Violentvixen
(She/Her)
I was reminded of this older article today about... well, lots of stuff, poverty, capitalism, how you portray yourself to others. It's a very good article and I recommend it.
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Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons/Stardew Valley/Etc Speed Farming Thread
- Thread starter Pajaro Pete
- Start date
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- Tags
- farm simulation rpg
I recently played through all of Sun Haven.
Clearly inspired by the success of Stardew Valley, this is a farming sim with heavy rpg elements and Zeldalike combat. You move to the new town (a medieval fantasy pastiche) and start your new job, which defaults to farmer but you can also start as a crafter, rancher, warrior, etc. rather than learning those skills as you go. You do farm chores, explore the surrounding dangerous areas, meet all the townsfolk and run errands for them; you know, the usual.
Interestingly, unlike Stardew, you don’t have an energy meter, so you can chop trees all day. Instead, you have a mana meter that you use on various spells you unlock (Air Skip to move faster and Teleport are the most valuable in my opinion, but the rain spell to water all your crops or the bubble spell for easy fishing are also great. I barely used the combat magic!) Also, the experience system is much more explicit and most quests give you several options for bonus experience rewards. The quest system is great and the maps show you where people are, including marks for available and open quests. You can save mid-day (you always resume at your farm). Characters have daily dialogue trees that you can use to gain hearts with them instead of always needing to feed them gifts (though that’s an option, too). All crafting/cooking is done through stations, but they’re all queue-able so you can stack up a dozen recipes and just come back the next day. You get both swords ands crossbows for combat, and the crossbow combat is really easy and the best way to deal with most things.
There are SO MANY things in this game. So many plants, so many recipes, so many craftable items and different crafting stations you need to build them on, so many people and quests and areas. The museum is loaded with bundles of crops, fish, mineables, collectables, and craftables…but plenty of items never appear in bundles at all! Plus, one of the ways you permanently increase stats is by eating, so every time you pick an apple you need to decide whether to eat it, gift it, sell it, juice it, bake it, etc. Thankfully, for foods it tells you how many you’ve eaten, which made my plan to eat at least one of everything for the stat gains (they decrease exponentially with each additional food of the same type) much easier. I would have loved a quick view of what you still need for the museum/endgame bundles, but instead I just took notes.
There’s a core set of crops you can grow in every season (including wheat, corn, rice, tomatoes, etc.) that are the ones you need for the majority of cooking and quests. There are also fish available in every season that are mostly the ones you need for other purposes. Basically, except for museum completion (which is unnecessary and doesn’t even have a lot of achievements attached to it), there doesn’t seem to be anything locked to a specific season. Which is good!
I started as a farmer and didn’t really start into fishing until the late summer, which was part of why my museum collection of fish was incomplete (I ended up missing three summer fish and a trinket that I never pulled up). The mining setup never really won me: You need to collect “rusty keys” in each area to temporarily open gates, but if you craft metal keys (copper in the first area, iron in the second, etc) you can permanently unlock the gates and go straight to deeper mines. The elven and monster mines have their own gimmicks, but at the end of the day mining was the path that interested me the least and was the least complete of my museum collections. Actually, no: Ranching was the activity that interested me the least, and I never did any of it. No barn, no farm animals on any of the three farms. I bought all the milk, eggs, and meat I needed for cooking. I also didn’t go far into the smithing tree (a branch of mining) because equipment I was able to get was more than sufficient (leaf armor -> feather armor using quest rewards -> the phantom set from the final bundles). I generally found that stat bonuses from food and quest rewards were much more beneficial than scraping out equipment upgrades.
There is a small shrine to the Corn God behind the Sun Haven café that gives the “Corn for the Corn God” quest, which I highly recommend doing, because for 50 corn (easy to grow in any season) you get the Corn Sword, which is better than any sword you can buy and lasted me happily through the end of the game.
In the endgame, you approach the Moon Dragon and are given the option of trying to appease him by filling seven of the nine bundle altars in his chamber. This was a great capstone to this style of game because it gave you the chance to show off everything you’ve achieved (and nothing was time-locked or super-rare; the crops bundle was all any-season crops and the rarest items were fish that had low appearance chances). Or, alternately, you could ignore that and just fight him and have a final boss instead.
I found it really interesting the percentage completion rates on some of the achievements: More players apparently reached level 50 in combat and reached the fifth mine level than made it to the first summer season, for instance.
I didn’t use them, but I appreciated that the game included toggles for things like the length of days, monster attacks on your farm, or character invincibility. Customization options for gameplay so you can experience this game the way you want to are always great. Oh, and every character is default bisexual, so you can just date whomever. There are apparently mods for things like walking speed, museum tracking, and sprinklers; I didn’t feel they were necessary but I understand how people would appreciate them.
