It sounds strange to advise people on how best to enjoy a video game. After all, they are made for enjoyment. The problem is, life sims like Harvest Moon are formulaic, and attract people with a meticulous nature, who get too attached to doing as much as possible, as well as possible, as fast as possible.
Especially as Harvest Moon games generally work at about x10 speed – so ten minutes real time is ten hours game time. This makes you run around like a headless chicken trying to finish everything until the day ends, and you get to start all over again.
A bit of hurrying is fine, because the challenge of that game is basically your ability to Win At Life, which is why life sims have a draw on people with an obsessive streak; real life doesn’t operate so predictably, so life sims give you an escape from unpredictability. But in order to stop my fellow obsessives from falling down the rabbit hole of frustration at one’s inability to Do All The Things, here is a list of things to avoid doing – against the game’s own advice.
Do not build fences.
In most Moon games, you make your own perimeters on your land by putting up fences. You can build them around the furthest sides of your property, or around livestock areas. These fences are made of wood, which involves cutting down trees for lumber, then fetching the lumber out of the wood shed and karting individual pieces to their designated space.
Cutting down trees is always labour intensive, and at the beginning of the game you’ll neither have time nor energy to collect much lumber a day. What you do collect you’ll want to keep for building new structures and upgrading existing ones.
Fences are not easily removed once put up. You can drop them in bodies of water one by one, which is time-intensive, or smash them with your hammer, which is labour intensive. Even in games where you can upgrade your tools and need to stack up experience points on each of them, there are better ways; for example, using your hammer in the mines renders ore and gems which you can then sell.
As you change your farm by adding crops, expanding buildings or in some cases buying new land, you will have to rearrange your fence posts. You can spend a lot of time making your farm both efficient and tidy as per its fence post orientation, but this is a waste because you do not actually need fences.
Fences are for stopping livestock from wandering off, and for keeping antagonisers away from livestock – for example, wild dogs or wolves who bother your animals and make them stressed, which makes them sick. But since you do not have to keep your animals outside, you do not need to deal with this. In fact, it is better not to keep livestock outside.
Do not put livestock outside.
Apart from the fence situation above, there are all sorts of problems with keeping animals outside. One is the weather. Every day, tomorrow’s weather is randomised. If it is raining, you cannot keep your animals outside or they will get sick. I can confirm that this is not in fact true in A Wonderful Life, even though it is supposed to be. A developer oversight, perhaps. Indeed, in many ways A Wonderful Life is so easy, it borders on dull.
Anyway, you have to move all your animals into the barn the day before the rain comes. If the weather is particularly back and forth, this can get tedious. Letting them out to pasture is just so they can feed themselves, as opposed to your feeding them by hand or by filling the feed bins; but feeding them by hand increases their heart level, rendering higher quality products and quickly preparing them for contests, which are won by having an animal with a high heart rating.
Moreover, if you feed the animals by hand and fill up their feed bins when they empty (the animals eat only once a day), you have a back-up in case you can’t get in to feed them for some reason – occasionally there are typhoons or snow storms, whereby your character is barred from leaving the house for the day.
Keeping animals in the barn all the time means you always know where they are to talk, brush and milk or sheer them. In most games, there is a shipping box in the barn, so you can ship product fresh off the production, if you want to. The advantage to all this is that in many of the Moon games, time does not pass indoors, so you can save a lot of time in each day. This is helpful for making sure you can perform tasks which happen at particular times, such as meeting your beloved at their preferred spot by the lake at 1pm.
In addition, moving animals around in Moon games is quite a chore. It can involve several items, such as reigns or a bell. Usually, you have limited tool or bag slots, meaning you have to keep shuffling your tools back and forth between your bag and the tool box. That gets boring quickly, so they less you have to do that, the better.
Each usage of these items takes up some energy and takes up time if used outdoors. Just getting your animals in or out for the day can take hours. Often they get stuck, and it some games defiantly walk back inside when you just sent them out, sometimes they get stuck on thin air. Sometimes they can walk through fences – but only in one direction, sod’s law being what it is. Try to get them to walk back through the same fence towards safety, and of course they get stuck.
Moving animals on mass leads them to collide or become clumped as one, making it impossible to deal with them individually – that can mean you don’t get all your milk for the day. The animals will often stop for no reason when they are supposed to be walking, so you have to use those tools again. Many a time my character collapsed because I had to use the tools more time than I was expecting on low energy, frantically getting the beasts in for the night before coming rain. In some of the older games, too many animals outside lags the game terribly. All in all, a total mess.
Deal with animals at night.
There are many events that take place at specific times of day, including shops opening and festivals. Animals can be dealt with at any time. A major advantage of visiting them at night is that when they are asleep, they don’t move. If they are awake, chickens in particular tend to roam around and get under your feet. You can accidentally pick the wrong one up (picking them up once a day increases their heart rating, any more than that is unnecessary), feed them twice if hand feeding, hand-feed when you’re trying to fill the feed box, or accidentally givean egg to a chicken, to which they react with concern. Besides, it’s a waste of an egg.
