Sharpening your SKILLS in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

It's that time again - the time where I yap endlessly about the eventual fruits of my labours winning the heart of some virtual lady whom I can only guess has been in existence for thousands of years. How old is farming? She's been around for at least that long.

...Actually, now that I ask Google this question, it seems that the conscious cultivation of plants for the sake of harvesting and consumption has been happening in some form for at most 13,000 years. So I guess the Harvest Goddess is canonically this old...? Good on her - she doesn't look a day past 30!

Anyway, I'm sure you were all chattering your teeth; getting lockjaw from the nailbiting anticipation of not knowing what became of my animals from that fateful faux pas on the 14th of Autumn! Well if you must know... They're all totally fine!

Yep - taking them inside their coops and barns, feeding them, keeping them out of the rain, and a bit of brushing for the sheep and cows did wonders for getting them back into my good graces! And thankfully of course, none of them got sick from the ordeal. They simply were unhappy with me and then got over it as I corrected my behaviour for a day or two. As a refresher - always remember that you can check on your animals' condition from the memo menu, accessible with SELECT.

When interacting with your animals, it's also best to keep a close eye on the expression bubble that pops up over their head: a heart means they're happy, three dots means they're unhappy and a skull means they're sick. Once you see the skull, that's when you should administer the medicine.

I also feel the need to make an addendum to my previous post - it appears I've been a peddler of incorrect information! I had the weather patterns all scrambled in my head, so allow me to set the record straight: Summer has simultaneously the lowest precipitation chances but is the sole season for hurricanes. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, so you're free to jump about and justify it, but nonetheless, that leaves Autumn and Spring both with a sick-nasty 0% chance of storms!

It should still be noted that the number of festival days closing shops in Autumn is still an indirect threat if paired with a poorly-timed rainy day. However, it means that our little incident was indeed the worst-case scenario. It also means that the upcoming Winter is definitely the de-facto most dangerous time of the year, if only by a small margin due to the smaller number of events.

With all that out of the way, I need to give a recounting of the rest of Autumn! It wasn't that eventful, but sadly I missed out on getting a medal for my sheep. I've learned my lesson with it though, and it does make sense in retrospect... But I won't lie in saying that it blindsided me and this game can play pretty dirty at times!

On Autumn 18, Mineral Town hosted the Autumn Derby for horse racing! Naturally I stopped in - I couldn't resist the temptation to run some bets and see how many credits I could get. I did also enter my own horse, Epona, as well! We came in second place, not gonna brag...!

However my bigger concern was on the winnings from my bets every round! You see, every horse has a ratio'd betting odd already existing in place once you open that race's dashboard to place your bets. The lower the current betting odd means the higher the chance is of that horse coming in first place; inversely though, a lower bet also means a lower payout. Naturally the decision on how to bet lies with you; are you feeling lucky and wanting to buy out all 99 tickets on the horse with the lowest 55 to 1 odds of winning? Or are you going to play it safe and toss 10 tickets on the 5 to 1 horse? The ratio of betting odds is multiplied by your tickets bought for the payout, so all of these considerations are yours to make!

However, in the real world money talks, and as an unapologetic capitalist I brought my fattened money bags to the festival and simply tossed 35,000 gold into the entire event to inflate the ticket pool and monopolize all the medals that day, soooo I guess I just hope all this cash is going to a good cause? Carter's church could probably use some new pews, and I like for my beaches to have lifeguards. See? Don't get it twisted - I'm uh, just engaging in some philanthropy!

With these winnings, I just barely don't have enough for both top prizes, but for now I'll take that Jewel of Truth! Thankfully it's not required for the Harvest Goddess' romance route, but collecting the 9 jewels hidden in this game will give us a very helpful treasure! It would be very cool if I could squeeze in getting these mcguffins as a sort of B-side to our Harvest Goddess quest. I already have 5 of them, so this makes 6!

Throughout the game, these jewels are mostly hidden as invisible pickups in the overworld, sort of like how that concept works in Pokemon. If I'm remembering correctly, the ones I've come across so far are as follows:

1. At the water trough in my horse's stable (Press A)
2. Somewhere near the lamp post between the Rose Plaza and the church (Press A)
3. In the farm's doghouse (Press A)
4. In one of the library bookcases (Press A)
5. Completing a New Year's Math Quiz conducted by the Harvest Goddess

And with this 1000-medal prize at the horse races, that's 6 on my shelf now! There are two other types of jewels to find in this game, one of which I've mentioned very briefly in my first post being the Goddess Jewels. We'll need to go mining for those and is no-doubt the second-worst grind in this game on this route. We'll talk about that in the future.

And now I have to tuck my metaphorical tail between my legs and tell you all about how Autumn 21st went. Notably, how I wasn't allowed to participate in the Sheep Festival despite having two amazing sheep who would've won without a doubt. The explanation is frustratingly simple: Your sheep must be fully-matured, not sick, and not sheared in order to participate.

Now those might all seem like perfectly reasonable criteria for a sheep to have in order to be judged in a competition, but silly old me did not account for nor anticipate that simply shearing my sheep would disqualify them! I was completely taken by surprise, and what annoys me the most about it is that it makes total sense logically while feeling so unnatural to prep for.