The only noteworthy issue is that there were some graphical and plot glitches. Nothing gamebreaking, just places where sprites didn’t load properly (weeds on the monster farm were a big offender) or animations were janky. I did the bundles for the Moon Dragon, but I got the cutscene as if I’d beaten him in combat…and then immediate after the cutscene like I appeased him. Everything continued just fine after, but it was weird.
I’ll admit I’m also annoyed that you can’t get 100% achievements without playing the game several times: There are several plot achievements that you can only unlock one (of two) in a playthrough, several that unlock when you choose a character type (so you need to restart five times to get them all), and a bunch that require constantly getting divorced and remarrying to get max hearts on romanceable characters. I got a respectable 58% achievement completion and opted to stop there, though I could have romanced some more characters and grinded a few more. I also left the museum only mostly-complete, mostly because the remaining items were all mining or ranching-based.
Overall: If you want more Stardew Valley-like experience, this delivers it solidly.
Clearly inspired by the success of Stardew Valley, this is a farming sim with heavy rpg elements and Zeldalike combat. You move to the new town (a medieval fantasy pastiche) and start your new job, which defaults to farmer but you can also start as a crafter, rancher, warrior, etc. rather than learning those skills as you go. You do farm chores, explore the surrounding dangerous areas, meet all the townsfolk and run errands for them; you know, the usual.
Interestingly, unlike Stardew, you don’t have an energy meter, so you can chop trees all day. Instead, you have a mana meter that you use on various spells you unlock (Air Skip to move faster and Teleport are the most valuable in my opinion, but the rain spell to water all your crops or the bubble spell for easy fishing are also great. I barely used the combat magic!) Also, the experience system is much more explicit and most quests give you several options for bonus experience rewards. The quest system is great and the maps show you where people are, including marks for available and open quests. You can save mid-day (you always resume at your farm). Characters have daily dialogue trees that you can use to gain hearts with them instead of always needing to feed them gifts (though that’s an option, too). All crafting/cooking is done through stations, but they’re all queue-able so you can stack up a dozen recipes and just come back the next day. You get both swords ands crossbows for combat, and the crossbow combat is really easy and the best way to deal with most things.
There are SO MANY things in this game. So many plants, so many recipes, so many craftable items and different crafting stations you need to build them on, so many people and quests and areas. The museum is loaded with bundles of crops, fish, mineables, collectables, and craftables…but plenty of items never appear in bundles at all! Plus, one of the ways you permanently increase stats is by eating, so every time you pick an apple you need to decide whether to eat it, gift it, sell it, juice it, bake it, etc. Thankfully, for foods it tells you how many you’ve eaten, which made my plan to eat at least one of everything for the stat gains (they decrease exponentially with each additional food of the same type) much easier. I would have loved a quick view of what you still need for the museum/endgame bundles, but instead I just took notes.
There’s a core set of crops you can grow in every season (including wheat, corn, rice, tomatoes, etc.) that are the ones you need for the majority of cooking and quests. There are also fish available in every season that are mostly the ones you need for other purposes. Basically, except for museum completion (which is unnecessary and doesn’t even have a lot of achievements attached to it), there doesn’t seem to be anything locked to a specific season. Which is good!
I started as a farmer and didn’t really start into fishing until the late summer, which was part of why my museum collection of fish was incomplete (I ended up missing three summer fish and a trinket that I never pulled up). The mining setup never really won me: You need to collect “rusty keys” in each area to temporarily open gates, but if you craft metal keys (copper in the first area, iron in the second, etc) you can permanently unlock the gates and go straight to deeper mines. The elven and monster mines have their own gimmicks, but at the end of the day mining was the path that interested me the least and was the least complete of my museum collections. Actually, no: Ranching was the activity that interested me the least, and I never did any of it. No barn, no farm animals on any of the three farms. I bought all the milk, eggs, and meat I needed for cooking. I also didn’t go far into the smithing tree (a branch of mining) because equipment I was able to get was more than sufficient (leaf armor -> feather armor using quest rewards -> the phantom set from the final bundles). I generally found that stat bonuses from food and quest rewards were much more beneficial than scraping out equipment upgrades.
There is a small shrine to the Corn God behind the Sun Haven café that gives the “Corn for the Corn God” quest, which I highly recommend doing, because for 50 corn (easy to grow in any season) you get the Corn Sword, which is better than any sword you can buy and lasted me happily through the end of the game.
In the endgame, you approach the Moon Dragon and are given the option of trying to appease him by filling seven of the nine bundle altars in his chamber. This was a great capstone to this style of game because it gave you the chance to show off everything you’ve achieved (and nothing was time-locked or super-rare; the crops bundle was all any-season crops and the rarest items were fish that had low appearance chances). Or, alternately, you could ignore that and just fight him and have a final boss instead.
