GTA CDA — Lakeside Ave (web)

Starting, exploring, and saving

Core loop: Walk downtown, talk with people, learn what they know, discover what others need, and use the right knowledge or item to help.
Save slots: Three local save slots preserve progress automatically, while starting over in an occupied slot requires an overwrite confirmation.
New game: Your chosen body stays fixed for that save, and your required essential skill becomes the first knowledge you carry into town.
Interaction: Left-click people, shop doors, food windows, benches, and nearby objects, while right-click controls the camera and middle-click changes first- or third-person view.
Discovery: Nameplates never reveal someone’s problem — ask “What do you need?” in conversation before a help attempt becomes available.
Phone: Talking to someone reveals their name and adds a callable contact who can tell you where they are downtown.
Character qualities: Rules → Characters reveals a person’s role, summary, and qualities only after you have talked to them; unmet people remain completely hidden there.
Bag: Items are used, skills and mastery are reviewed, businesses are managed, and active quests are checked or abandoned from the Bag.

Skills, needs, and helping

Learning skills: Keep choosing a teacher’s talk option until its counter is complete, after which that skill is learned permanently.
No skill cap: You can learn every skill without using inventory space or active quest slots.
Teachers: Some people downtown teach skills through repeated conversation. Who teaches what stays hidden until you meet them — then Rules → Characters records their qualities.
Essential eligibility: Every ordinary skill can be chosen at New Game; the current choices are acupuncture, coffee roasting, Creative Arts, heavy metal taste, climbing, and LEGO building. Skills tied to special activities, contacts, passive bonuses, or multi-person unlocks remain learn-only.
Essential effect: Your chosen skill starts learned and mastered, but it does not skip the two-business-contact requirement for an owned shop.
Need privacy: Help choices stay deliberately vague until you own the matching solution. Optional Skill Hint Mode reveals categories early, but conversation still gates helping.
Skill matches: Skills resolve matching interests and needs. Creative Arts includes crafts and watercolor; Game Development includes design and coding; Business & Marketing includes both practical business help and marketing.
Item and connection matches: Mark’s Gather magazine helps with housing, Nick’s BuildCities listing helps people share ideas, and a carried coffee helps someone tired.
Helping rewards: A successful kindness earns Help points and positivity, and any linked active challenge adds its own reward.
Coffee kindness: Helping a tired person consumes one cup from your Bag and grants two-and-a-half times the normal help positivity.
Returning needs: A helped person feels better for a while and can later develop another eligible downtown need.

Quests, challenges, and mastery

Challenge unlocks: Learning a skill, receiving Gather, or listing on BuildCities unlocks its practice challenge without automatically accepting it.
Accept rule: Every challenge and the Start a business checklist must be explicitly Accepted in conversation with the person who unlocked it.
Quest capacity: You normally have three active quest slots, and learning skills never occupies those slots.
Quest management: The Quests tab shows only active objectives and can abandon them, but it never accepts a new one.
Challenge pressure: Every active practice challenge raises stress, while the Start a business pitch checklist uses a slot without raising stress.
Standard challenges: One matching help completes most practice challenges, awards a bonus, and immediately frees their slot.
Multi-step challenges: Sean’s guest list needs five matching invitations, while Scarlett’s route needs five full laps for mastery.
Repeat-run progress: Mastery is permanent, but accepting a repeat multi-step challenge starts a fresh run counter so old lifetime completions cannot instantly finish it.
Molly’s target: Accepting Molly’s concert challenge assigns one random named person; only helping that person as the concert plus-one completes the challenge.
Scarlett’s slot: Walk Scarlett remains active after mastery until you return her to Glyn or abandon the challenge.
Repeat practice: Completed challenges can generally be accepted again while their required skill, item, or connection is still available, and abandoning never erases mastery progress.
Mastery: A non-essential business skill becomes mastered after its required challenge completions, while the chosen essential skill counts as mastered immediately.

