Next to the boring stuff like combat and construction, there's also the dorms area, which has a bunch of different purposes:

Actual Dorms#

Dolls passively gain affection every day they're assigned to an echelon with a dorm. You can increase the affection gain by tapping the ♥ bubble every day, but either way, the gain is fairly minimal, combat is a much faster way to pile up affection.

Additionally, you can collect your batteries at set times which depend on your timezone by clicking on a large tube (called the Battery Condenser) at whichever dorm you set as your "Visit Dorm" (the dorm everyone sees when they visit you, default being Dorm #1)

How many batteries your friends get from visiting you depends solely on your number of dorms. Each dorm is one battery.

Comfort#

This value determines both your dolls' passive affection gain, and how many batteries your dorms give every day. Comfort itself is calculated as sum of all furniture comforts (capped at 10k) + highest set bonus + pets (capped at 3k), with the set bonus determined by how many different pieces of a particular set you have:

2* and 3* furniture gives no bonuses at all, 4* maxes out at 2k bonus, and 5* sets provide a whopping 8k bonus at 12 parts (some sets have more than 12, but many have exactly 12 pieces). You can also get a 2k and 5k bonus at 6 and 9 pieces of a set. So for all purposes but aesthetics, having even half-completed 5* sets is preferable to anything else.

Battery Calculation#

(Un)fortunately, comfort does not scale linearly to provide batteries. Empty dorms provide 50/85/95/99/101/102/102.5/103/103.5 batteries a day for 2/3/4/… dorms, ±8 batteries. Comfort is added to this as total_comfort*0.0011 - total_comfort²/1000000000 , which works out to:

Or in short, "not much". Going from two empty dorms to four dorms with 12k comfort will improve your daily battery gain from 50 to 145½, but to double that again you will need to have 10 dorms with 21k comfort.

Battery Calculator#

I encourage people to play around with the numbers, to get feel just how many dorms you really need. Chances are 4-5 are going to be enough.

Re-Supply#

The final boss. The ultimate suffering. The costume gacha!

The re-supply gacha lets you roll for both furniture and costumes. Usually, you have two options here: Event Gacha and Radiant Collection.

• Event Gacha has one four star furniture set, one five star furniture set, and about half a dozen costumes. It costs 10 token per roll, 100 for 11 rolls. You get one Exchange Ticket for every roll. Unused tickets will be converted back to tokens. The Time-Limited Trade shop lets you buy 4/5* furniture and costumes directly in exchange for tickets.
• Radiant Collection holds all old furniture and costume sets. 6/60 tickets for 1/11 rolls. No tickets. No shop.

Given the limited impact of incomplete furniture sets, never use Radiant Collection. You will never get the costume you want and you'll never be able to complete a furniture set, never mind getting a specific piece you want.

If you want a specific costume not in the current set, use the black cards exchange (red button in the bottom left corner). Due to the limited drop pool, event gachas are the best way to pile up black cards again. Radiant is still hopeless even for this purpose.

Warehouse#

Not much to see here. This lets you pick furniture (including pets!) to place in your dorm, and gifts to give your dolls, including combat reports.

Rescue Station#

Why does it look so sad? Because it is sad.

As mentioned earlier, pets give very little comfort – at most 3k per dorm, compared to 18k from furniture. This works out to 1.1 batteries per pet per day, and these little shits cost 600 batteries to buy… so a pet needs two years to pay off its initial investment. This is not counting rescue station upgrade costs.

Rescue station items only determine what kinds of pets appear (different visual designs, all have the same bonuses). They only have a gameplay impact in the expedition system, where you want up to three pets of each type (variants don't seem to matter) to steer your expeditions to the area you want. It's rather low priority for a beginner, since all areas give something useful.

Data Room#

This will be your main focus for batteries in the beginning, and remains useful throughout the game, since everything needs EXP.

The game forces you to upgrade all bits in lockstep before you can reach the next level, so there's no real priority for which you should upgrade first.

At what level you stop focusing on this and instead start spending batteries on e.g. the fairy room, YMMV. Fairies need EXP as well, but how fast you can make combat reports will largely be limited by how fast you can get batteries. Usually, you won't have enough daily battery income for more than one batch of reports anyway. Level 7-8 is probably a good point to step back and focus on other things.

Fairy Room#

Already has a post describing it, less work for me. \o/

Cafe#

There's a bunch of stuff to do here:

• You can watch costume related side stories here. Not all costumes have them, but you'll be notified if you gift one of them. This even works when gifting costumes of absent dolls to Kalina, you still get their stories. The Notebook lets you replay those.
• The Gramophone lets you check completion status for side story events, because you weren't depressed enough yet or something. Clicking a story also calls all dolls with a related costume into the cafe.
• The Projector lets you spend 1000 batteries on a video you can also find on twitter and a poster that gives 1000 comfort. Might as well just burn the batteries and huff the fumes for the sweet embrace of death.
• The Comic Stand lets you spend even more batteries on comics… but at least you will eventually be able to buy GSh-18 and a skin for her from this.