Independent fan guide. Details reflect the launch patch (v1.0.3) and cite official sources; if the game updates, in-game text always wins.
01One jump, no ladder
The phone rings during your first morning, and it is Steve. A position has opened at the associate level, you might be eligible, and congratulations: your week now has a plot. Worming from Home contains exactly one documented rank change, from Junior Financial Analyst to Associate Financial Analyst. There is no ladder after that, no intermediate stop, no next rung to scheme toward. Everything you do between the first call and the credits exists to move that single title change forward, which is oddly clarifying. At any moment of the week, you know what the work is for.
Late in the process, Tippy, the voice-acted Clippy-style narrator, will show you a senior analyst tree with 198 unique perks. Do not budget your life around it. It is a gag, delivered with complete sincerity, and none of it is real content. The actual endgame is a shopping list, a contract that takes four separate physical procedures to finish, and a graded video call with Steve. The comedy in this game lives inside paperwork, and the promotion is where all of it converges.
This guide walks the whole chain in order, because the chain demands order. The desk comes before the contract, the contract before the stocks, the stocks before the phone call, the phone call before the shopping, and the shopping before the interview. Skipping ahead is not merely inefficient. In one specific case, buying early can break your objectives outright. The table below is the whole road; the rest of the article is the same road with the potholes marked.
| Stage | What you do | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Day one | Take Steve's call about the associate opening | The promotion thread, running behind everything else |
| Desk | Buy the L-shaped desk for $1,000 | Prime Real Estate (hidden); the contract follows |
| Contract | Sign, print, scan and return the paperwork | Kafkaesque (hidden); three tradeable stocks |
| Portfolio | Make some money, develop that portfolio | No verified numeric gate — the phone call is the trigger |
| Shopping | Trampoline, webcam $3,000, soundboard, framed photo | Locked In (hidden); the interview unlocks |
| Finale | Take the graded video call with Steve | Worm of Wall Street (hidden); no raise |
02Step one: the L-shaped desk
The first real gate is money. The L-shaped desk costs 1,000 dollars on the official price sheet, and when the objective arrives it is the largest number you have faced by a wide margin. It is also as close to mandatory as this game gets. Buy it and you earn Prime Real Estate, a hidden achievement that 60.1 percent of all players own, which for a hidden achievement is a startling number. Very little in this game is near-universal. The desk is.
What you get for the money is workspace and consequences. The desk rearranges your station, and it puts the promotion chain in motion: once it is yours, the contract paperwork follows, and the contract is what expands your trading life from a single stock to three. Players who ignore the desk and try to grind the market early stay stuck with one stock and no paperwork. The game is firm about the order even when it never says so out loud, and Tippy's lower-right hints do most of the explaining when each new step opens.
Raising 1,000 dollars on junior pay is a small project, and the game hands you honest tools. Spreadsheets pay per task and scale with your Financial Insight level. Completing five files inside 24 hours stacks a 200 dollar bonus on top of the task pay. Interns cost 400 dollars each, with the price rising about 100 per hire, and they generate passive income that a developer confirmation says you can buff permanently with coffee or water dousing. The trampoline belongs somewhere in this window too, because the paperwork after the desk will ask you to reach the printer.
03The contract: sign, print, scan, return
The achievement for the contract stage is named Kafkaesque. It is hidden, and 36.0 percent of players have it. The name is the entire review. What the stage actually asks is four tasks in sequence: sign the contract, print it, scan it, and send it back. Each of those is a separate physical procedure for a worm with no hands, and the printer has opinions about all of them.
The printer runs from its own screen, the buttons live on its top-left, and the green button is the one that opens the scanner lid. Paper goes onto the glass face-down, because face-up scans a blank, and you will learn this the way everyone learns it: by scanning a blank. Finish every signature before you scan, since a half-signed contract scans as a half-signed contract. The machine sits high enough that you will want the trampoline to reach it comfortably, and the bin for destroying documents lives behind it, a detail that returns later in the week for entirely different paperwork.
Two physical warnings from the launch-week bug list. Do not use the menu's Reset Objects while a print job is running, because the print button can vanish with the job half-done. And if the scanner lid traps you, a known and reported stuck state, resetting objects is the fix once nothing is printing. None of this costs anything permanent. The contract stage is pure ceremony, the game knows it, and the achievement name suggests the developers heard you muttering.
- Sign the contract as prompted before touching the printer; a complete signature set survives the rest of the chain.
- Print from the printer's own screen — the buttons are on its top-left.
- Carry the paper to the scanner and lay it face-down; the green button opens the lid.
- Scan, then return the document exactly the way the prompt asks.
- Keep Reset Objects away from the printer until every job is finished.
04Three stocks and 'develop that portfolio'
Hand the contract back and the company pays you in the only currency it respects: options. Steve tells you that you'll be able to trade three different stocks instead of just one, and Tippy, ever the hype-man, celebrates three whole stocks as 'like the entire market.' A later phone call grants what the game calls full access to the stock portfolio. From one stock to the whole market in a week — that is the promotion track in miniature, and honestly in corporate life too.
With the paperwork done, the objective quietly becomes make some money, develop that portfolio. Here is the honest part: nobody has verified a number. No source we trust documents a dollar threshold, a hidden meter, or a day count that triggers the next step. Different playthroughs reached it with different balances. When Steve is ready for you, the phone rings, and that call is the trigger. Do not rearrange your week around a number from a fan wiki, because the wikis invent those. Save for what is coming instead.
