How does WINTER Work in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town?

Hello all, thanks for waiting for me - and glad to be back on the grind!

I want to make it clear that video games can simulate life to some fun and impressive degrees, but even with the advent of virtual reality and other technologies yet to be unveiled, they will never be real life itself. Case in point: I haven't played Friends of Mineral Town in almost two weeks due to life obligations, and if I had neglected a girl in my real life the same way I have neglected the Harvest Goddess, she'd be tossing me aside like a bad habit. Luckily this is just a game - not called Animal Crossing - so she has no cognition of the real-life passage of time!

And hear those sleigh bells jing-a-linging, we're now in the wintertime! Circling back again to real-life talk, this is my favourite season of the year! Living in Canada, the snow falls, the days get short, and my province's capital is adorned with historical brick architecture and castiron streetlights. Needless to say - it is always a picturesque Christmas here in my neck of the woods! In Mineral Town it feels much of the same, making this time of year in the game also a bit of a familiar pleasure for me, personally.

Winter is by far going to be our most tedious season to go through for the sake of this Harvest Goddess route. It may become most apparent in either this post or the next, but for the sake of brevity I plan to make the next couple posts more brief. These winter tasks are pure repetition, so you don't need me to give a play-by-play on doing the same cycle of six or so actions 30-200 times over.

I still will have to chronicle Year 4 a little bit as I come back around to the spring and summer seasons, so starting with my last post in Autumn, I figured it'd be most beneficial to provide a rundown of notable days per season as well! Pictured below are the important dates in Winter:

Not bad at all! There are a couple optional "events" of sorts that also happen in Winter, but nothing that is required for any specific romantic path, nor do these occurrences change any shop schedules. Valentine's Day is on the 14th, the 24th is Starlight Night, and then on the 30th is New Year's Eve - all pretty basic and predictable stuff!

As fun as these dates are, none are all that relevant to my purposes for marrying the Harvest Goddess. Guess she's not the festive type? What matters most to us in the wintertime is how much free time we now have! With the harvest sprites being instructed to watch my animals for me from now on, I no longer have any farm chores to tend to for an entire month.

Now you might be thinking, "Well what about crops, Will?". Which is a fair-enough question to ask for the uniniatied, especially when I just went over my frustrations with watering and laying out my farm field in the last post. Truth is, there's simply no winter crops to be planted! Novel idea I know - a farm doesn't plant outdoors in the wintertime. It varies from game to game in the Harvest Moon series, but it just so happens that there's no way to rear any fruits or veggies in Friends of Mineral Town's Winter! There are Harvest Moon games that do allow for the construction of a Greenhouse, allowing for any crops to be planted at any time of year indoors, but this is not one of them.

Yep with all that snow on the ground, there's no point in even trying to till the soil with our hoe (non-derogatory). Instead, we're going to be tackling the things I normally don't have time to do because I'm too busy milking Dairy-Queen or pouring medicine all over St-Huberts for the 5th time this year: fishing and mining!

It should be noted, as a reminder, that we have many objectives we have to complete in order to ask for the Goddess' hand in marriage. It's easy with all of this information I spout out to lose sight of that goal, as most things tend to be in life; what really matters often gets lost in the noise! So let me reiterate that we need to:

1. Own the Big Bed furniture item; (DONE)
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;

All I really have is the bed, and although I'm getting closer in the other objectives bit by bit with each passing year, I'm notably the most behind in my fishing and in my mining. Winter is when a unique mineshaft available only in this season becomes available, and so we should be making a full effort in the next two Winters to get that place cleared out to the best of our ability!

There are two mines to dig through in this game: one is called the Spring Mine, which is the cave you've no doubt seen next to the Goddess spring in my myriad of wife-to-be screenshots. The other is appropriately called the Lake Mine, a more elusive cavern with its entrance located on a small island at the center of the mountain lake. There's no bridge to access it, so you have to wait for the wintertime when the lake will freeze over, allowing you to walk across the frozen surface and over to the entryway.

Honestly this is a bit ominous-looking, given how dark it is all day in the Winter with all the snowfall days. Oh did I mention that snowfall is a unique weather condition only in this season that doubles your stamina exertion all day? Surely this shouldn't make an impact in our ability to mine.... Oh wait, yes it does.

One you get inside, you're welcomed to a messy clearing of soil with rocks adorned across the floor. Almost looks like a Bomberman board. Your objective in the mine is to climb through floor after floor by using your hoe to till the ground in order to make a hidden staircase on each floor appear. If you need to get around the rocks to further explore the current floor in search of that staircase, you can use the hammer to smash them.

Since using a tool will drain your stamina - and at twice the rate if it's snowing outside - you're bound to get very tired and risk passing out if you have average luck and get down maybe 5 or 6 floors in this mine. The upside is you find lots of cool jewels in the rocks and buried in the ground which you can sell for money! It's not much, but the likes of emeralds, rubies, topaz and other jewels can usually net you between 50 and 100G each, which is pretty cool given you'll have zero crop-related income all Winter.

The real prizes here are the pathways to Harvest Goddess-related completion these mines provide! The significance here is threefold, and not exclusive to the Lake Mine but also in the Spring Mine:

1. all of the different ores and jewels dug up across both mines count as shippable items, meaning they're on the shipped item list for completion;
2. the Goddess Jewels are buried in specific floors of the Spring Mine; and
3. There's a secret underground lake on the 9th floor of the Lake Mine where you can find fish exclusive to this one body of water;

All of that is pretty cool! Buried jewel treasures and secret underground waterbeds? Well, I'd say "count me in" if this wasn't one of the most miserable grinds in this entire game.

