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

Welcome back to the latest episode of "My Strange Addiction" - that addiction being the compulsion to painstakingly complete a 21 year-old farming game.

I have entered the Fall season! Or as the French call it: L'Automne. Or as everyone in Mineral Town calls it, uh: Autumn. Autumn is an interesting time of year; it has this interesting, desaturated colour filter over the entire game first thing in the morning, making 6AM in Mineral Town seem a bit more like Silent Hill; how appropriately spooky!

What's more spooky though? The frequency of rainy days is back like in the Spring, but also having the same rare but possible occurrence of hurricanes happening. Keep a very close eye on your TV every day so you know what weather to expect for the next day, and yes, that is foreshadowing to a tee!

In this post I'll be summarizing things of note that occurred between Autumn 1 and Autumn 15.

Firstly, on the topic of Autumn itself - what changes from Summer to Autumn day-to-day? Other than the aforementioned rain returning to potentially Spring levels of frequency and the unnerving foggy mornings, there's really only one notable change that happens: the tree in the yard starts to bear fruit!

It's not much extra, but every day - in addition to the honey your tree's beehive produces in Spring, Summer and Autumn - your tree will also drop three apples from out of it for Autumn! Honey and apples are both used in some cooking recipes, as well as being able to be sold, both for 50 gold each. So at minimum, even if your barns are empty and your fields are barren, you can at least count on taking home 200 gold every day in Autumn as long as you harvest and ship these resources.

The Calendar in Autumn is also quite filled up! Take a look at this:

For our purposes, the only one here I really care about is Autumn 21 - the Sheep Festival! This is a chance for me to enter either GAP or Old-Navy for a chance to win that medal to start producing that Platinum or X-grade wool and yarn! My eyes are definitely on that prize for this season. If there's any one thing I want to make sure I don't miss, it's that on the 21st.

The season so far hasn't really been all that eventful, but sometimes low excitement is what you want when you're simply biding your time for an important event! The last thing I want is for things to get hairy and risk not having the time for that Sheep Festival... or worse yet, if something goes wrong with my prized sheep!

The Harvest Sprites are sleeping on the job again. Pshhaw, so hard to find good help these days. You can raise your friendship with these little guys to further motivate them on-the-job by giving them wild grass matching their suit colour as a gift to them each day! Red, green and indigo grasses grow in Autumn, and my friendship with the indigo-coloured sprite is the lowest of them all, so I'm making it a point to forage these available grasses as gifts when I'm making the daily trek to my beloved to chuck wild flowers at her face.

I also attended the Harvest Festival on the 9th! This is a cute little extra activity where you can provide an edible food item to throw into this big vat of stew. This event isn't anything too important; you can give yourself a small stamina boost or loss depending on the food added. If you're a literal psychopath, you can forage the poisonous mushrooms that grow this time of year and poison the town. I won't judge. Out loud.

Other than that, it's just an easy way to consolidate lots of people into one place and earn a few friendship points with them since these count as unique daily interactions with the townsfolk!

Keep in mind on festival days like this, all the shops close. Also If you participate in this festival, you'll be spit back out to your house after leaving this town square map and forced to continue your day starting at 6PM. This routine goes for every festival in the game and could prove important to your dayplanning.

It was at this moment I almost screwed things up pretty badly! Worst-case scenario I could have set my farm back two to three seasons and halved my earnings over that time.

After enjoying my time at the festival, I went right to bed knowing my animals were tended to outside in their paddocks and my crops were watered and harvested by the sprites. Dog was played with, horse was brushed, Harvest Goddess had a fresh bouquet between the eyes - all was well... And then the next day I saw a horrid icon in the corner of my screen, where the weather displays the current day's forecast.

I had completely forgotten that I checked the forecast the day before and it projected rain! I had brushed, talked to and milked my cows, collected my eggs from the chickens and everything - but I had forgotten to let them back inside to shield them from the rain that started overnight.

Weather is a very important factor in Harvest Moon, as it completely changes up what your farm routine for that day is going to be. On a clear day, animals are happy outside and crops need to watered. When it's raining, naturally, the crops don't need to be watered. This is very helpful for a one-man operation, and on this rainy day I'm sure the sprites were happy to see they had no work to do. Freeloaders...

