Wow, you have yourself a tester! I've been putting off updating because the end of the season report is the most work intensive part, and knowing that I am entering into the Age of (Broken) Animals was kind of demotivating. I have questions about what design decisions you made, but I'll ask them in the other thread.
Summer 28 It's the last day of Summer. There's very little to do, actually. My tomatoes and hops heroically squeeze out one last harvest, I've got mushrooms that need harvesting, and I guess I should pet my animals. The Moonlight Jelly festival is tonight, and that puts a damper on any elaborate plans. I mostly just putter around the map, visiting villagers, chopping random trees, hitting the Secret Woods, scraping up any last Summer forage, etc. I actually run out of things to do near the end and just have to run the clock until the festival starts. My traps kind of spoil the mood. They spoil the mood even more when the rare green jelly, the one that everyone is so excited about, swims right into my trap. AWKWARD
How did we do? On track for getting the million coin achievement by the end of year 1. I'm not even going to try for the 10 mill one. That's a year 2 thing. Experience Foraging is going to require special attention to hit the cap. Keep in mind that 33% of the total xp required for level 10 is contained in the 9->10 transition. Social Anything at 5 hearts or better is on track for completion by year 1. The Dwarf, Sandy, and Krobus are new arrivals and are going to be behind no matter what. Krobus probably won't make it to ten hearts this year, because you can't talk to him (bringing up the shop menu doesn't count for friendship). Most of the starting villagers that are on the bottom of the list have birthdays coming up, so they are basically 2-3 hearts better off than they appear. Harvey is the outlier. He had his birthday, and he's still low on the list. Three of the villagers are completely done, which simplifies things. Once a villager hits ten, they no longer decay, and you can basically just ignore them. FRIENDSHIP! I also have some sort of pansexual collective going on here, included a matched set of sisters. Gross! Community Center No surprises and no serious omissions. The big item to look out for is the red cabbage for the dyes section. It's not a crop you can grow in the first year, but the cart merchant sometimes has one. I've been checking her every chance I get, but no luck so far. Equipment Maxed out on gear. Galaxy sword, all iridium tools, my favorite ring combo, and the Space Boots. Not only are the tools nice, but this is a major source of task creation gone. No more having to reach Clint before 4:00 PM every second day! I am running low on Salmonberries I've only got 50 left. But alternatives are on the way. Basic Resources I'm past the point where I care about things like wood, stone or metals anymore. If I need it, I can get it. Shipping Closing in. The only major category missing are the animal products, which I will start collecting tomorrow. Fishing If it can be caught by Summer, I've caught it. The notable items are the two new legendaries and the ever-annoying lava eel. Minerals Some headway. The mineral collection is just a numbers game. Keep getting geodes and you'll eventually be done. If I have to mass buy geodes from Sandy on the last week of Winter, that's what I'll do. Artifacts Very weak progress. There's not much I can do. I especially worried about the artifacts that are tied to specific regions. The beach and desert artifacts are completely missing from my list, and there is nothing I can do about except hope that I can more artifact sites in those regions. It hasn't helped that most dig sites have been coughing up clay and mixed seeds. Museum Mostly matches the collections tabs, but I still haven't found a second Prismatic Shard. I also have all of the books now. Cooking Still don't have a kitchen, and I still don't care. The important things is that I have been hoarding the ingredients needed, so I can backfill my list the instant I get around to getting the house expansion. Achievements A few more finished and a few more unlocked. Monsters Better progress than expected. Slimes started at 140 this season, and I didn't think I'd be able to finish them before the year is up. I'm not worried about that anymore. Everything else is getting close.
SunTide, thank you for this amazing guide. Your reports have helped me improve my own game significantly, such as placing chests in strategic locations so I can delay buying the $10,000 backpack. I am utterly gobsmacked by your gear -- how did you get so much iridium?? And two prismatic shards already? Also, how often do you visit the traveling merchant? I noticed there's no out-of-season items in your community bundles. There's many items I buy from him long before they're normally available, especially the Animal & Artisan bundles. When I'm lucky, I can unlock the greenhouse before winter starts.
