Welcome back! Are you ready to find out how to make the most of your farming life by making friends, cooking, and getting the best out of your farm? You're in the right place!
Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life — Beginner's Tips
Making Friends
In the original A Wonderful Life, making friends was one of the main ways of getting farm upgrades and equipment. In this version, as far as we can tell, that's not really the case any more.
Through friendship, you can get a Seed Maker from Daryl, Spice from Lou, and Takakura will introduce you to his friend Vinnie, but the characters won't offer you Strange and Weird tools any more. Tool upgrades are all done through Van.
Still, there are benefits to friendship, not least of which is marriage!
Good gifts
Everyone in town is pretty basic. They all tend to like flowers, and if they don't, they probably like fish, fossils, or cooked meals instead. They're not too fussy about specific flowers or fish, either — any will do.
More gifts
Some characters — namely, the marriage candidates — will accept multiple gifts in one day, if you want to speedrun a wedding. However, the gifts all need to be different types, so one Flower, one Cooked Meal, one Fossil/Ore, and so on. It's not hard to befriend people, so don't worry too much about it.
Diary peepin'
Each marriage candidate has a diary somewhere in either their bedroom or their workplace. Reading these diaries gives you an insight into how much they liiiiike you. You can use this to figure out whether their next Heart Event will trigger.
Heart Events
You don't need to see each character's Heart Events in order to marry them, but it makes for a nicer story. These special events are triggered by reaching a certain number of hearts with a character and then going somewhere specific at a specific time. We recommend looking up a guide for these — as far as we can tell, the requirements haven't changed.
Monetary gifts
The strange little forest man, Pui, will occasionally take donations. You'll find him on the bridge to Vesta's Farm in the mid-afternoon, sitting on a rug. Give him money when you can, and when you hit 2,000G in donations, something nice might happen!
Insistent gifts
A couple of characters in town will only take gifts if you speak to them twice while holding the gift, so don't give up!
Hurried gifts
Gary, the old man who lives with his wife Nina, will not accept gifts after the end of Year 1. If you want to befriend him, do it before then — he likes fish.
Requests
Make sure to visit the Bulletin Board at the entrance to town to pick up requests. These are usually for cooked meals, fish, or dairy products. Fulfilling these requests usually gets you higher quality seeds, fancy ingredients, and even new tools like the Plant Encyclopedia and the Alarm Clock, so they're well worth doing!
Cooking
You'll need to eat, but not a lot
There are now three bars that you need to keep full: Stamina, Energy, and Fullness. It's all a bit confusing, but they seem to add up to overall energy levels, which are what you need to do farming things. The bar in the top-left corner of the screen is your Stamina, but it will also indicate when you're low on Energy and Fullness.
Stamina is gained by eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, and visiting the faraway town (more on that later). You spend Stamina while using your farm tools, but it doesn't go down when you're fishing or running around.
Energy is gained through sleeping, and can be lost if you pass out or don't eat enough before bed.
Fullness is gained through eating, and slowly goes down. When it is low, you won't gain as much Energy or Stamina from sleeping.
You'll need to eat something every now and again to bring up your Fullness bar, but this is really only once every couple of days. Food with more ingredients fills the bar faster.
...But cook a lot anyway
Later cooking recipes, like Hors D'Oeuvres, Desserts, and Entrees, require a higher cooking skill. You can get this skill by cooking lots of recipes, and the fastest way to do that is to grow a TON of Turnips, and turn them into Pickles. It'll tell you that you feel more confident in the kitchen, and that's how you know you've unlocked a new level of recipes!
...And make sure to snoop
Recipes can be found in a few ways, but many of them are gained by talking to people, and snooping around. There are bits of recipe everywhere: stuck to fridges, hidden in plant pots, taped to paintings. Make sure to be thorough!
Talk to the fairies
Head to the goddess pond every day and eat one of the "weird" red mushrooms to gain access to the Harvest Sprites that live in the tree. They'll give you one recipe a day. It seems like the recipes might be limited to each chapter, so even after they say they have no more recipes, check back when you're in the next chapter for more!
