Harvest Moon games will always have a special place in my heart.
Although on the surface, they might all look like the same game, just with different options for friends and family, each one is full of unique features and game functionalities that make it just an understatedly wee bit different.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working my way through Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. I looked at a few ways it differed from its predecessors in my first look, but there’s much more to it than that!
Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
Keep everything.
Seriously, I really can’t put enough emphasis on it. Even if you think there’s no point to keeping those scrap ores, there will be.
And that doesn’t just go for presumably useless ores; plants, herbs, even bird fluffs you find on the ground will all be useful to you.
They will also never drop when you need them to.
Luckily, the game makers thought of this, and it’s pretty easy to upgrade your storage chest to hold more stuff than you actually need to hang onto fairly early on in the game. With your 500-slot chest, you’ll be ready to collect ALL THE THINGS!
Grow pearls.
These may seem like a bit of a money sink at first, but especially later on, this practice will come in handy.
Once you start trying to make any kind of fabric+ for outfits and farm circles, you will need to dye the wool using ores. Pearls and all of their colourful variations count as ores for this purpose, even golden pearls.
It’s a much more sustainable way to make fabrics, because well, you can’t exactly grow amethysts. It’ll save you a pretty penny on buying ores from the Log Cabin, and it’ll let you save your ores for other things that don’t accept substitutions: your tool upgrades.
BONUS: As you level up your pearl growing skills, you will eventually be able to harvest three pearls for every pearl oyster you put in. Which means, if you have the big oyster farm circle, you get about 36,000 G in pearls for 600 G in pearl oysters.
Push that trigger.
The left trigger, to be precise.
I think one of my favourite features in this game is the quick greeting that you deliver to everyone near you if you press the left trigger.
It counts as talking to that person for the day, so you can build friendship points, and doesn’t eat a huge chunk out of your real day. After all, there are 40-odd villagers, if you’re only counting the ones with portraits. Ain’t got time for that.
Buy chewy treats.
And lots of ‘em.
See, I have this obsession with maximizing my farm animals’ productivity because it just makes life that much easier (and my farm less full).
This was easy enough to accomplish in Sunshine Islands, because all I had to do was slap an Orange Wonderful on my milker and wham, bam, shang-a-lang, I had two milks instead of one.
Tale of Two Towns threw a real monkey wrench into that situation by introducing a complex series of treats that you had to give your animals in order to level them up to produce more. You could only get to a maximum of five items per animal, and I swear, by the time you gave them all the right treats, they’d be close to dying on you anyway.
I had a dedicated notepad with spaces for each animal on my farm, and I would very carefully tally which animal had gotten which treats. There were a few cases of mis-tallying, though, which ended with much consternation.
Thank goodness, Trio of Towns made that function so much easier by instead introducing a set of treats that would each boost a different stat on your animals. Chewy treats boost animal byproduct amount all by themselves, so before you know it, you’ll be getting 20 milk a day without any issues.
You can also boost the success rate of these treats if you pick an animal with a timid nature. Natures randomly set when you enter the “Buy Animals” list, so you can just keep exiting and reentering until you get the one you want.
Do your farm tips.
This is honestly the first time I’ve seen a Harvest Moon game give the player homework, and as much as I may not have liked homework in school, it’s a good thing now.
Once you finish all of your farm tips (for which, by the way, you’ll need to feed lots of different treats to your animals), your uncle Frank will give you a piece of land deep below your farm that he “forgot” about.
This cellar is basically your greenhouse from previous games, where you can grow all of your crops indoors with the help of seasonal suns. Unlike previous iterations, though, the cellar has three rooms—so you can grow three different seasons at the same time.
Mind-blowing, I know.
It’s a very handy place for fruit trees.
So there are my basic tips for rocking at Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. Have you tried it yet? What did you think?
