchase a single pail from the urchins. You gain 1 from Advent, then use a pail with Examine it through your Semiotic Monocle to get to 4, then Warm your Tears of the Bazaar to get to 11 (uses on average another 1.17 Vials and at most 4), then use the Mr Sacks cards to gain 4 ToL and a Pail (requires that you be a Celestial or a Notary or Doctor). See Christmas (Guide) and 12 Days of Mr Sacks (Guide) for more information on this.

Future Years

Christmas 2027 (Noman Tattoo)
TtH Day	Noman creation day	Expected Noman's Friend loss	Maximum possible Noman's Friend loss	Safe number of Pails	Safe number of Vials
Monday	24th	143	176	3	9
Tuesday	25th	146	179	3	10
Wednesday	26th	150	183	3	10
Thursday	27th	153	186	3	11
Friday	21st	132	165	3	7
Saturday	22nd	136	169	3	8
Sunday	23rd	139	172	3	9

Christmas 2028 (Noman Tattoo)
TtH Day	Noman creation day	Expected Noman's Friend loss	Maximum possible Noman's Friend loss	Safe number of Pails	Safe number of Vials
Monday	22nd	136	169	3	8
Tuesday	23rd	139	172	3	9
Wednesday	24th	143	176	3	9
Thursday	25th	146	179	3	10
Friday	19th	125	158	2	8
Saturday	20th	129	162	2	8
Sunday	21st	132	165	3	7

Memories of a Doubled Spring

The newer noman-survival-based-vanity, Memories of a Doubled Spring, is gained by having a Noman survive to early May so it can experience De Gustibus in Whitsun. This is significantly more difficult than the tattoo, not just because of the substantially higher resource investment, but also because the volumes involved introduce multiple new time-limited chokepoints. You will need far more than 5 x Unusual Pails of So-Called Snow for the much larger quantity of Noman's Friend needed; these will have to be purchased at a ruinous cost in echoes and actions from the urchins: as noted below, it costs 16 actions, 1 x Night-Whisper and 7 x Storm-Threnody for each of around 80 x Pails, and can only be done in December and January.

Timeline

Before December

Gather Supplies

As a rough estimate, this achievement requires around 130 x Vial of Tears of the Bazaar, 80 x Night-Whisper, and 560 x Storm-Threnody. You should try to obtain these before the first SNOWBOUND!, as you will not have many actions to spare afterwards.

December

Trading for Pails

Trade your Wild Word items for Pails of Snow. This can be done between the first SNOWBOUND! through 29 January. While it is possible to continue drawing this in January, you may want to accomplish the bulk of this in December to reserve actions for warming Tears.

You need to draw the Urchin's faction card for each pail. Even accounting for random draws and your free weekly Favourable Circumstance, you will probably need to force-draw this card around 60 times by spending Notability on Favourable Circumstances.

Favourable Circumstances cost 7 Notability, although you will want to have 8 before you buy one so that you are still Notable afterwards. A character with at least 41 points of BDR can bring themselves up from 1 Notability to 8 by simply calling on the Amanuensis repeatedly, a process that takes 16 actions per Pail. Characters will lesser gear will need to spend additional time generating Making Waves.

A character with at least 38 points of BDR and a trusted accomplice could perform this process by buying Circumstances with only 7 Notability, and benefiting from a Social Action to gain the first point of Notability.

January

Warming Tears

Making a Noman first becomes available on January 5. As described below, you will probably want to make a Noman early rather than late so that you can draw the card as often as possible before Pails melt. To help draw the card more, review the guide for deck thinning and also make use of deck-refresh options like Tin of Murgatroyd's Jellied Mushroom Cakes and one of the Perks available in the House of Chimes.

February through May

Waiting

Track progress against expectations. If it looks necessary, you can expend more Tears at a less-efficient rate to give an existing Noman a boost.

The Numbers

Christmas 2026 (Doubled Spring)
TtH Day	Noman creation day	Expected Noman's Friend loss	Maximum possible Noman's Friend loss	Safe number of Pails	Safe number of Vials
Monday	6th	2415	2712	80	316
Tuesday	6th	2226	2523	74	294
Wednesday	6th	2257	2554	75	298
Thursday	6th	2289	2586	76	301
Friday	6th	2320	2617	77	305
Saturday	6th	2352	2649	78	309
Sunday	6th	2383	2680	79	313

Note that, although anything less than these safe values is theoretically capable of ending in failure, in practice the chances of having that many vials get used up first time are vanishingly small. Below is a table of maximum losses and corresponding vial percentiles - that is, the amount of vials you would need to have a given percentage chance of success.

Noman's Friend Loss	95%	99%	99.5%	99.9%	99.99%
2410	106	111	113	117	122
2438	108	113	115	119	123
2466	109	114	116	120	125
2546	112	118	119	123	128
2576	114	119	121	125	130
2605	115	120	122	126	131
2635	116	122	123	128	132
2665	118	123	125	129	134
2695	119	124	126	130	135
2724	120	126	128	132	137
2806	124	129	131	135	140

Future Years

Christmas 2027 (Doubled Spring)
TtH Day	Noman creation day	Expected Noman's Friend loss	Maximum possible Noman's Friend loss	Safe number of Pails	Safe number of Vials
Monday	6th	2383	2680	79	313
Tuesday	6th	2415	2712	80	316
Wednesday	6th	2466	2779	82	325
Thursday	6th	2499	2812	83	329
Friday	6th	2289	2586	76	301
Saturday	6th	2320	2617	77	305
Sunday	6th	2352	2649	78	309

Christmas 2028 (Doubled Spring)
TtH Day	Noman creation day	Expected Noman's Friend loss	Maximum possible Noman's Friend loss	Safe number of Pails	Safe number of Vials
Monday	6th	2320	2617	77	305
Tuesday	6th	2352	2649	78	309
Wednesday	6th	2383	2680	79	313
Thursday	6th	2415	2712	80	316
Friday	6th	2226	2523	74	294
Saturday	6th	2257	2554	75	298
Sunday	6th	2289	2586	76	301