Getting a CURSED TOOL in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town!
As I had promised in the previous posts of my goddess-wooing escapades, this is bound to be a much shorter post! Partially because I've been enjoying not being quite as busy for the last week or two, but mostly due to how uneventful Winter is in Mineral Town. It's not to say I'm not making progress every other day, but I'm taking the pace very slowly to keep the challenge palatable for me - trying to power my way through all of this mining for hours straight would probably make me want to flush my cartridge down the toilet!
Nevertheless, I'm down around floor 35 now, and I've found my Cursed Fishing Rod on floor 29! This comes as both a blessing and a curse, mind the pun.
On the bright sides of things, I can now work to bless this rod and get started on fishing up all the King Fish! This should put us comfortably in-line for meeting our fish requirements for the Goddess in Year 4. This also gives me a chance to go into more detail about the cursed tools in a future post!
On the downsides, well there's quite a few...
In typical RPG fashion, equipping a cursed tool is a bit of a committment, to put it nicely. Once equipped, you cannot unequip that tool again until it's been blessed! And to bless the tool, each one needs to meet its own unique requirement in order for the tool to be eligible for a blessing. In the rod's case, it must be used 255 times.
Luckily the use of the rod doesn't have to translate to catching a fish, or even hitting water! So once equipped, I can just spam the B Button and cast the rod onto the wooden floor of my house like a sane, well-adjusted young man to... shake the evil spirits out of it or something. Logic aside, it's easy and only carries the burden of stamina which works for me!
The other downsides though relate more to the mining. See, I'm still down in the mine shaft because I want/need to progress more - part of the "mine all objects" requirement includes digging up all the cursed tools and the grand prize of both mines on their bottom floors.
So yes - I need to dig down to floor 255 in both mines as part of this romance route.
So even though I dug up one cursed tool, it's obviously the most efficient to continue digging for as long as I can in this same session! The problem with that is how our inventory management works.
As wisdom I have imparted to our lovely Minimap writer @Dutchess_of_Hyrule in her Harvest Moon exploits - we are all caught up on the idea that you can hold L and then press B to cycle through your tools. I do this to speed up my mining by swapping between the hoe and the hammer. The problem with this method is - though it's worlds faster - each cycle counts as equipping the tool and not just cycling through another interface.
You can see where this leads: inevitably I would cycle my tools onto that fishing rod and be stuck with it, effectively ending my run in the mines instantly.
This leads me with a dilemma: do I just pack it in now and return to the surface every time I unearth a cursed tool? Or do I just keep trying to dig as deep as I can while hobbling through the slow menus?
I have a lot of strategizing to do. However, I already know this current run isn't going to take me to the end as I didn't even attempt to stock my rucksack with stamina-healing items. I'll probably just try to get as many cursed tools as I can and then resurface to start blessing some tools!
Hope you all have had a great week and that the upcoming week treats you all very well. We'll talk soon.
If you haven't yet seen Dutchess' video starting out in Harvest Moon: Friends in Mineral Town, why are you still here reading me yap? Go check it out below: