So it's been a bit since I picked up SDV, my last play had been a farmer named Seraph who romanced all the singles before settling down with Abigail to raise two kids. But that play through had been at the end of a bunch of hard pushing runs and it was a while ago. Thus I was pleased to feel the pull again. I promised myself I wouldn't fuss too much over things, and that I'd not bother heavy optimizing and would be certain not to restart the game except in those terrible cases of "mining-oops" that bite us all every now and then. Basically I was just going to take it easy and have fun. I ended up playing "Jessica", named after one of my wife's co-worker's on a lark. She moved away from Joja and the City to a forested plot of land her grandfather had christened "Moosehead Farms" long ago. Her first year was one of mostly solitary labor setting the farm up. Jessica even missed a few of the holidays -- such as the Flower Festival -- in the first year due to her desire to work hard. There wasn't one instance where she didn't think "Umm, No," when asked if she ever took a day off, or wanted a break from things. Wandering the valley and clearing her forested home were all she wanted. The spring was routine, very busy but it got the essentials moving. I didn't have any extraordinary luck during the season, but nothing bad happened and I managed to enter Summer with a steel watering can and pick and a copper hoe and axe along with enough cash from strawberries to buy and even 100 blueberries. Jessica did have some luck during the summer, she found an ancient seed and had several fruits by the end of fall. She also got a lucky find of a fire quartz in the mid-steel levels of the mine and got the mine-carts in summer as well. The traveling merchant sold her several rare fish, clearing that early on as well. By Fall she was hauling a gold pick into the Skull caves regularly and eating pepper poppers to keep moving. Alas she wasn't so lucky with the museum and did not manage to get a key to the sewers until mid winter, cutting her off from two or three iridium sprinklers. I managed Jessica's gold fairly well however, and she had a pig in her barn with four days to spare in the Fall, and buying two fruit trees plus an apricot tree for the front "yard" was no imposition. The rabbit came through with a foot mid-winter as well. I put a fair amount of effort into prepping for the new year. I've layed out a full design for three bee-hive centers. I have a fairly large tree-farm in the south-west. There's grass growing freely everywhere due to my planting starters on the 28th of Winter. (pro-tip, plant your starters on the 28th and on the 1st they'll have spread like wild to cover a huge area) I have a passle of ducks (and one void chicken) and a cow and goat for pepper poppers and one pig, but mostly animals are too much work for me so I sell them off as they get happy. Jessica even discovered she made a few friends, that woman Leah who lives down near the river is pretty nice and it turns out that she might even be interested in a few of the bachelors. Sam and Sebastien both are a bit too young for Jessica, but Harvey and Shane are a bit older to her eyes. Eliott is another story entirely; Jessica thinks he's kind of cute, and he's very articulate -- his admiration of civic virtue when she toasted the town really caught her eye. This year she's planning on going to the Flower Festival instead of farming all day -- though she'll probably just dance with her best friend instead of finding the courage to ask Eliott. It's been a fun run so far, fun as all git out. I've got a bunch of bee-hives, 450 winter seeds for next winter, about 50 rhubarb seeds, and 25k in gold to buy more spring seeds. My greenhouse even has 13 ancient fruit producing. Plus -- for all the not-putting-lots-of-effort into it thing it turns out I could have a fully done Community Center if not for lacking a little bit of luck....... CURSE YOU RED CABBAGE!!!!!!! *shakes fists in the air like Khan* Anyhow, here's Spring 1. ( https://upload.farm/1F2mmv if you care )
"Egg Festival", and "Flower Dance," sheesh -- it would appear it's been longer than I thought since I played last. I also forgot how bloody fast the day of the Egg Festival goes, there's way too much work to do on that day for me. Spring saw Jessica make some final moves and improvements on Moosehead Farm. She had Robin tear down the shed and move it out behind the house, and then put up a mill and silo out front. Jessica got a few more iridium sprinklers and extended the second set of fields to be another 9X9 grouping of them. The tree-farm she largely forested down, mostly just taking mature trees though the lower part of the second field for crops did require chopping some immature saplings down. Beehives to fill in the 2nd pattern started to come in, but maple syrup only flows so fast in Stardew Valley. I extended the fenced area and put in some grass-seated posts to help keep grass for the limited animals Jessica keeps, she only ranches to supply cheese for poppers and eggs to keep the mayo-machines running. One thing I'm doing differently this run than most is that I'm Jessica farm repeatably. She build 7 seed-makers and makes a practice of putting all non-starred crops into