I found it really interesting the percentage completion rates on some of the achievements: More players apparently reached level 50 in combat and reached the fifth mine level than made it to the first summer season, for instance.
I didn’t use them, but I appreciated that the game included toggles for things like the length of days, monster attacks on your farm, or character invincibility. Customization options for gameplay so you can experience this game the way you want to are always great. Oh, and every character is default bisexual, so you can just date whomever. There are apparently mods for things like walking speed, museum tracking, and sprinklers; I didn’t feel they were necessary but I understand how people would appreciate them.
The only noteworthy issue is that there were some graphical and plot glitches. Nothing gamebreaking, just places where sprites didn’t load properly (weeds on the monster farm were a big offender) or animations were janky. I did the bundles for the Moon Dragon, but I got the cutscene as if I’d beaten him in combat…and then immediate after the cutscene like I appeased him. Everything continued just fine after, but it was weird.
I’ll admit I’m also annoyed that you can’t get 100% achievements without playing the game several times: There are several plot achievements that you can only unlock one (of two) in a playthrough, several that unlock when you choose a character type (so you need to restart five times to get them all), and a bunch that require constantly getting divorced and remarrying to get max hearts on romanceable characters. I got a respectable 58% achievement completion and opted to stop there, though I could have romanced some more characters and grinded a few more. I also left the museum only mostly-complete, mostly because the remaining items were all mining or ranching-based.
Overall: If you want more Stardew Valley-like experience, this delivers it solidly.
I've had this in my 'to-play' pile for awhile. Thanks for the review!
Roots of Pacha
Another Stardew Valley-like, but in this one you’re playing as a member of a primitive tribe who were led by the spirits to the new land and must build their civilization there. Find wild seeds and wild animals and domesticate them as your tribe invents the trappings of civilization for you to use.
Instead of money, the game tracks your contribution and the tribe’s overall growth (which will grow steadily even if you do nothing), and your contribution level also functions as a “bank account” to get things from NPCs. (Unless you really like decorative pots and extra outfits, you’re going to end up swimming in mostly-useless cash really quickly.) The fetch quests are initiated by NPCs having “ideas”, so they’ll ask for ingredients and reward you with the next technological innovation. The Community Center equivalent is the Pyramid, where you and the tribe unlock achievements to advance. It feels like there’s much less actual freedom in the order you do things than some other games of this style—you’re beholding to the tribe’s overall advancement and idea generation. (And to your progress in the caves, where totem spirits gate the metal upgrades.) A lot of things are double-unlock or predicated on earlier ideas.
Interestingly, you start off doing almost every task with a sharpened rock (chopping, mining, clearing, digging, fishing) but eventually get specialized tools that are better at each job. Also interestingly, there’s no combat or hostile creatures at all: Animals ignore you unless you tame them with your flute. You can send a tamed animal to be butchered (a toggleable option—you can just release them instead) but otherwise meat is acquired via traps you set on the Savanna that have meat in them the next day—harm to animals is completely abstracted.
Fishing is completely different from most games of this type: You’re spear-fishing rather than line-fishing. You stand in the water and watch for fish and then track them until the meter fills up and you can stab them. Fish can then be dried, smoked, fermented or pickled for increasing rewards. Pickling is only worthwhile for the really expensive rare fish, because you need to ferment grain or fruit juice into beer or wine and then turn that into vinegar as a second ingredient for pickling. Cooked food is pretty much only for using yourself—it doesn’t add value and sometimes even loses value versus the raw ingredients, but it’s great for refilling your stamina. The game doesn’t have any stamina increases except from one of the accessories you can wear, so getting through the mines particularly requires packing snacks.
Automation for your farm is done in an amusing classic way: One of the last ideas you unlock is a school, and you get “learning stations” for your farm. If you pay for materials to stock them, the children of the village will come and pet your animals and water your crops for you. There’s also a water wheel that unlocks late in the game that lets you automate juicing, grinding or spinning; which your character otherwise has to stand at a station and do manually.
Like many games in this genre, all of the romanceable characters are functionally bisexual and your character’s gender is irrelevant. Babies are made via magic statue regardless of the parents’ genders. Most interesting is that there a monogamy toggle—you can choose whether forming a “union” with one character stops you from dating any of the others. Regardless, unlike Sun Haven, none of the achievements are gated behind romancing multiple characters, so it’s entirely your choice. (You actually only need three good friends—one in each tribe—to unlock all of the friendship achievements.)
On that topic, the achievements are a mixed bag. You can hit a lot of them early and playing through the “main plot” (fully raising the pyramid and doing all the cave challenges) gets you about two-thirds of them, but then the rest are completionist and have a few annoying gates. You can’t grow every plant, get plant knowledge to 5 for every plant, or cook every dish until you unlock Teff, which requires randomly getting alfalfa as a trade option and offering it to the Horse totem to unlock a secret area...and then only grows in summer. This is despite the fact that you can grow any season’s plants in the Jungle farm once it unlocks—you can’t acquire Teff seeds in any other season. I was pretty sure from the start I wasn’t going to extensively breed animals to get every achievement, but the fact that I would need to push through another half-year just for that one unlock for achievements I otherwise had 99% complete was really frustrating.