Fall 0 The tyranny of tools is over. But now it's time to welcome our new animal overlords. Fall is mostly going to be about getting livestock. I plan on building one fully upgraded barn and one fully upgraded coop. I'll fill each building with an even mix of the allowed animal types. I care less about ruthless efficiency than I do variety and completion. I'm using Starpeanut's mod, so I might even turn a profit on this! Many of the villagers are approaching ten hearts, and I want push as many of them over the edge as possible. Most of my inventory complications are coming from having to both store and carry half a dozen different items to appease their various cravings. It will be good to not have to worry about that any more. I'm going to try to make two visits to the Skull Caverns every week. This is partially because I am legitimately running low on metal, but also because I need to build hearts with Sandy, and because I need to make regular checks for the desert artifacts. I'd like to visit on Wednesday and Saturday. That way I catch the last wave of spawns, and then I give the desert a few days to rebuild before hitting it again. I have lots of high value crop items that I have been hanging on to. Most of my corn and melons were stored away in anticipation of being turned into pickles/jelly/wine. I've got a small shop running right now and I'll probably expand it a little bit. I'm not going to do the reductively powerful thing where you build several hundred of them and make wine from literally every single fruit you harvest. It's too much hassle for me. After some thought, I settled on this array of crops for my first Fall: Half of the field goes to cranberries, since they're the most powerful crop. The rest goes to variety. The big ticket item is the row of gem berries on the western field. I've been picking rare seeds from the cart whenever I can, and now it's going to pay off. The other notable item are the rows of beets. You have to get those from Oasis, and I suspect that most people don't have access to them on the first Fall. The four rows of pumpkins are mostly a function of me having enough Quality Fertilizer on hand to prepare five crops of crops. The gem berries were the obvious first choice. I decided to spend the other units on pumpkins. By putting them close together like that and maxing out their chances of coming up gold-starred, I am making it more likely to get a giant crop or two. The reason that I planted as much wheat as I did is because it gets used in tons of recipes, and I don't want to end up being undersupplied when I finally get my kitchen. You'll notice that I have a keg next to each of my fruit trees. The idea here is that when the trees are in season, these kegs are dedicated 100% to making wine from their trees. On off seasons, they help process whatever overstock needs eliminating.
Thank you. I hate to say that I answered your questions in the post you were replying to, but I answered the questions in the post that you were replying to The gear was gotten by making four trips to the Skull Caverns. That's it. There's no real secret to it, I just get there early and work efficiently. You need a little bit of luck, but if you can minimize the effects of chance by making regular trips. I only found one prismatic shard. What I was saying is that I want a second one. The merchant cart I've been hitting almost every weekend, checking for Rare Seeds and red cabbage. I've found lots of the former, none of the latter. The greenhouse is extremely powerful, which is actually part of the reason I'm not all that bullish on unlocking it. I mean, sure I'll use it, but it lends itself towards one dimensional play were you just calculate the best crop and do that forever. I appreciate that it presents an interesting engineering challenge as you try to figure out the perfect way to arrange things for maximum profits. That kind of stuff can be fun, but it only hooks me for so long. Personally, I'll probably use it as a sort of food lab where I raise things like gem berries and ancient fruit and process them for seeds so that I will have more options when year 2 rolls around.
