Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Tutorial

From Fallen London Wiki

If you're involved with the Fallen London community, you've likely heard about the Bone Market. Maybe you've read a guide or two, and were still left scratching your head.

Fear not, I've got you covered. (I hope, at least). This page walks you through some first bone market actions step by step, explaining the what and why along the way. After you've followed these steps, reading Assembling a Skeleton (Guide) should make sense to you.

Why Bone Market?[edit]

The bone market offers efficient access to some resources that you need for example for the Railway.

These include:

Access to the Bone Market[edit]

This is the progression that leads you to get access to the Bone Market:

Before you can Start[edit]

Assembling your own skeletons requires you to Invest in a Stall of your Own. If you buy a small stall first, it won't make the upgrade to a larger stall any cheaper, so you might as well get the biggest one (the handsome dais) right away. But for the rest of this tutorial, a small stall is enough.

What's the difference between the stall sizes? It's simple, if you work with bigger skeletons (built on a Mammoth Ribcage, Prismatic Frame or Leviathan Frame), the small stall isn't big enough.

The Rhythm of the Bone Market[edit]

The Bone Market is fundamentally an exchange, a market place.

Interacting with it usually consists of these steps:

  • Acquire some stuff to sell, often outside the bone market.
  • Potentially assemble a skeleton out of your stuff.
  • Approach a buyer.
  • Sell your stuff.

(Later we'll revise these steps a bit).

Let's break this down based on an example.

Example: Acquire Bessemer Steel Ingots[edit]

We'll start with a simple example: Acquiring 10 x Bessemer Steel Ingot.

These are the steps, more details to follow:

  • Acquire a Femur of a Jurassic Beast.
  • (do not assemble anything)
  • Approach the Enthusiast of the Ancient World.
  • Sell him the femur.

The details are

Acquire a Femur of a Jurassic Beast[edit]

First, check your inventory -- you might already have one.

If not, a simple but action-intensive method to acquire some is to use Brawling with Dockers and chose the large crate from the bone market.

This will give you quite a few femurs, which might seem like a waste for now, but you'll need lots of these later on when building the railway, so eventually they come in handy.

There are other ways to get this and and other bones; if you're looking for a specific bone, it is usually advisable to check Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Bone Sources.

Approach the Enthusiast of the Ancient World[edit]

In the Bone Market, select Seeking Buyers. One of the options should be Sell to an Enthusiast of the Ancient World. If this option is not available to you, it is because this buyer needs Respectable of at least 3.

At this point in the game you very likely have enough equipment to reach this threshold; go to your Possessions, filter your equipment to show Respectable items, and equip the highest you have per slot. If that doesn't bring you to 3, you can buy a Carnelian Sapphire Pendant from Trompowsky et Fils at the Bazaar, which alone brings in 2 points of Respectable -- and reduces Scandal build up, so it's actually useful in many situations.

Other buyers have other requirements, we'll get to that later.

Sell him your bone[edit]

Once you have reached the Enthusiast, there is a checkless option Sell him a Jurassic Thigh Bone.

It costs one action and one Femur of a Jurassic Beast, and gives you 10 x Bessemer Steel Ingot.

Congratulations, you have just finished your first Bone Market transaction.

Wasn't that bad, was it?

Building your First Skeleton[edit]

The Bone Market starts to get really interesting once you assemble skeletons and sell them.

To do that, you need your own stall, and you need a torso to start with.

The torso then dictates how many heads, limbs (arms, legs, wings) and tails you can attach.

At the end, you need to declare what your skeleton is supposed to be. If, for example, you started with a Human Ribcage, attached two arms, two legs and one head, you can declare it a human.

If you didn't follow anything that fits into a pre-made category (such as human, ape, bird, ...), you can always declare it a Chimera. This automatically increases its Skeleton: Self-Evident Implausibility, which makes it harder to sell.

Harder to sell means you need to pass a possibly steep Shadowy check, and you gain Suspicion on failure (and have to try again until you pass the check, or else decide to eventually break down your skeleton for parts, which isn't as profitable as selling it).

Other ways to increase Implausibility (which you should avoid, or at least limit), are:

But, enough theory, let's actually build something.