the seed-maker to replenish seeds from. The net result is that she is entering summer with the seeds needed to re-plant the entire spring crops for next year already put away. It's not a really good investment of time and effort, but I like to think Jessica appreciates the self-sufficient nature of the whole affair -- she's a hand's-on kinda gal. Jessica also moved all the other machines into the shed as well, to clean up the farm a bit. The end result is that it only holds 31 kegs, but I'm not doing the game for optimization so that's okay. Jessica finally began to make efforts to befriend the rest of the town. Leah's friendship continued to deepen, and she was surprised to discover that Haley turned into a good friend as well. Abigail might be holding the fact that Jessica beat her in the egg-hunt against my farmer though. My plot to get the wizard up to 10 hearts as soon as possible finished out -- thank you bi-weekly trips to visit the wizard -- now I just need to get that Red Cabbage and finish the Community Center! At the Flower Dance Jessica did just dance with her friend Leah though, she just didn't feel comfortable asking any of the men even though she and both Eliott and Shane are becoming good friends. (I gotta have my pepper popper recipe early on, and for some reason Jessica kind of digs Eliott) I continue to work hard on the day before a season change to have my fields in order, I'm a big believer in covering them with a waste-crop to scythe away after the season change. Oddly the visual for the save shows the plants rather than the weeds, gotta be an oddity of how farm upload sees the save. I should finish the outdoor fields soon, two more iridium sprinklers will finish off far field, after which I'll start on the sprinklers for the greenhouse. I'll be going into Summer w. 95k in funds, so I hope to be able to buy all the seeds I'll need for the entire season up-front.
Well Fall has arrived! (and a fine looking season it is) I never did get the red cabbage, or a seed for it, from the traveling merchant. So Jessica tossed super speed grow onto a plot and grew it for herself. That did mean no Community Center until I think it was the 8th or so. Once that was done it took literally a single day for Jessica to get the magic ink back to the wizard and put down two Junimo Huts; one for the front garden and one for berries in the fields out back. I then had Jessica focus on a few other desirable things like getting a slime hutch in and mining the Skull Caverns looking for eggs (no luck so far), buying the stone to build stairs down to level 100 and return with a Prismatic Shard, clearing out the last of the trees in the southwest, and adding in an entire new pattern of 9 sprinklers and a third hut. Jessica did need to move the beehives, and give up on three patterns of them, to make room for the second berry-field, but come cranberry harvests it'll pay off. She also bought one of each kind of fruit tree and planted them across the rear of the greenhouse where they can grow year-round. I fear Jessica didn't like the trees in the barnyard though -- they kept getting in the way of things and making it hard to spot truffles -- so she chopped them down and moved her taps to a regrowth of forest around the lake in the south-east. She intends to let that area grow semi-wild and tap the trees that do. I consider moving the slime hutch next to the greenhouse and cutting out a bunch of my fencing, further restricting the barnyard's size, in order to make my daily routine even shorter and to consolidate the "developed" area of the farm. Jessica has also been building up a stock of oil-makers, so I hope that she can use corn and sunflowers to some effect on those as well, I'm thinking five in the end. Between oil-makers, seed-makers, kegs, furnaces, mayo machines, cheese-makers, recycling machines, and several sundries the shed is almost it's own mini-game at this point -- I can spend hours in there processing things. My plans for the Fall are to use cranberries in the back fields and treat the one in front of the house as a garden again. There the corn and sunflowers will continue, I'm replacing the hops with grapes, continuing to enclose the ancient fruit inside, I'll be putting in some eggplant in a small plot, and two plots of pumpkins, I'll mix yams and beets across the fall in the last plot out front. I intend to plant a ton of trees in the southeast, around the small pond, in the hopes that one or more will pop into mushroom trees I can grow out. The greenhouse is now full of growing ancient fruit and a slowing growing population of sweet gem berries that will eventually take over entirely, I consider lining the walls with kegs, but I don't think I care to move my "processing mini-game" out of the shed where it's quite enjoyable on it's own. Most importantly Jessica has finally begun to connect more with the townsfolk. She makes more effort to make it into the tavern on Fridays, and stop by people's houses to sit in for a minute's chat on her way to and from elsewhere. Leah's art show was a rousing success, validating Jessica's support of her, and Sam's practice with Abigail and Sebastien paid off when they took their electronic dance music to the big city for a show. Jessica has definitely been thrilled as Jas has finally begun to open up to her, and Vincent as well, she's very much a kid-person. But most of her best friendships are with the "adults" in the village; Pierre, George, Evelyn, and of course the Wizard are her best friends -- although she's beginning to get a healthy respect for the quality of Demetrius's mind and hopes that remembering to bring the town doctor coffee every now and then will help further their friendship as well. https://upload.farm/1F5CWZ