The animals though are not to be kept out in the rain, that is a huge no-no. Animals left out in the rain not only become unhappy, but an unhappy animal always has a chance to advance their state into becoming sick. An unhappy animal will not yield any raw production, and prolonged states of sickness or unhappiness can lead to lost affection, or even death of the animal on your farm. This is only compounded as worse during a hurricane compared to a rainy day, for obvious reasons.

So all 4 of my cows, both sheep, and 7 chickens were all left outside overnight on a rainy day... and needless to say, they weren't impressed. Luckily all of them only registered as unhappy that morning, meaning after a quick talk to them and some brushing, I'm hoping I offset some of that affection loss! I bussed all the cows, sheep and chickens back indoors and I plan to keep them all inside for a few days so I can monitor their state until they show as happy again.

None of them registered as sick, but anything is possible if they don't return to being happy overnight, so I had to make an emergency run to the supply store in Mineral Town. I have a lot of animals, so this run wasn't cheap:

I have a lot of money, sure, but that was a preventable 8000 gold spent. I was kicking myself pretty hard! I wasn't taking any chances - I had 13 total animals affected (my indoor animals built only for Gold-grade produce are constantly sealed indoors and were happy as clams!), and so seeing that I had 5 vials of medicine in my storage chest already, I bought 8 more to ensure that if the worst were to come - every single animal left outside getting sick - that I could cure all of them in one go.

It should be said that, while I don't think this is bound to happen, this could have been VERY bad.

In Harvest Moon, a rainy day can be bad for your animals, but a hurricane is without a doubt the worst thing for your farm! A hurricane is so violent outdoors that your player character can't even go outdoors. When you arrive back to your farm field the next day, fencing can be destroyed, and there's a near-doubled rate of weeds, wood and stones being strewn across the yard. These storms can also destroy crops, and if a stone just so happens to randomly spawn on a tile where a crop is (the game doesn't check for this), that can also clear a crop. And if you can't go outside to pass time, the harvest sprites can't spawn. And if you can't leave your house, you can't go to your chicken coop or barn...

...Needless to say, a hurricane day is a complete write-off for your farm at best, and very, very dangerous for your animals at worst. They go a whole day without being sheared, milked, picked up after in the case of eggs, and don't get fed. That alone can cause sickness - and worse yet, all weather patterns are randomly generated a day in advance. This can happen anytime and the only warning you'll get is that weather channel.

Adding to that horror, Autumn is so stuffed with festival days that, paired with hurricanes, they can also be dangerous for your animals with poor preparation!

Say for example, you don't keep any medicine readily available - maybe you're tight on funds, maybe you need to git gud - whatever the case is, it happens sometimes. Now let's say you make my mistake and leave animals out on a rainy day. Okay no problem, you get them inside and they're all unhappy but none are sick. No problem! Now go to town and buy some medicine to prep.

Oh no. Today's the Music Festival. Everything is closed. That sucks - I'll go to sleep and tend to this first thing in the morning!

You go back home and check the forecast before bed, and - oh no - it's a hurricane tomorrow. You wake up, you can't go out, and are forced to go back to sleep at 6AM. You can check the state of your animals with the SELECT button of your records though, which doesn't require going out.

Now imagine you check and several of your animals are sick. The animal is sick and needs medicine, and now you can't go outside so you have no choice but to let those sick, untreated animals starve for a day too. Sad to say, but when you wake up that next morning, a string of bad luck just snatched a chunk of your livestock from you. Those animals are as good as done.

This can work out badly in other ways too - imagine you have the medicine but still make that mistake of leaving animals out; even if the festivals don't get in the way, the hurricane day could still prevent you from tending to an animal that went from unhappy to sick overnight. This is a very, very dangerous time of year for animals because hazardous days are at their highest with there still being an incentive to have the animals outdoors, be it for enrichment or for food.

I can confirm that my next day is a sunny one, so I do think it's very unlikely something bad comes of this other than a couple days of setbacks while I let the animals get happy again! But this was a an eye-opening ordeal that's going to coach me back into being super vigilant about what's truly going on. The game graces me with a view of a 48-hour period, and I need to utilize that constantly.

I've rambled long enough about this though. We've hit the middle of the month so I'll leave things off here! I'll start the next post most likely with a final say on the outcome of this little mistake, followed by the outcome of the Sheep festival! From there, the next post will likely be a summation of the rest of Autumn, and notably a bit of preamble of my Winter plans.

Take care, and we'll talk soon! Please - don't forget your animals outside.