Money, food, and wellbeing

Cash: You begin with $50, spend it at merchants, food places, and Craig, and earn it from dog walks, pitches, business sales, partner tips, and art commissions.
Food costs: Food and coffee display their cash price before purchase, and more expensive food generally removes more hunger.
Food locations: CDA Coffee Co, Hula Pot, Burger Dock, and the Oh Baby truck sell different meals and snacks through their doors or service window.
Hunger: Hunger rises continuously, rises faster while stamina stays low, and falls when food or coffee is used from the Bag.
Maximum hunger: A full hunger meter slows you to a crawl and prevents sprinting until you eat or drink.
Positivity: Positivity slowly decays and rises through kindness and selected rewards; Molly’s completed concert challenge adds 50 and pauses decay for about 30 minutes.
FailFest: Every missing-skill help attempt is secretly banked, and Dan K converts the full bank into five positivity per failure before resetting it.
Stress relief: Every point of positivity awarded also removes one point of stress even when positivity is already near full.
Maximum stress: A full stress meter slows walking and prevents sprinting, and full stress plus full hunger compounds the on-foot slowdown.
Stamina: Running and hard bicycle pedaling drain stamina, while resting regenerates it and coffee restores a portion.
Peptides: Dan sells ten-minute buffs that either raise maximum stamina or let Semax add two temporary quest slots.

Businesses and the big idea

Business gates: An owned skill business requires mastery of its skill plus any two contacts among Roman, Nick, Pat, and Dan D; the big-idea pitch requires Business & Marketing plus Nick’s BuildCities listing.
Business types: Every masterable help skill has a matching business definition; dog walking still supports partner tips only.
Business limit: You may own one skill business at a time, and closing it frees the slot without taking away money already earned.
Solo business: Starting from Bag → Businesses keeps the full value of each matching street sale; mastering Dan D’s ecommerce also starts passive online income for a solo shop.
Teacher partnership: Starting with the skill’s teacher, or partnering with them later, halves each street sale and adds a slow passive tip income.
Passive optimization: A third business contact doubles passive income, ecommerce mastery doubles partnered passive income, and those two boosts stack.
Business sales: When your current business matches a person’s need, the help becomes a paid sale that still earns Help points but grants no positivity.
Coffee sales: A coffee business still requires and consumes a cup for each tired customer because the product must be in your Bag.
Dog-walking business: A mastered dog-walking shop can earn partnered tips, but it does not yet have a matching street-sale need.
Separate pitch path: Owning a skill business and pitching your big idea are separate money-making systems with shared Business & Marketing and BuildCities preparation.
Start a business quest: Roman or Nick can offer an optional slot-using checklist that tracks Business & Marketing, BuildCities, and naming your big idea, then clears when all three are ready.
Pitching: Business & Marketing, BuildCities, and a named idea are enough to pitch named people for cash, Help points, and positivity, with a per-person cooldown and no requirement that the checklist quest stay active.

Travel and special activities

Bicycle: Craig sells one bicycle that cruises at running speed without stamina, pedals faster with Shift at a high stamina cost, and remains wherever you dismount.
Dog walking: Accept Walk Scarlett from Glyn, keep her on the leash along the gold Den-block route, and earn cash plus positivity for every completed lap.
Party invites: Accept Sean’s guest-list challenge and invite five people with the social need to earn mastery through repeated helps.
Emily’s events: After learning Emily’s Creative Arts perspective, she passively adds invitations while Sean’s guest-list challenge is active; Creative Arts mastery doubles drawing commission payouts.
Concert buddy: Find Molly’s assigned plus-one to receive the large, long-lasting positivity reward.
Guild: Master Game Development, then talk to Scott or Jeff S to join their Guild.
Art studio: Creative Arts mastery unlocks a paint pad that can keep up to eight saved sketches in the Studio tab.
Gallery commissions: One sketch may hang at Art Spirit and one at LiveforBlu, where random visitors can repeatedly buy commissions while the originals remain displayed.
Street safety: Corner walk buttons stop traffic for a crossing signal, while a car collision respawns you at CDA Coffee Co.
Rest and movement: Benches let you sit, Space jumps or stands, Shift runs, and the bicycle remains usable at cruise speed even when hunger or stress blocks sprinting.

Email the admins

Camera

Match view

Bag

Phone

Game rules

Starting, exploring, and saving

Skills, needs, and helping

Quests, challenges, and mastery

Money, food, and wellbeing

Businesses and the big idea

Travel and special activities

Community

Settings

Talk

You died

Bro

Paint pad

Gallery

Turn sideways

GTA CDACoeur d’Alene · walk · talk · help

Saved games

Who are you?

Essential skill

NPC Builder