Fall 0.5 Oh, yes, I forgot to mention something very important. My game ran into some kind of bug that prevented me from getting a pet. Marnie showed up like she's supposed to, but the problem is that she showed up over and over in an infinite loop until I finally told I didn't want a damn pet. I just tolerated this state of affairs, because it really doesn't affect anything, but it's starting to bug me. So I opened up my savefile and did a little bit of surgery and manually added a pet. While I was there, I decided to go whole hog and add two pets. I mean, why not? Meet my new pets. They have been named very logically
Fall 1 The first day of any season is a mess, but today gets even messier when Shane greets me at my door and says he wants to take me to a gridball game tonight. Is this like a date or something? I tell him that I can probably work it in somehow. I also tell him that I'll go with him to the game. *rimshot* My cattle have grown up, so I collect my first load of milk ever. It actually works too, thanks to Starpeanut! Here's my animal pen. It's very much a work in progress (this image is taken from the future) I located it near the mushroom cave, since I have to go there regularly anyway. I incorporated the greenhouse into the enclosure, both to save on materials and because it makes sense to cluster all of my facilities together. As I mentioned earlier, I picked up all of my lightning rods and moved them here, forming the bulk of my fence. This gets the rods out of my way, and supplies me with a zero-maintenance building material. The coop is located closer to my house than the barn, and for good reason. You need to enter the coop every day, but you only have to enter the barn on rain days and during winter. The buildings are on the north edge of the pen so that animals can't hide in the blind spot created by the camera angle. I have some processing machines laid out here, but I'm not sure I'll keep them there. I'll eventually need many, many more machines, and I'm not sure I can keep them in the pen area without them getting in the way. I may eventually make a general purpose processing area for all of my second generation goods. I can already tell that the pen isn't going to be big enough to handle 24 animals. The grass just can't grow fast enough. I'll have to expand the pen. Truthfully, the optimal setup would be to have the barn and the coop on opposite corners of the pen, so that the animals attack the grass from two different angles and the surface area is maximized, which improves the rate of grass recovery. But I can't stand the loss of work flow that comes from having the buildings separated like that, and I also don't like having buildings on the southern edge, where they can create blind spots. I'll also going to have to lay out pavement eventually. I want a nice horizontal path that connects the eastern gate to the buildings, and centrally located vertical path that makes it easier to chase my animals down. Of course, this cuts into the area available for grass, so that's just one more reason to expand as soon as I have the time. Anyways, after tending to my cattle, I get to work on my field. Working with all iridium tools is a real pleasure. I knock out the whole field in record time. I'm able to plow, water, and fertilize the whole field by 2:00, leaving me plenty of time to hit Pierre's and buy up some seeds. I have $50,000 in the bank and a small fortune in hoarded goods, so I'm not too worried about running out of money. When I'm done with Pierre, my inventory looks like this: Unless I screwed up, that's enough seeds to run my farm for the entire season. Also, look at all the crap I'm having to carry for the villagers! I can't wait to start whittling the list of things I need to carry with me down. I see Penny heading towards the the green space just south of the main square. I follow, hoping to score some quick points with my (newest) girlfriend. Things get scary when I get there and find her sitting on a bench with Maru. The whole thing is so totally weird. I give a nice romantic gift to Maru, and then I give one to Penny, assembly line style, and neither one seems upset. I think that they might even be kind of into it. I'm waiting for the penny to drop (so to speak), and for the whole village to go Wickerman on me or something. The bulletin board has a message from the Wizard. He wants a Joja cola "for a potion he's brewing." Christ dude, you're just making a Jack and Coke, get over yourself. Nobody likes the pretentious guy that just graduated from barkeep school and plays up his drink mixing like it's some kind of unfathomable art. Whatever. Doing his quest gets me nearly a week's worth of friendship with him, and I'm eager to max him out so I can stop visiting his remote-ass tower. I need to plant my seeds, but first I have to meet with Shane to plant my seeds. Things get weird pretty fast. Alex (aka my other boyfriend) is at the game too. He's not even watching the game. In fact, he's not even sitting in his seat. He's standing up on the edge of his chair so that he can get a better look at me and Shane. We put on quite a show for him, too Alex definitely sees us. He doesn't seem jealous at all. In fact, he seems rather the opposite of jealous: Damn, that is some ultracuckold shit right there. Anyone else would be devastated to see their SO making out with another dude in a public place, but for Alex, this is the best day of his life. For the first time in a long time, I'm actually worried about cash flow, so I toss 50 gold bars into the shipping chest before going to bed. That should help.