Advanced Tips
Once you're some way into the game, and you've figured out all of the above... what do you do next? You check out our Advanced Tips, obviously!
Befriend Vinnie
In Year 2 (which is also Chapter 2) Takakura will eventually introduce you to his weird friend, Audrey 2 Vinnie, a talking plant who can combine plants to create hybrids. We can't emphasise this enough: This is how you make the most money, so you'll want to befriend Vinnie ASAP.
Luckily, it's not hard. Just talk to him over and over and over and over again, even on the same day. Eventually, he'll ask what he can do for you, and you'll be able to combine crops. Yay!
Visit town
Later in the game, you'll want to visit town to pass the time. This passage to the side of Vesta's Farm used to be how you got to Mineral Town when you linked the GameCube version up to the GBA game, but now it's just a way to skip ahead six hours.
Why would you want to do that? Well, in the early game, you won't, because there's too much to do. But in the late game, when you make most of your money from crops and animal products, you might sometimes want to water all your plants, skip ahead, and then do the second water instead of waiting around all day.
Buy the Pond
The Pond gets you Ducks. Just make sure you have two spaces in your Coop, buy the Pond, and wait.
Ducks!!!
Get the Big Field
You may have to befriend Takakura for this, but you should anyway. Talk to him in Year 2 or 3 once you've made some hybrid crops, and eventually, he'll recommend that you get a bigger field. Go to the Orders book next to the shipping bin and pay 60,000G for this extremely long field. It's worth every penny!
Trees vs. Crops
Generally, we'd recommend setting up your farm the way we did: Trees in the two small fields, and crops in the big one (with a Fertilizer Spreader, if you have the cash). Not only is it easier to water the big field with the Golden Watering Can, but it's also the most fertile, meaning that a handful of your crops will be bumped up to the next quality rank with no effort on your part. Nice!
And that's all there is to it! Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life might be a bit of an obtuse, old-fashioned game, but we hope these tips can help you enjoy it as much as we have.
If you have any of your own tips or anything you would like to know more about, let us know in the comments below!
Comments 14
Nice tips! Thanks
This guide went under my radar, it's very helpful. I ordered birdseed for rainy days (though looks like I didn't need to according to this guide) but where the heck is it? It's not in my inventory, and I never even got notified that it had arrived.
@Nintendencies it's in the blue box by your front door!!
@KateGray
I found it finally last night (well my partner did) xD but thankyou!
That was totally me being an idiot, I is big dumdum.
But I did think the box was just for achievements with the wonder-fuls at the start so maybe a li'l bit the games fault... derp.
stupid question here. HOW DO YOU SAVE. I don't want to sleep and waste a day? but i don't get the option to "save and sleep"? Am I missing something? SOS
First of all - THANK YOU! I'm very excited to try these interesting tips and tricks! And where can I find the Advanced Tips? Do you have the link?
@amanda12994 press the + button and select "write in journal". it's very annoying that it doesn't tell you this is how you save the game!
@Foxyroex Go to page two, there's a little button at the bottom of the page!
Lol I had the gamefaqs guide printed out for the original. I think I used that guide more than any other guide I've ever used outside of a fighter or old Disgaea games.
Thank's for posting these tips, my only compliant is that each season is only 10 days. Pioneers of Olive Town each season was roughly 28-30 days. 10 days hardly seems long enough to grow crops that are season specific.
Granted I only had the original version but there seems to be a lot of interesting changes to the gameplay loop. Will take some of these tips into account.
Tip: befriend Daryl (scientist guy) for a free Seed Maker.
"How To Make Money, Friends, And More" - could you make the same guide for real life?
It's been 6 or 7 days since I bought the pond. Will the ducks ever show?
so, about that wild animal appearance, can someone explain more about them and which place they indicate a higher luck is? i know a small chihuahua dog infront of dig site is good indicator for mining
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