Firstly, shifting gears a little toward fishing, there's two degrees of completion needed to be done. Fish are measured in both size and by species, meaning to complete the shippable items list, you must have shipped at least one small, one medium, and one large-sized fish. That's the easy categorization, as in classic life-sim fashion, there's an entire species list of fish you then also need to catch in order to fulfill the Goddess' "catch every fish" requirement. These fish have not just seasonal requirements to find them, but also which body of water you're casting your lure into, and which level of stance you're taking when you cast.

No I did not stutter. Mostly because I can't, this is just all typed words. But you did read that correctly! So if you're following along: in order to capture the game's 46 different fish, you need to be in different seasons, fishing in either the spring, the ocean, upstream from the lake OR downstream from the lake, AND be casting in the different fishing rod stances up to Mystrilite.

To make a long explanation short: you'd better believe I just have the Harvest Moon Wiki pulled up beside me as I do this.

On top of this, there are also what are known as the "King Fish". These 7 special fish all have unique requirements you have to meet in order to fish them up as well, such as first throwing a small-sized fish into the ocean as "bait" or having already shipped 200 fish to sell in order for it to enter the spawn table. And just to put the cruelest of cherries on top: none of the King Fish can be caught until you have a level 6 or higher fishing rod. Just to clarify, that's a level higher than the rod I currently have!

So that's right, we are now on a wild goose chase of a quest, and why this lady is so hard to impress. We need to catch all the fish, which requires at some point getting access to this underground lake, which requires a level 6 fishing rod at minimum to fish up everything we need from it, which means now to need to upgrade our rod again... and how do we do that? From mining, of course!

We are now in search of the Cursed Tools, which are self-explanatory in the sense that once you equip them, you cannot unequip them until you meet a certain requirement and then take that tool to Carter at the church for him to bless the tool. The upside to the Cursed Tool is it counts as level 6 and thus can be used to nab the King Fish! And this would go for all the other tools too, items like the hoe, the hammer and the watering can all have their own Cursed equivalents that can be obtained.

It should be noted that the ability of the Blessed and Cursed Tools are the same, the difference being that you can freely unequip the Blessed Tool. However, since they still have different names, I'm counting these ranks as Level 6 and Level 7 respectively.

So that seems to be the prime objective to resume Goddess progress: get a Cursed Fishing Rod.

We can get one by mining in the Lake Mine without a fishing rod already in our inventory! Pretty easy, since I usually try to bring only my hammer and hoe to the mines anyway for easy tool-switching. Luckily it's not all that random of a find either, as long as you get to the right numbered floor, you're basically guaranteed to get any of the tools as long as you take the time to dig up each tile until you find it. Refer to the Wiki once again for which floor each tool is on:

...Oh my. Remember me saying that with average luck, you can get down maybe 5 or 6 floors in one day? Yeah, we have to go down really far for the fishing rod, and it's the easiest one to get by extension! So that's 5 to 6 floors in one day, so let's say you consider some margin of bad luck and estimate it'd take 6 days of mining at that rate. Just a chunk of the winter month, that's not so bad.

This would all be true... if the mines had floor-based fast travel or checkpoints. Of which there are none. So if you want to get to floor 15 or 20? You're going from floors 1 to 20 in one run as soon as you enter that mine entrance. Welcome to 2003, baby!

How Natsume thought any of this was a remotely reasonable or OK idea, I don't know. How did they even playtest this mine with the things hidden inside them and conclude it was reasonably achievable? Most seem to agree that it wasn't tested, isn't possible and was mostly thrown in as "easter eggs" of sorts for only the most dedicated of savescumming players.

And savescumming is what I plan to do! In case you didn't notice, go up three images in this post to see close to the exact same image, but notice this one is without the tiles tilled with my hoe, but the staircase is still exposed. That's because I savescummed this floor of the mine!

As soon as you enter a floor of the mine, the location of all items and the staircase itself is generated. Playing a GBA game with two save slots and the ability to save as long as you can press START to access the menu, this provides a golden opportunity to savescum!

Before entering a floor, save in slot 1, then go down the stairs. Save in slot 2. Start to dig and go around the floor until you find the staircase. Once you find it, memorize its location and load slot 2. Finally, go right to where the staircase was before loading so you access it in as few actions as possible, minimizing your stamina usage!

In an ideal world this should be a single use of the hoe per floor, but you may need to break a rock or two as well, which is just all up to luck. It would still help to bring some stamina-restoring foods or drinks of course - and would be borderline required to get every single tool listed. I'll talk about the Spring Mine, my progress here in the Lake Mine as well as shed some more light on these stamina-efficient foods in the next post.

But yeah, all of this is to give a non-exhaustive explanation of why i was not looking forward to Winter at all! It's not that this is hard per se, but it's tedious. And not tedious in the mindless way either, this isn't like grinding levels in an RPG or for a rare drop in an MMO or idle battler. Having to consciously swap between tools, dig, save and load accordingly, all while memorizing a new tile per floor is asking just enough where you still have to pay attention to the game a bit. The only saving grace here is that time does not pass in the mine. Thhank goodness for that...

Anyway, this is about as far as I'll go here today. Remember when I said this would be short? Hah! Next time probably will be, as I may explain one or two wintry things, but other than that just say "hey I got down X floors of the mine and got Y and Z for it" and that's basically it.

I hope you all had a great passing week and that the upcoming week treats you all very well! We'll talk soon! I think I'm on floor 8 right now? Not the worst, but just wait until I explain what we still need in the Spring Mine... 'Hoo boy...