Start with a Plan[edit]

We want to build a human skeleton and sell it to the Enthusiast of the Ancient World.

This means we need

  • one torso
  • one skull
  • two arms
  • two legs

The Enthusiast wants at least one point of Skeleton: Antiquity in its skeleton, and the easiest way to achieve that is by using a Femur of a Jurassic Beast for one leg (or for both, if you like symmetry).

Selecting and Sourcing the Materials[edit]

The page Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Bone Sources gives a good overview over how you can get which bone. Which bones you use is dependent on availability and how well it fits into what you want to achieve.

Torso[edit]

The following torsos make it possible to build a human:

(How do I know that? From the clever table at Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Skeleton Types#Torso to Skeleton Types).

The first two of these aren't a good fit for what we want to do, because they only allow us to add a skull, nothing more, which makes it hard to get our Antiquity in.

For our purpose, Human Ribcage and Thorned Ribcage are equivalent; we'll go with the former, because it's easier to source. If you happen to have a Thorned Ribcage lying around, feel free to use it.

As to where to get it, I recommend consulting Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Bone Sources. If that overwhelms you: pick the Brawling with Dockers option if you have that unlocked. If not, gather 5 Constable favours and hand them in at the Shuttered Palace through A longer conversation with the Commissioner of Police.

Skull[edit]

There are a lot of possible skulls to mount to the torso, see Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Bones#Skulls for the complete list. Most of these would work for us, except for the Carved Ball of Stygian Ivory (which counts as zero skulls) and Doubled Skull (which counts as two skulls).

For simplicity, we'll use Bright Brass Skull, which you can simply buy at the Bazaar. It costs 62.50 E , which isn't cheap, but that value gets transferred into the skeleton, so you'll recover it when you sell the finished skeleton. If you have access to a different skull, feel free to use it.

Arms[edit]

Any of the arms from Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Bones#Arms work for us, including two different ones.

If you don't have any in your inventory, exchange 5 Criminal favours in the Flit for 3x Human Arm.

Legs[edit]

As mentioned before, one of our legs should be a Femur of a Jurassic Beast, possibly from Brawling with Dockers. As the second leg, you can use another Femur, or any other leg you have access for, for example an Unidentified Thigh Bone.

Enough Planning, Let's Build[edit]

Go to the Department of Menace Eradication, there take The Back Stair to the Bone Market, and then on to Assemble a Skeleton.

In this storylet, do the following. I'd also advise that after each step you got to the "Myself" tab and enter Skeleton into the search box there, and observe the values of the qualities related to your skeleton in progress.

  • Build on the Human Ribcage, which gives you these messages
    • You have begun work assembling a skeleton., a marker that your skeleton is a work in progress
    • An occurrence! Your 'Approximate Value of Your Skeleton in Pennies' Quality is now 1,250! this transfers the value of the torso to your skeleton. Future actions will increase this.
    • Your skeleton will need a skull.
    • Your skeleton needs four limbs to occupy all the joints available. This and the previous messages inform you what else you will need to do, attach one skull and four limbs (two arms and two legs, in our case)
    • An occurrence! Your 'Skeleton: Torso Style' Quality is now 15 - Human! this might be different if you start with Thorned Ribcage, don't worry about it.
    • You've lost 1 x Human Ribcage your torso is gone, it is now a skeleton in progress
    • You've started work on a skeleton. Palaeontologist counts how many skeletons you've built (or started to build, at least)
  • Affix a Bright Brass Skull to your Human Creature. This is a Mithridacy check, and it's better for you to pass it than to fail it (more profit, easier to sell that way), but don't worry if you fail it, the project overall will still succeed. This step also needs 200x Nevercold Brass Sliver, which I hope you have. If not, see Goods Grinding (Guide)#Nevercold Brass Sliver for where to get some
  • Now attach your arms and legs (order doesn't matter for the result, maybe go first arms then legs to avoid confusion), for example
    • Join a Human Arm to your Armless Human Creature twice
    • Apply a Jurassic Thigh Bone to your Finless Human Creature
  • And finally, Declare your Incredible Partially Prehistoric Free of Rubbery Influence Creature a completed Humanoid

These last three steps might have slightly different wording, depending on which materials you've used.