Of course the sheep should be all fluffy and woolly and... sheepy-looking. But not shearing your sheep when it has wool is just money left on the table! It's like not milking a cow, it's like letting the tomatoes just sit on the vine. Every day that sheep is not sheared is a day it could have been sheared so that the clock would start on that wool growing back in order to shear again. It's all dollar signs to me, see - unapologetic capitalist!

So I still attended the festival, but mostly to brood silently in the corner and make faces at Rick while his sheep gets permission from the Mayor to spin Platinum wool.

And to make matters worse, all the frustration from the Sheep Festival kept my attention away from the harvest sprites, who all ended their week-long work at my farm and retired back to their hut behind the church. This meant I had to go back to them all the next day and ask them all to come back to my farm to water and harvest my field, which also meant that I had no sprites up at 6AM that morning to do the work for me.

Let me tell you - I have become almost entirely dependent on these little elves. I can see why Santa hires them; they are just the bee's knees when it comes to getting things done! I'll save the more in-depth discussion on them for the next post once we're in the Winter, but needless to say I had to get out my watering can for the first time in probably six seasons and tend to my fields alone.

When you have a field with this many crops and no tiny little elf guys to look after it for you, you begin to be thankful that you put the time into upgrading your tools to a respectable level. All of my tools are currently at the Mystrilite level - which would be level 5 out of 8 possible levels - and so by holding the B button, my tools adopt a new stance per level beyond one! The longer you hold the B button, the more of these stances you cycle through until you reach the highest-level stance you can.

Each stance has its own effect per tool. In the case of the above two images, my character turned red in the face with a little angry anime vein popping up on his head to indicate he adopted the Mystrilite stance - the level 5 stance - and can water far more tiles of crops in the field! This is much more efficient in stamina usage than just walking to each tile one by one is, as you use the same amount of stamina each time you use your tool. In this case, the stance gained from this Mystrilite Watering Can can water a 5x3 block of crops in one go. Really handy!

With my current formation, I plant "drills" of crops - not only because it's immersive for me and how my own family garden has always been tended to - but also because it allows me to get to every crop individually for harvesting if I need to, since these plants are solid objects. I plant in six-tile-long drills, which leaves the two on the ends unwatered, as you can see from the soil patches being lighter in colour than the others. That's when I walk between those and use the Level 2 stance, which allows you to water three tiles wide in front of you! Only two uses of the watering can, and a maximum of 18 tiles of farmland have been watered.

As you can see, these are the finer details and logistics surrounding how you layout your farm in this game. Harvest Moon is not like Stardew Valley and similar modern farm sims where you can just walk through your crops like they're tall grass and get to where you need to. Your crops soon become physical obstacles, and doubly so if that crop yields repeated harvests, like tomatoes, corn and here with sweet potatoes! You need a smart crop layout and the right tools and stances for the right jobs to truly get your chores done as quickly as possible.

...Or you know, just use the sprites and they can do it for you.

On Autumn 29th, I lucked out and finally got some X-Grade milk from Dairy-Queen! I can see that this took approximately 40 days to finally happen for the first time, which leads me to estimate a roughly 1-2% chance of any Platinum-Grade yield being upgraded to X-Grade instead. I shipped the milk as it was so I could check it off on my shipping items list, but you'd better believe that from now on, any X-Grade milk I get is going to be cheese instead! X-Grade cheese is ridiculously profitable, just a single wedge shipping for 5000G.

Finally we have Autumn 30th , which is Autumn's last chance to distract us with another event. And you better believe the fine folks at Natsume decided to - this time in the form of the Pumpkin Festival!

I'll admit that I was fooled by the name - I kept a lone pumpkin in my fridge for this day and it's not even needed for this festival. It's not even a festival. It's Halloween.

Throughout the morning, the kids of Mineral Town (And Popuri for some reason...?) will come to your door and demand chocolate as a reward for coming all that way. Giving chocolate to the likes of Stu and May will net you some friendship points with them! Meeting Popuri's demand will net a huge amount of Love Points toward your relationship status with her, so if you're planning to put a ring on her by the end of your career, you should keep chocolates instead of pumpkins in your fridge for her. Wow, this game really is full of amazing dating advice...

Naturally I'm not one to adopt a wandering eye when I already have out-of-body perfection waiting for me at the mountain spring, so I was happy to give the kiddos a treat and kindly waited in my field for Popuri to scoot her way back to her house. Love the typo too, May. Run along now.

I really only had one more little trick up my sleeve before winter began, and that was to return to the harvest sprites today and ask them all to not only return to my farm, but to shift their focus away from my farm field and instead focus on my animals.

Tomorrow is the start of Winter, and we won't have any need for that field at all! The TV is telling us we're kicking off the season strong with some snowfall, which already brings with it some ramifications to our routine. I spent the rest of this day harvesting my field of the remaining green peppers and sweet potatoes, netted another huge stack of cash for the day and got all my animals back indoors. They won't be seeing the world outside for another 30 days. Also, "Not to catch cold". I love the bad localizations in these games, Natsume has never proofread in their lives and it's the best.

Ever since I laid my first word in these posts, Winter has been coming. Winter is inevitable.