You can’t wake animals up in A Wonderful Life without annoying them, but in other Moon games, dealing with them at night means they don’t move about. Provided you never went inside the barn earlier, they will all be in their default position by their feed boxes, meaning they don’t overlap with each other. You can put chickens where it’s convenient to you and go about your business. This will decrease your frustration level a lot. You can feed animals any time before 6AM the following morning, which is when the day switches over.
Do not fill the barn or coop.
In some Moon games, you can have about 12 cows and 8 chickens. Don’t. You will quickly get bored and annoyed. Think: all you’re doing is interacting with the animals for the sake of a satisfying routine. If it takes too long, it’s not fun. Even if it earns you more money, you have to wonder what the reasoning behind the endless collecting of money is; eventually you want to buy everything, but actually you want that process stagnated, so that the game continues to motivate you. Earn too much too fast and you have defeated the object of playing the game.
Where there is a specific reward in having a full barn, fill the barn for the sake of the reward, then empty it again afterwards if you’re going to keep playing. For example, in Magical Melody, you get a “note” for doing it – that’s a musical note, something you collect in order to unfreeze the petrified Harvest Goddess, which is pitched as the main aim of the game. In the original Moon, the reward for a full barn plus all other forms of completion – a wife, two kids, eating all the fruits of power, etc. – is the “best” ending. If you’re interested in that, bulk buy a load of cows and chickens in the run-up to the end of the game (three in-game years).
Get married as soon as possible.
Above, I touched upon the fact that if you buy everything in the game too soon, you defeat the object of the game. The temptation of a life sim is to start on that process as soon as possible. In the first Moon game with its three year time limit, the “best” ending does indeed rely on you being rich as well as everything else; in the others, you have all the time in the world to achieve this goal, and in some, achieving it renders no special reward.
So, you want to focus on getting married quickly because the process of building a family is time-consuming. If you’re a millionaire by Year 2 but unmarried, you’ll be going through the motions for the next three years waiting for your child to grow up. Get on with building your family quickly. In most of the Moon games, you can lavish your lover with gifts all day, everyday.
In Melody you can’t, they only appreciate one gift a day. Whichever way, find out your lover’s tastes by trial and error, and spend your days collecting whichever freely available, commonly-found gift they like the best. There’s always something; flowers, herbs, mushrooms, ores, gems – some weirdos even like branches and weeds.
Spend your days talking to villagers.
What makes a life sim enjoyable is the right balance of familiarity and freshness. I’ll admit to neglecting villagers on Moon games in favour of livestock, crops and money-making. Talking to villagers was the major draw of Animal Crossing games, which being set in real-time gave limited opportunities for money-making in any 12-hour period. In other words, it’s a relaxed, long-game experience. Moon can feel frantic if you focus on the wrong thing.
Talking to villagers usually develops their dialogue as they grow to like you. It can lead to receiving special items, many of which will make your farm life easier. And it will give you a stronger sense of being part of a world, not just an underpaid and dissatisfied vegetable picker for Morrisons. At night, you can do low-energy foraging, or fishing, both of which are hobby-like actions; low key and with the promise of something unexpected, such as a rare fish, rare mushroom, or ingredient for cooking. Crop growing, on the other hand, is always the same.
Do not grow more than two 3×3 squares of crops.
With all the structure in the world, you can overwork yourself by being too ambitious. Plant an entire field of crops and you’re obliged to pick them. Even if you make sure you only have to pick two patches a day, you still have to water them all every day. If you are playing a Moon game with upgradable tools, eventually you can water a 3×3 patch with one swish of the watering can; but as fun as that is, the novelty will wear off.
When you first start out laboriously watering each square, I wouldn’t recommend having more than one patch – except perhaps in summer in the games where you can grow corn to grind up for chicken feed. That’s a good trade off. A season’s worth of corn harvest can give you chicken feed for about five years.
In Friends of Mineral Town, you don’t have to do it all yourself. You can hire the Harvest Sprites to help you for the price of a few herbs now and then. The satisfaction of strategic micromanagement is a big part of FoMT for me.
They always took one day off, so you had to cycle them. They had to like you to work for you, hence the herby gifts. They had birthdays, and appreciated gifts more on those birthdays, making birthday gifts an economic use of supplies. They got individually more skilful with experience, so you could balance newbies with veterans. And, you had to quickly nab any crops you didn’t want to ship before they got round to them, because anything they harvested was automatically shipped. Using the Harvest minions made you rich, enough to eventually buy the bizarrely expensive mountain cottage.
In the other Moon games, you’ll get bored of planting crops. The fact that a strawberry is worth more than a potato will mean nothing to you if the month of summer is ruined by an abundance of strawberries you have to deal with, thinking they’ll be time to fish when it’s winter. It’s a miniature version of life we see playing out before us; putting work first, thinking the relaxing times will come soon, and perhaps they never will because actually there’s a lot of mining and fishing to do in winter.
Variety is the spice of life. To keep your day varied, you need to avoid the trap of planting as many crops as you can, buying as many animals as you can, making as much money as you can. I remember the immense satisfaction in Animal Crossing: Wild World of planting just one red turnip, and having to water it every (real life) day. It didn’t bring in the big bucks, but it was reliable, and a task you could treasure. Like real gardening, it was a game of patience and anticipation. Moon games can be to, but by our design, not the design of the developers.
You Must Insult The Ones You Love 