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

Greetings and salutations! I hope all who are reading had a good passing week - my week was quite busy. A lot more meetings and order fulfillments than I thought I was going to have cross my desk, that's for sure.

The Harvest Goddess was a little quiet this week, so that translates to me not keeping her too busy. I've definitely been busy though! I'm getting through Year 3's Summer at the moment, reaching the last week or so of our favourite hot season on this half of the globe.

Summer tends to be a season in Harvest Moon very focused on both animals and festivals! It makes sense, both being so well-suited in nice weather. This also means rainy days and storms alike are all but absent from FoMT's summers.

So this brings together three main things that make Summer a particularly busy time of each year: tending to crops for profit, tending to your animals to prep for the festivals, and attending and - hopefully - winning in the festivals' competitions to get medals for your livestock, notably the Chicken Festival on Summer 7th and the Cow Festival on Summer 20th.

This all somehow ties into getting the Harvest Goddess to take my weak, lifespan-abiding-by ass' hand in marriage: shipping at least 1 of every item you're able to ship!

For the uninitiated - Harvest Moon is a farming simulation game. Have I mentioned this already? Is this officially getting too basic and singsong-y? Can I set down the tapshoes and cane? I'll set down the tapshoes and cane. You tend to a farm and rear crops and animal product in order to sell them for cash, which you can then use to further expand, arrange, and upgrade your farm's infrastructures and your tools. Shipping is done via shipping boxes that are strewn across your farm property.

Simply throw a jug of milk or some random foraged weed at the box, and it's generated a value for your shipped good! This big buff guy then walks onto your property around 5PM (unsolicited, but to my knowledge Mineral Town isn't in a castle doctrine state) each day to pick up your shipment stockpile. At that point, you get paid! Your earnings can be viewed and tracked in your ledger, viewable by pressing the SELECT button on your GBA.

I took two previous posts drumming up how labyrinthine marrying this Harvest Goddess is going to be, so what exactly is so difficult about shipping one of each item the game has to offer? Surely you just play the game and eventually get everything, right?

It's almost that simple!

This "Shipping all the Things" goal is multifaceted, as the items you can ship for profit expand beyond just growing random fruits and vegetables in your farm field. Each animal you can raise produces a raw product which can be shipped as is; that product can also be converted into a complex product that can also be sold. You can catch fish, you can forage, you can go digging for stuff in a mineshaft... there's a lot of sources of income! And marrying that dastardly dame of the spring requires you to explore every single one of them.

So how has my experience with this been? Well, since many of these items are contextual and seasonal... I have a spreadsheet:

It's not a very complex spreadsheet! It doubles as simple note-taking and as a checklist, at its core. I also have a running percentage at the bottom of it to help me track my items shipped! Shipping every single item in the game overlaps with basically every other Harvest Goddess marriage requirement, so it's a good ballpark estimation for your overall progress impressing the ruler of all things harvesting.

Now in this checklist, I have to separate the varieties and grades of the animal products. Things like milk and eggs are split into 6 varieties, or grades:

Small >> Medium >> Large >> Golden >> Platinum >> X

The higher the grade, the more money the product will sell for when shipped! More importantly for our purposes though, we simply need to sell each animal product once at each grade. These varieties being produced by your funny farm are dependent on three main factors, all of which you have fairly free control over when it comes to raising your animals:

1. How much your animal likes you;
2. How much time your animal has spent being raised outdoors;
3. Whether or not the animal has a Festival medal;

So you see now how summer very quickly becomes a busy time of year! There are summer-exclusive foraging items, summer-exclusive crops, it's the season containing festivals for 2 of the 3 animals you can raise in the game, and since rain is virtually nonexistent in summer, it's the perfect time to let your animals be outside!

When you start focusing big on this time of year, I highly recommend getting these little guys on your good side. These are the Harvest Sprites - Harvest Moon's form of an automation mechanic! If you can raise these guys' individual affection stats enough, you can ask them to help you with certain tasks around the farm, be it watering crops, harvesting the crops once ready, or tending to your animals for you. This helps free up a lot of time so you can still keep your farm running but have time to pursue these other activities.

I highly recommend spending your entire first year investing in at least 1 of each animal, tending to a simple and manageable repertoire of crops, and befriending these colour-coded gremlins.

With my time freed thanks to my shockingly ethically-sourced manual labour watering my 80+ squares of crops for me every day, I have time to tend to the animals now! For me in Year 3, I made it a point to make sure both a chicken and cow of mine would win their respective festivals:

Having a festival ribbon under an animal's belt - as well as a minimum of 8/10 hearts in their affection stat - allows them to produce the Golden grade of products for shipping! So as seen above, both KFC and Dairy-Queen now have a medal and are yielding upgraded produce. The question is, how do we upgrade to the Platinum and X-grade products from here?

Platinum is surprisingly easy - all you need to do is let an animal accumulate 900 hours (game-time not real-time) being raised outdoors in the pasture as well as meeting the previous Golden-grade requirements. X-Grade is pure RNG; once an animal is capable of producing Platinum-grade products, every day there's simply a small percentage chance of that Platinum product becoming X-grade. Naturally, the more outdoorsy festival champions you have in the family, the better your odds!

...So as you can see, I'm getting Platinum product. Which is great for making money! The problem is that I've been strategically letting my animals graze outdoors to save time and resources since I started this file. All 10 of my chickens, 4 of my cows, and both sheep all already surpass the 900-hour mark needed for platinum. I haven't shipped any Golden-grade products yet.

This means that when one of my animals wins a festival medal, we jump directly from Large-grade product to Platinum-grade... skipping over and missing out on the Golden variety; a separate product that still needs to be shipped in order to achieve 100% completion for the Harvest Goddess. We've officially raised our animals too well and missed content because of this quirk!

So that means I have to sell one of my chickens, incubate a new chick, and impregnate both a cow and a sheep for new offspring. The whole point of these new family additions, unfortunately, will be to shut them indoors forever like some sort of twisted backwards parenting technique; their only purpose will be to produce gold for me.

My Machiavellian genius aside, this is just one of many obstacles I've faced with getting Mineral Town's oldest resident to be my wife. If I'm remembering correctly, I'm on Summer 26th now. We haven't even hit Year 3 of Autumn yet - another festival to attend for the sheep! My pumpkins have grown and since been harvested, the pineapple and corn are doing well and proving to be good sources of income; all that I seem to be doing is focusing on my animals because I really am not looking forward to the mining bits.

Winter is coming.