What is coming is a shopping run in the 8,000-plus dollar range. The webcam alone is 3,000 dollars. The soundboard is roughly 5,000 by community reports, with one garbled transcript line hinting it may cost more, so budget flexibly. The trampoline and the framed photo ride on top. Growing the difference is what the three stocks are for: trade the tips in Steve's voicemails, hold shares overnight — one launch stream posted +17 and +21 percent net-worth nights back to back — and let the Financial Insight interest perk compound while you work. The market exists to fund the finale, and the finale is not cheap.
05Steve's call and the shopping list
The call comes when it comes, and it turns the final stretch into a shopping list: a trampoline, a webcam at 3,000 dollars, a soundboard, and a framed photo. Buying the webcam, the soundboard and the framed photo together pops Locked In, hidden, at 33.9 percent. That purchase set is the game telling you, in shop form, what the interview is about to involve — a camera for being seen, and equipment for everything else the call demands.
Now the warning worth more than the rest of this article: do not buy the webcam or the soundboard before this call. Buying early is a known progression soft-lock. The objective system breaks and demands the purchase again, which you cannot satisfy, and your save is stuck until it is fixed. The developer has acknowledged the bug and is working on it, but as of the current patch the rule stands. If you already tripped it, your cleanest exit is restoring an earlier save. The game keeps three slots and the saves are plain JSON files, so a backup from before the purchase solves this completely.
The items themselves are straightforward. The trampoline is the practical one, the route to the printer and the high shelf you already know. The webcam mounts for the call and only needs you roughly in frame, a point the community S-grade guide is firm about. The soundboard exists to produce noises a human would plausibly make, and you should learn its buttons before the call, not during it. The framed photo is a prop: at one point in the interview you hold it up to the camera, and a thumbs-up is involved. Kevin, the 10,000-dollar shop centerpiece, is not on the list. He is optional joy, with one famous exception covered in the interview guide.
06The graded video call
The finale is a timed video call with Steve that grades you. The store page pitches it straight: quick thinking, several tasks at once, managing multiple tasks to keep up your pretence of humanity. In playthroughs and community reports, the call includes showing the framed photo, typing your employee ID — it is 90764, printed on the back of your monitor, which is a fact you want to possess before the call rather than during it — timed typed answers, showing an expensive purchase to the webcam, screen-sharing your earnings report, and making soundboard noises. At one point the computer restarts itself mid-call. The route to the top grade has its own guide on this site; the short version is that the call rewards preparation and punishes fumbling.
Pass, and Steve delivers the line: you are now our company's newest associate financial analyst. The achievement is Worm of Wall Street, hidden, at 30.7 percent. Then comes the game's best deadpan. No raise. Six years of service, one promotion, zero additional dollars. The title is the trophy. It is a perfect ending for a game about corporate life, and somehow it is still infuriating.
The call has two documented poles. At the top end, an S grade earns Absolute Expertise, which 11.4 percent of players hold — roughly one player in nine. At the other end, you can simply hang up on Steve, which 18.3 percent of players have done, and which the achievement name Ugh, Boooooooringgggg describes with total accuracy. Both are legitimate endings. Only one of them is a promotion.
07What the promotion actually changes
Mechanically, the promotion changes less than you would hope and more than nothing. The title updates. The pay does not — the no-raise gag is real and permanent. What genuinely unlocks is Imminent Layoff Mode, a harder second mode with deadlines on everything, which reframes the cozy desk life you just mastered as something with a stopwatch attached to it. If you wanted the game to turn the pressure on after the credits, this is where it happens.
Beyond that, the game simply keeps going. Player reports from launch week describe the post-promotion state as idle gameplay, with the shop, the market and the daily loop still ticking and no further story beats. The Wormhole platforming challenge — the community calls it wormkour — remains for the physics-brave, with Torment Mode as its nastiest variant. Since the v1.0.3 patch it no longer gates 100 percent completion, so it is strictly a personal problem now, in the best sense.
If you are chasing completion after the credits, the long tail is shop-shaped and patience-shaped. Expensive Taste, buying every item in the shop, sits at 6.0 percent. Transcendental Invertebrate, the full sweep of all 31 achievements, sits at 4.0. The promotion is the story's end and the checklist's middle. The worm's career, like most careers, concludes with more meetings than money.
08The critical path as a checklist
For players who want the whole chain on one screen, here it is in order, with the three hidden achievements marked where they fall. Follow it top to bottom and the week carries you from day-one phone call to associate financial analyst without a wasted evening. The only step with a known way to break the game is the shopping step, and the fix there is patience, which is free.
- Take Steve's day-one call. The promotion thread starts itself and runs behind the week.
- Save and buy the L-shaped desk for $1,000 — Prime Real Estate (hidden).
- Sign, print, scan and return the contract — Kafkaesque (hidden); paper goes face-down.
- Trade the three newly unlocked stocks and build the balance. No verified threshold exists; the phone call is the trigger.
- When Steve calls with the shopping objective, buy the trampoline, the webcam ($3,000), the soundboard and the framed photo — Locked In (hidden). Never earlier.
- Prep the desk: upgrades maxed, soundboard buttons memorized, path to the PC cleared of papers.
- Take the graded call: photo, ID 90764, timed typing, soundboard, earnings report, and whatever the mid-call restart is about.
- Accept the associate title and the complete absence of a raise.
- Unlock Imminent Layoff Mode, then decide how much worm is left in you.