Independent fan guide. Details reflect the launch patch (v1.0.3) and cite official sources; if the game updates, in-game text always wins.
01Waking up in the plant pot
Day one begins in soil. The plant pot beside the desk is your bed, and it is not decoration: the amount of sleep you get sets the next day's buffs and debuffs, so the pot is the first and last thing you touch every day of your career. Wiggle out, shake off the dirt, and take a second to look around before moving. The desk is big, you are small, and the monitor, keyboard, phone, calendar and dice are all waiting for a worm with no arms to operate them.
Your first crossing of the desk is the real tutorial, and it teaches by bruises rather than menus. There is no walking; you fling. Short hops work, full-power flings dump you on the floor. The floor is fine, by the way: falling off kills you, the game respawns you free, and nothing is lost, so cross badly, die cheerfully, and try again. By the time you reach the far side you will already have the core movement instinct that takes other players a full hour: throw short, wiggle the rest.
The PC under the monitor is where the day officially starts. You log in by physically bashing the password into the keyboard, one key at a time. The credentials, verified across playthroughs: work login 1234, computer password worm123. The moment the desktop appears, Welcome to Corporate Finance pops. That log-in achievement sits at 100.0%, the only one literally every player owns, because there is no game without logging in. Congratulations, you are now the only worm in corporate finance.
Keep one eye on the lower-right corner for the rest of the day. Tippy, the voice-acted narrator in the Clippy tradition, explains each mechanic the first time it appears, and his hints are easy to miss and do not repeat. If the login, a spreadsheet, or formatting ever confuses you later, the answer was almost certainly sitting in one of those corner boxes while you were mid-wiggle somewhere else.
02Steve's opening call
The phone rings early, and answering it is not optional in any sense that matters. It is Steve, your boss. An associate analyst position has opened, and you might be eligible for a promotion. That single call is the entire plot of Worming from Home: every task, purchase and awkward conversation for the rest of the week feeds the promotion thread it starts, and the week ends with a graded video interview that Steve personally runs.
Listen to how he talks, because the game quietly tests you on it later. Steve gives stock tips when flattered, and when he finally interviews you he expects one-word answers. On day one you mostly listen and agree, which is the correct amount of commitment. One more thing to do while you are near the monitor: your employee ID, 90764, is printed on the back of it. You will not need it until the interview, but that interview has a time limit, and reading behind monitors under pressure is nobody's idea of a Friday.
03The morning routine, in order
Before touching a single spreadsheet, run the same three checks every morning, in the same order: calendar, phone, die. The order is not superstition. Blue calendar entries are deadline tasks with expiry times, and they are the only things on the desk that actually expire, so they go first. New players who skip the wall calendar are the same players who later miss a timed task and go reading about it on the forum.
The d20 deserves its slot in the routine more than it looks like it does. One roll per day, and a natural 20 pays out the Stroke of Luck achievement, which 26.9% of players have earned; a quarter of the player base getting lucky on a daily die is roughly the arithmetic you would expect. The roll takes ten seconds. Do it before work rather than after, so the habit is already stuck by the time the week fills up with orange event entries like M's birthday.
- Check the wall calendar first: blue entries are deadline tasks, orange entries are events.
- Check the phone for voicemail, where overnight tips and event notices land.
- Roll the d20 once: a natural 20 earns Stroke of Luck, and the game rewards a natural 1 in its own way.
- Then, and only then, log in and start the actual work.
| Object | What to check | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Wall calendar | Blue entries (deadlines), orange (events) | Deadline tasks expire; the calendar is the day's real plan |
| Phone | Voicemail | Stock tips and event notices arrive before you need them |
| d20 | One daily roll | Natural 20 earns Stroke of Luck, owned by 26.9% of players |
| Monitor | Task list and messages | Where spreadsheet work and chats actually live |
04Your first spreadsheet
The first task arrives at the monitor, and the loop it teaches is the loop you will run all week. Read the instruction bar completely, because it names the exact cell and the exact value. Line up the column and the row, aim at the key from the row below it, and bump. Then stop and confirm on screen that the input actually registered before moving on. That confirmation habit is the entire difference between a clean morning and a morning spent wondering why a task refuses to close.
The typing itself deserves one rehearsal before a deadline is running. Each letter is a headbash, one key at a time, and keys catch best when you approach from the row below and bump upward, the same aim rule that governs all movement. A mispress is not fatal: Backspace sits at the top of the board, one long wiggle away, so a wrong letter costs a round trip and nothing more. If your first attempt at the cell takes three tries, that is the median experience on day one, not a personal failing.
Each early spreadsheet needs exactly one input: a total, a value, or a choice from a list. Pay arrives per task, and reviewers have described the money as surprisingly generous for what amounts to one well-aimed headbash. The real day-one target is the volume bonus: complete five spreadsheet files within 24 hours and the game pays a 200 dollar bonus on top of the task pay. Start early enough in the day and the bonus is nearly free. Discover it at 11 p.m. and it becomes a lifestyle decision.