You have just built your first complete skeleton! Let's go on to sell it:

If you fail this last check, try again.

You should get roughly 2x Unprovenanced Artefact and 167 Bessemer Steel Ingot. The former reflects the points of Skeleton: Antiquity you brought in (through the Femur of a Jurassic Beast), the latter the Approximate Value of Your Skeleton in Pennies divided by 50.

Afterwards, clean up after yourself (this is just the next, zero-action step after selling), and celebrate your first successful sale!

Plan your Own Skeleton[edit]

At this point in the Tutorial, you might think "OK, I was able to follow a plan made for me, but what if I want to strike out on my own?". Or maybe not, but let's pretend you did.

Here's what you could do:

Decide Who to Sell To[edit]

Go to Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Buyers and select (from the first table) something that you want, and thus a buyer for skeleton.

Check The Buyer's Requirements[edit]

Most buyers have some requirements. Check that you can fulfill them. Some of these requirements can apply to you and your equipment, some to the skeleton you're selling to them.

For example, if you want to obtain Crate of Incorruptible Biscuits from A Theologian of the Old School, the table lists the requirements:

  • 0 
  • 0 

The first one refers to yourself, you have to have an outfit in which you have 0 Bizarre. This one is probably not too hard to fulfill, but some require 15 of one of the BDR qualities, or 7 of one and 7 of another quality, for these cases it's best to check first if you can even approach the buyer.

The second one means there must be no Skeleton: Amalgamy in the skeleton you're building. The easiest way to achieve that is to only use bones (torso, skull, arms, legs) that don't provide any Skeleton: Amalgamy.

(If you want to achieve zero Skeleton: Menace, you have more options, because there are bones that reduce the Menace of a skeleton, like the Human Arm).

Decide On a Skeleton Type and Bones[edit]

In theory, you can always just combine everything you want (as long as there are open slots on your torso) and declare it a Chimera in the end.

In practice, this might lead to skeletons that are so hard to sell that you waste a lot of actions on selling, so it usually pays off to target a specific skeleton type.

Please check the page Assembling a Skeleton (Guide)/Skeleton Types for available types, and what they require.

Beware that all types except Chimera, Humanoid, Ape and Monkey require that you first finish a lengthy study about them in your Laboratory. Of course, you only have to do the lab research once per type.

Picking a skeleton type involves some tradeoffs:

  • Some bone types make it easier than others to bring in some qualities. For example, if you want to build a skeleton with Skeleton: Amalgamy and the only bone you have access to that grants that is a Knotted Humerus (a type of arm), then you have to pick a skeleton type with arms.
  • Some bone types make it easier than others to bring in lots of skeleton value. For example there are torsos with high value (like the Leviathan Frame), and some skulls contribute medium-high values in the order of 50 to 100 E . It's hard to get hundreds of echoes in value just with arms and legs. If you want lots of whatever good you want to acquire, and your skeleton only has little value, you might need to build many of them, which consumes lots of actions.
  • There are weekly-changing "Fads" that favor some skeleton types over others, meaning they produce a higher payout.
  • Attaching many limbs takes many actions.
  • You might prefer using bones you already have in your inventory, or those that you can get more easily.

Gather your Materials[edit]

Sometimes you need some materials (like Bone Fragments) that are themselves best obtained by building skeletons (called "Generator Skeletons"). This is why you should first acquire the necessary materials and bones and then build, so that the Bone Market is available for the sourcing step.

Build[edit]

It's time to assemble your skeleton!

Stick to your plan. If you're prone to lose track of what you need to do, it's best to do all the tricky parts in one session. If you need to add a certain number of certain kinds of limbs, it's easier to keep track of them if you don't have to wait for action refreshes in between, so maybe start the limb part when you have enough actions to finish.

Finish and Sell[edit]

If you've done everything right, this part should be easy.

What's Next?[edit]

I hope that by now, you have a basic feeling for how the Bone Market works.

However, I've skipped over a lot of nuance in order to keep this tutorial manageable, so it's best to also read the guide.

When you get stuck, try asking for help on discord, people know that the Bone Market is confusing to newcomers, and usually somebody is willing to chime in.

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