I was pleased to discover how much I was enjoying the replay, figured I would share it in the hopes that maybe people would either enjoy it or perhaps even gain value from some trick I do they didn't know. I'm glad you like it so far.
A brief divertissement on role-playing Jessica: I'm finding this run through fascinating in that it is showing off how differently I react to some of the NPCs as Jessica vs. previous incarnations of the Farmer. Kent in particular is an interesting case: I am IRL a man, and a vet, and Kent usually pulls out both competitive and very strong fraternal feelings in me, role-playing as Jessica I get an entirely different vibe from him. He's definitely bristly, and he has issues, but he has a sense of humor and that damned grin that just makes him incredibly hot -- not at all my reaction with other farmers. I'm afraid it's becoming obvious that Jessica is very het, and a bit older than most of the bachelor/ettes. She definitely develops different friendships faster than my other farmers have, and likes different people. I do enjoy the role-playing aspect of this game quite a bit, so a bit from this morning's play particularly charmed me. I'd been meaning to get Jessica into a relationship sometime soon, it's Fall of Year 2 for goodness sakes. But the only men who really interested her were either taken (Kent) or really needed working up (Harvey and Eliott). But I knew I wanted Jessica to have a fall wedding so she could be married by the time of Grandpa's evaluation, and for that to happen I was going to need to hand out the pendant before Thursday of week 4 -- and given me and forgetfulness that really needed to be Wednesday. With a limited number of gifts available left on her deadline Jessica set out early one morning to take care of business. She got the pair of chicken's coop cleaned, and milked both the cows, watered the slime's troughs, and even picked up and dropped in the fridge the mushrooms from her cave. She thought she was off to Clint's with a load of omni-geodes to break open and a pocket of diamonds so she could give one to Jodi for her birthday -- I knew she was off to hand out diamonds to every villager she could meet because I need more friendship with everyone for that judgement. There's limited time left to get more friendship with the bachelor's before Fall's over I thought, Jessica isn't really interested in anyone she's got good hearts with so far, best get a move on. I ran smack, face-first, into Shane's seven-heart event where he tells Marnie he's feeling better and things are helping, and reveals to Jas he's cutting back on drinking and gives her a gift. Now that's the kind of growing up I can respect. Then, before I even got a chance do anything else the game immediately triggers his eight-heart event and Jessica learns about how much he cares for his chickens, and Jas. Now, you need to know a few things about Jessica at this point. First off, Jessica is a hard worker, she is up until wicked late almost every night, and she respects hard work and picking yourself up with it. Second, Jessica is very much a kids kind of gal, she wants to settle down and raise a passle of kids. Third, Jessica hates the barn-yard and everything to do with it, especially chickens which are dirty critters and require way too much hay for the constant stream of chicks and really only feed the two mayo machines she has in the shed. Thus it is that Jessica, who'd been planned (by me) to hand out a couple gifts to the Doc and Eliott who I thought she'd like, suddenly found herself in a chicken coop with Jas and Shane viewing him in a very different light. There Shane was, working hard to pick up his life from the hole it was in, and showing positive results! Not only that but he actually likes chickens! OMG, he not only could be a farmer, he actually WAS a farmer already -- and a pretty damn good one if he managed to whip up a new breed of chicken. Right then and there she fell for him. Jessica turned right around, walked out of the house, hopped on her horse and rode straight home as fast as coffee and pepper poppers could fuel her. There she took the bouquet she'd bought some time ago out of the chest where she figured it would sit unused for quite some time and headed back to give it to Shane. She was so elated she then proceeded to go around the whole town, seeking out literally each and every person in the game save the Wizard (who watches everything anyway) and gave each of them one of her store of diamonds she was in such a good mood. So .... I guess that puts me on the Shane Train. *rolls eyes at ceiling* I'm definitely looking forward to his second seven-heart event now. It will further validate Jessica's hopes that Shane's capable of turning it around and being successful.
