Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life Beginner Tips & Tricks - How To Make Money, Friends, And More

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!