A note on expectations, because the game will not give you one: your first spreadsheet will go badly at least once. You will bump the wrong cell, or bump the right one without registering, or drift a row during the wiggle over. None of it costs anything but time. The loop is short, retries are unlimited, and every player on the leaderboards started with the same wrong cell.
05Messages from Trevor, M and Steve
Chats arrive throughout the day from all three named humans, and the mechanic never changes: pick a dialogue option, then type it out exactly, letter for letter. Replies only send when they match; a typo is a redo, not a personality moment. Day one is also when your typing is at its worst, so expect the wiggle of shame to Backspace, the community name for the trip, to feature heavily in your first conversations.
Choose options with actual content when Trevor writes to you. He is the softball captain with the sports chatter and the thin skin, and vague replies can genuinely offend him. The concrete option, an actual answer or an actual opinion, keeps the week's friendship intact. Nothing on day one flags which choices matter, which is exactly the trap: the game files the grudge quietly and you find out later.
M's early message carries the one real clock of the day. Reply within one real-time minute and you earn Wow, You're Desperate, which 47.8% of players own; nearly half the player base, typing back at a crush too fast to pretend otherwise. The window is real time, not game time, so a slow typist can legitimately miss it. If you do miss it, nothing breaks. The achievement is simply gone for the run, and M's thread, which is the romance route if you want it, continues either way.
06Spending the free evening
Once the tasks are cleared, the evening is genuinely yours, and day one's evening works better as planning than as play. Two timing rules from the game itself: the gym corner trains best before 10 a.m., and the reading nook works best after 9 p.m. That makes day one evening a reading night and pushes the gym to tomorrow morning. Reading is not idle time either, since it feeds the Financial Insight perk tree, which is where the stock app unlock eventually lives.
For the record, the gym is worth knowing about before day two. Sessions are arcade-style minigames that earn points in the Muscle Mass perk tree, and the whole system trains fastest before 10 a.m., which effectively books your tomorrow morning. An evening gym trip on day one is not wrong, exactly; it is just inefficient, and the game quietly notices. Sleep, then lift, then work, in that order, is the rhythm the entire week wants anyway.
The shop exists, it is tempting, and your wallet is a joke: you start with roughly 41 dollars. That covers nothing meaningful. The one comfort buy rumored to be within reach is the Reading Nook upgrade at around 10 dollars, community-reported, and even that can wait until the first task pay lands. The realistic day-one budget is to buy nothing, read after nine, and sleep rich in spirit.
If the evening still has slack in it, waste it well. The radio on the desk shows the time and carries lo-fi jazz and classical channels, which is exactly the soundtrack this game deserves. Wandering over to say hi to the plant you slept in is also permitted. Nobody grades your evening, and the achievement list tracks things as small as communing with a pile of dirt, so someday that will be you too.
07Closing the day
Every day ends with a progress report that summarizes your earnings and net worth. On day one it is a baseline more than a brag: spreadsheet pay, possibly the 200 dollar bonus if you cleared five files, and nothing spent because there was nothing to buy. Read it anyway. Watching the net worth line move is the quiet hook of this game, and the habit of checking it starts here.
Then sleep, in the pot, on purpose. Staying up stops working at around 3 a.m., when you pass out wherever you are, and a launch-week bug can lock the camera after the passout, which is a miserable note to end a good day on. Short sleep also bills you tomorrow: roughly five hours of rest applies about a 4% penalty to movement and training efficiency the next day, and the debt compounds across a bad week. The pot is not just vibes. It is arithmetic.
08What not to worry about on day one
Day one comes with phantom pressure, and most of it concerns systems that do not exist yet. The stock market is the big one: it is not unlocked on day one, and no amount of hunting across the monitor will find it. Trading arrives later in the week through the perk trees and the L-shaped desk purchase, and the investing guides on this site cover it when it does. For now the market is a rumor Steve mentioned on the phone.
Two shop items deserve a specific warning even though you cannot remotely afford them today: the webcam and the soundboard. Burn the rule in now, because it stays true all week: never buy either before Steve's phone call tells you to. Buying early is a known progression soft-lock the developer is still fixing, one that makes the objectives ask for a repurchase you should never need. The webcam runs 3,000 dollars. Let the game ask first, always.
Keyboard upgrades can also wait, potentially forever. The chunky clacky starter is, by community consensus, the best typing instrument in the game, and the top of the upgrade line types worse with no way back down. Day one's actual job is learning the physics you already own: short throws, upward bumps, the headbash grab combo. Desks and interns and dirt piles come later in the week, and the guides linked below take over from there.