In my current play through I've been thinking of either Sam or Shane. Sam appeals to my rock and roll side, but he is a little bit immature. Shane is older and has a job at Joja Mart, I got a Joja membership on this play through just to get the trophy. He is hard working and while he complains about his job, he always manages to show up for work. It's true he is a bit damaged, but they all have issues of one kind or another. So for right now I think my farmer, Prissy, may be on the Shane train too.
I have to admit I share the admiration for Sam's musical side, but, like you, he's just too young for me. I give him credit, he accepts some chiding over the skateboard incident, and he fesses up and cleans up cheerfully enough with a simple accidents; so I think he's going to become a fine young man .... in a few years .... and a few years after that Jessica might be interested in him. In yet another agonizing "Oh my goodness I forgot ..." I suddenly realized on Fall 13 that my plan to get Jessica married before Winter was in terrible danger of failing. Jessica went to the shed, to check our her stocks, and discovered she'd forgotten selling off almost all her hardwood, hardwood she needed if Robin was going to add a second floor to the house, and without a room for kids how could she get married?!!! Now on the forest farm this isn't normally an issue, but I'd just spent thousands of gold on fruit saplings to put into the spaces where the hardwood stumps appear on the farm, Jessica felt they were unsightly and didn't fit the feel of the farm as something growing and alive. Yet the Secret Forest only gives 12 Hardwood a day, and I needed around 135 in ten days .... the maths didn't add up. So Jessica went and chopped down 8 fruit tree saplings just to let the hardwood stumps regrow on the farm. (I then forgot to get the Mermaid Pendant during a rainy day and on the 16th said "I don't know I'm gonna get lucky again this Fall with rain," and had to craft a rain totem to summon up a storm for the 17th which Jessica then used to the get the pendant. Sheesh, so much effort just to get my gal married before the Winter.....)
Owwwwwwww..... chopping down fruit trees... just owwwwwwww.... I like to time my marriage for Summer 24 to feel like it's coinciding with my Bday on June 24. I just need to hurry up and get Leah to 10 hearts so I can trigger her event, then I'll have everyone up to 10-hearts and I can go propose to mu future waifu Hailey! Of course, I'm on Winter 3, Y1, so plenty of time.
I've done a "Get the village to 10 hearts" before getting married run. I found it oddly disquieting for me. I don't have a problem with sleeping around but it felt oddly more deceitful than I'd anticipated. One my goals with Jessica was that she was going to legitimately befriend everyone first, then choose a partner and get married. I did fail at that goal, but I blame Shane and his growing up into a character Jessica could fall for.
Last save I got Penny to 10 hearts and got the Spa scene... and I chose the "I don't feel the same" option. O.. M... G... the avatar of her crying and the text... oh gawd it killed me. I felt terrible for weeks and just cringed every time I saw her after. I felt so incredibly terrible... Stupid Stupid Game!!!
Huh. My reaction was, "Dammit there goes 3 hearts! Moar gifting grrr." Maybe cuz I was just doing the "make everyone 10 hearts" ocd thang.
