Explaining How to Marry the HARVEST GODDESS in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

Hello! Hey! Ciao! Hi! Another week has begun and so has my risk of early-onset carpal tunnel with the way my workplace wants to handle its bookkeeping. However compared to manually inputting 3000 lines of numbers and account codes, writing about my beloved Harvest Goddess comes much more easily to me!

She seems to be in a good mood, as you can see. The great thing about summer in FoMT is how enthused she is by me just throwing flowers into her pool of water when that same flower grows like... 30 feet away from her. She can probably see the uprooting left behind from me plucking the flower out to give her as a gift. I won't question it - an easily-impressed lady is hard to come by!

I wish I could say that about the Harvest Goddess in all cases, as it seems to be she is very hard to impress in the world of romance. The Harvest Goddess is a secret bachelorette in this game, meaning it's not very easy to track her level of affection toward the player. This is just one of many differences (obstacles) that separate the Harvest Goddess as a marriage candidate versus the mere mortals. Before I can explain to the world of Minimap the madness I've found myself amidst, let's first explain how marriage normally works in FoMT.

Look here at Popuri - AKA, my choice if the Harvest Goddess didn't exist - and notice the grey heart next to her character portrait and textbox as I'm speaking to her. This is how a bachelorette's affection is normally measured!

In FoMT, spending time with and giving gifts to the girls (or guys in MFoMT) will cause this heart to adopt different colours as the affection stat goes up. Starting at grey, it will graduate to purple, then blue, green, orange, and then end at a larger red heart.

As the colour changes, this is how you meet the requirements for the bachelorette's heart events, which are the cutscenes that unlock as that affection heart changes colour. These heart events must be experienced in order to then propose to the bachelorette in question - and you have to know the dates and act fast, because you're likely not the only one in the town pursuing her heart!

To avoid explaining everything in exhaustive detail, the main five things you need in order to get married in FoMT are the following:

1. Heart Level (Get the red heart);
2. Heart Events (Get all the cutscenes);
3. Upgrade your house to its largest size;
4. Own the Big Bed furniture upgrade;
5. Own and present the Blue Feather item to the bachelorette;

Pretty straightforward, I think! Mrs. Right has to like you a whole lot, you need both a big house and a big bed to welcome a second body into your home, and the Blue Feather is Harvest Moon's equivalent to a ring for popping the question.

The problem is... my choice in bachelorette doesn't really have an earthly presence in the game; she has higher aspirations and isn't as impressed by material things. Plus you know - she's a divine being given an ethereal form. All of that is to say: the Harvest Goddess has eight requirements to get married instead of the usual five. They are as follows:

1. Own the Big Bed furniture item;
2. Catch at least 1 of every species of fish;
3. Ship at least 1 of every kind of shippable item;
4. Dig up every item in the Lake Mine;
5. Dig up every item in the Spring Mine;
6. Collect all 9 of the Goddess Jewels;
7. Be in Year 5 of the game or later;
8. Ask Carter, the priest, if it's okay to marry the goddess during a confessional at the church;

Potential spiritual and religious awakenings aside, the main point is that this lady is actually the single-most difficult bachelorette to marry in the game, and marrying her is akin to 100%'ing the game.

It's a weird thought and part of what endeared me to the idea in the first place: I've never thought of Harvest Moon games to have a way to "complete" them. In my mind they were always completeable in the same way a simulation game like SimCity or the Tycoon games are. You have an objective you work toward and have a moment of celebration when you complete it, but then you just play infinitely into the night in the same systems and structures you've already built up. I always felt Harvest Moon was the same - or at the very least was more or less "complete" once you have a kid or something.

The advent of the Harvest Goddess shows me that there's this narrow thread the game is tempting a very select, insane few to go down - rife with its obscure features, secrets and poor translations - in order to uncover an entire underbelly to this game I and no doubt many others never knew existed nor were even meant to be explored to such an extent.

This challenge is taking me down a collective 455 floors (minimum) of mining, learning how to manage my fatigue/stamina, understanding how to raise and care for every livestock available, how to obtain elusive items, how to actually fully upgrade all my tools, and - thankfully the only truly optional thing - how to make and maintain 100,000,000 gold. Yes. One-hundred million.

If you've made it this far into reading what I've written, then I think by now you've already gathered that this is less of a guide, less of a journal... and more the scrawlings of a madman. Strap in tight! As I flourish Minimap with more progress posts and insights into how this was all possible, you're sure to be highbrowed and shocked at what this game expects of you in order to have the pleasure of marrying this lady. It really does feel like an undertaking suited more for a god than some doughy little farmhand.

Now that the stage is all set, from here on out my posts will be more about the gameplay! I'll chronicle my efforts to win over the Harvest Goddess' heart through the lens of those above eight requirements. Trust me - those requirements sound simple until you realize a lot of it is "In order to do A you must first complete B which involves grinding out C". There's a reason why it's not unreasonable to wait until year 5 to ask for her hand in marriage - that time will fly by as you're scrambling to get down into floor 79 of the Spring Mine for the second time in a row, or realizing you need to sell a cow and start over because you raised it too well (Yes, you can raise the animals too well).

For now, it's time to give my wrists a well-deserved rest from both work and this. Take care - and we'll talk soon! No Harvest Moon tonight methinks. Wheel of Fortune's on soon.