Fall 2 Oh man, there's a long list of things I want to do today. -It's raining, so I don't need to water my crops. That's the only nice thing about today -It's Penny's birthday. -This will max Penny out, so it's time to liquidate my overstock of poppies -My chickens will have laid their first eggs today -Get more milk from my cattle -It's mushroom cave day -I want to catch a walleye, the rain-exclusive Fall fish -Catfish are back, and they are still pretty good, so I'd like to catch a few. This will be my lowest priority, however -If possible, I want to collect enough forage to complete the Fall Forage bundle and get those 30 Fall seeds -Assuming I get those seeds, I want to plant them immediately, to take advantage of the rain I'm getting today -Robin will have finished upgrading the barn,so I wan tot visit Marnie and buy 3 goats -I want to re-hire Robin and get her started on upgrading my coop -I need to chop enough wood to make that possible -Since I will be criss-crossing the map anyway, I should deliver as many gifts as possible That's a lot of stuff! I end up running all over the map. I start by attacking the trees that are immediately the the west of my animal pen. I need the wood, and I intend to expand the pen in that direction anyway. I need 450 freaking wood for the next upgrade, and there will be two more upgrades after this one, so there is no such thing as too much wood right now. I buy the goats from Marnie, and savagely murder every tree in my path along the way. The goats are more expensive than I was expecting them to be. I'm glad I liquidated all that gold last night. Hiring Robin uses up pretty much all of my remaining cash. I also have a chance meeting with Penny in the woods. I'm starting to have misgivings about including her in the love collective Yeah lady, one of the things I know about country life is that YOU DON'T HAVE A PICNIC IN THE MIDDLE THE FUCKING RAIN HOLY SHIT YOU BROUGHT CHILDREN ALONG TOO AND THEY ARE GETTING SOAKED WHY DO YOU EVEN HAVE A BLANKET THAT MAKES NO SENSE IN A RAIN STORM WHAT IS EVEN Well whatever. Completion is completion. I give her a gold star poppy for her birthday and now she's at ten hearts. God help me. I take advantage of the customary rain day pub meeting to smooze with a lot of the villagers all at once, and then most of the evening fishing out of the river. I catch a few walleyes, which is the most important bit. I also snag a few catfish, which is nice. Even nicer are the two diamonds that I find in chests. I collected what forage I could, but I didn't find any hazelnuts, and without those, I can't complete the bundle. Oh well. It's not urgent. I end up with $12,000 in the bank after shipping. That's pretty nice, seeing as how I emptied my account earlier today. Most of that money came from me dumping my poppy stock. I accidentally hoarded way more than I had meant to, and with Penny finished, I only need poppies for a single recipe.
Man, and here I was thinking my latest run's 50 quality sprinklers set for year 1 fall 1 was an achievement. This is some excellent work here. SunTide, thanks for sharing. I totally forgot about that double drops ring too, ffs brain!
Fall 3 Wednesday. I really need to go tot the Skull Caverns today, and just because of Sandy and the artifacts. I'm running low on metals. My farm is getting complicated. Between watering, managing my machines, and most especially handling my animals, it's already 11:00 when I'm ready to go. I guess this is the new baseline. It's only going to get worse as I add more animals. I'm wondering if closing the barn doors at night might be a good idea after all, since that means less chasing overall. The caves go well. get lots of shafts, and get all the way down to floor 74. I probably go have done even better, but I was a dongus and forgot to eat a Spiced Eel. I just barely get to bed before the 2:00 deadline. I don't even have time to swap out my machines.
Closing the barn doors so that you can pet and milk/shear them inside helps some. I routinely finish 67 animals by noon.
Fall 4 After doing my basic chores, I buckle down and expand my pen. The easiest and fastest thing to do is just expand it to the left until it hits the map border. That lets me repurpose the existing western wall, so I have to make very little new material. While clearing the land, I up end finding a chicken statue artifact. Nice! I will probably eventually have to expand southwards as well, but that can wait for another day. It's 2:00 when I'm ready to leave the farm. I buy three ducks from Marnie. I'd like to purchase a barn upgrade from Robin, but I just can't. There's not enough wood. I'm starting to regret not making a tree farm. If I were to start all over, I would probably take a day out of Spring and clear a small section and plant 50 trees or so for later harvesting. I do more gift work. Lots of people are almost at the ten heart threshold. I should be able to push a lot of them over next week. Haley, on the other hand, goes over today. It's kind of a scattered day. I do a little bit of fishing, hoping to catch some new fish, but I don't get anything important.
