How to start Free Use

TL;DR

1. Switch Free Use on under Content Preferences. The track is free.
2. Get Submissiveness to 50 and clear one of: the park glory hole, the Cabaret, or the first BNWO stage.
3. An invite text arrives in the morning.
4. Buy the anklet at Kitten & Chrome for $60, and keep it equipped.
5. Go to the Bar or the Club in the evening. Not the Gym. Not the Park. Not yet.

Read this first: the stage-1 trap

By far the most common report on this track is “I wore the anklet at the park and the gym all day and nothing happened.”

That is the track working correctly. Free Use unlocks in three tiers, and the Gym and the Park are tier 2. At the start, the only places the anklet does anything are the Bar and the Club, in the evening or later.

Getting to tier 2 takes 5 encounters, and only one encounter can happen per day across the whole game. So realistically it is about five evenings at the Bar or the Club before daytime venues wake up.

Nothing in-game tells you this, which is why it reads as broken.

Step 1: turn the track on

Free Use is an opt-in content track, off by default. Flip it in the character creator on the Content Preferences step, or in Settings from the pause menu mid-run.

Like the BNWO arc, the track itself is free: every player who switches it on gets the anklet, all four venues and the Velvet back room. Only tier 4, Common Knowledge, is Patreon, and you will not meet it for a long while.

Step 2: the prerequisites

The invite will not send until all of these are true:

• Submissiveness 50 or higher.
• You have not already started the track.
• At least one of these three, the game accepts any of them:
• you have been through the park glory hole,
• you have reached the Cabaret (stage 1 or beyond),
• or you have started the BNWO arc (stage 1 or beyond).

That third condition is the one people miss. Submissiveness alone is not enough; the game wants you to have already crossed one anonymous-or-owned line elsewhere before it offers this.

Step 3: the invite text

Once the conditions are met, the invite arrives as a morning text. It fires once, on the next overnight after you qualify.

If you have muted this track’s texts in your phone settings, it will not send.

Step 4: the anklet

The text points you at Kitten & Chrome, the fetish store in the Red Light District (Downtown, evening, and the store itself wants Submissiveness 30 or an established Owner to let you in).

Ask about the anklet from the message and buy it for $60. It is added and equipped automatically.

Keep it on. The entire track keys off the anklet actually being worn, not merely owned. Unequipping it hides every Free Use choice in the game with no prose and no penalty, which is the in-fiction pause button: take it off when you want the track to stop, put it back on when you want it again.

Step 5: the four tiers

At each venue, arriving with the anklet on surfaces a choice along the lines of “Someone’s noticed the anklet”. Take it and the encounter plays out, drawn from a rotating set of eight beats so repeat visits do not repeat themselves.

The Velvet Lounge back room at tier 3 is a bigger, longer scene and runs on its own 7-day cooldown, separate from the daily limit. Tier 3 also pays off a loose thread from the bully texts with a one-shot beat at the park benches.

Tier 4 runs on Reputation instead of encounter counts: a derived score of everything the town could have heard about you, shown as a bar under Shame on Patreon builds once the track is on. Free Use encounters push it hardest, so a House Rules run that keeps going gets there on its own; a second public habit (streaming, the Cabaret, the park regular) gets there faster. Details on the tier itself: Free Use.

Why nothing is happening

Work down this list in order:

Related

• Free Use, what the track actually contains.
• Fetish Store, where the anklet comes from.
• Lounge, the Velvet Lounge and its tier-3 back room.
• Starting Bnwo, the other opt-in track, free and unlocked very differently.
• Patreon Vs Free, what supporter status covers.