As of this writing we’re still waiting on the 1.3 update, which will apparently allow you to visit the homes of the other two tribes and add some more features. So perhaps I’ll let this be “done” until that drops, and then I’ll pick the game back up to collect Teff and do the bonus content at the same time.
Overall: This was familiar gameplay with some cute quirks; not perfect but clever enough to be a little different. If you want more Stardew Valley, it’s another fun option.
Another Stardew Valley-like, but in this one you’re playing as a member of a primitive tribe who were led by the spirits to the new land and must build their civilization there. Find wild seeds and wild animals and domesticate them as your tribe invents the trappings of civilization for you to use.
Instead of money, the game tracks your contribution and the tribe’s overall growth (which will grow steadily even if you do nothing), and your contribution level also functions as a “bank account” to get things from NPCs. (Unless you really like decorative pots and extra outfits, you’re going to end up swimming in mostly-useless cash really quickly.) The fetch quests are initiated by NPCs having “ideas”, so they’ll ask for ingredients and reward you with the next technological innovation. The Community Center equivalent is the Pyramid, where you and the tribe unlock achievements to advance. It feels like there’s much less actual freedom in the order you do things than some other games of this style—you’re beholding to the tribe’s overall advancement and idea generation. (And to your progress in the caves, where totem spirits gate the metal upgrades.) A lot of things are double-unlock or predicated on earlier ideas.
Interestingly, you start off doing almost every task with a sharpened rock (chopping, mining, clearing, digging, fishing) but eventually get specialized tools that are better at each job. Also interestingly, there’s no combat or hostile creatures at all: Animals ignore you unless you tame them with your flute. You can send a tamed animal to be butchered (a toggleable option—you can just release them instead) but otherwise meat is acquired via traps you set on the Savanna that have meat in them the next day—harm to animals is completely abstracted.
Fishing is completely different from most games of this type: You’re spear-fishing rather than line-fishing. You stand in the water and watch for fish and then track them until the meter fills up and you can stab them. Fish can then be dried, smoked, fermented or pickled for increasing rewards. Pickling is only worthwhile for the really expensive rare fish, because you need to ferment grain or fruit juice into beer or wine and then turn that into vinegar as a second ingredient for pickling. Cooked food is pretty much only for using yourself—it doesn’t add value and sometimes even loses value versus the raw ingredients, but it’s great for refilling your stamina. The game doesn’t have any stamina increases except from one of the accessories you can wear, so getting through the mines particularly requires packing snacks.
Automation for your farm is done in an amusing classic way: One of the last ideas you unlock is a school, and you get “learning stations” for your farm. If you pay for materials to stock them, the children of the village will come and pet your animals and water your crops for you. There’s also a water wheel that unlocks late in the game that lets you automate juicing, grinding or spinning; which your character otherwise has to stand at a station and do manually.
Like many games in this genre, all of the romanceable characters are functionally bisexual and your character’s gender is irrelevant. Babies are made via magic statue regardless of the parents’ genders. Most interesting is that there a monogamy toggle—you can choose whether forming a “union” with one character stops you from dating any of the others. Regardless, unlike Sun Haven, none of the achievements are gated behind romancing multiple characters, so it’s entirely your choice. (You actually only need three good friends—one in each tribe—to unlock all of the friendship achievements.)
On that topic, the achievements are a mixed bag. You can hit a lot of them early and playing through the “main plot” (fully raising the pyramid and doing all the cave challenges) gets you about two-thirds of them, but then the rest are completionist and have a few annoying gates. You can’t grow every plant, get plant knowledge to 5 for every plant, or cook every dish until you unlock Teff, which requires randomly getting alfalfa as a trade option and offering it to the Horse totem to unlock a secret area...and then only grows in summer. This is despite the fact that you can grow any season’s plants in the Jungle farm once it unlocks—you can’t acquire Teff seeds in any other season. I was pretty sure from the start I wasn’t going to extensively breed animals to get every achievement, but the fact that I would need to push through another half-year just for that one unlock for achievements I otherwise had 99% complete was really frustrating.
As of this writing we’re still waiting on the 1.3 update, which will apparently allow you to visit the homes of the other two tribes and add some more features. So perhaps I’ll let this be “done” until that drops, and then I’ll pick the game back up to collect Teff and do the bonus content at the same time.
Overall: This was familiar gameplay with some cute quirks; not perfect but clever enough to be a little different. If you want more Stardew Valley, it’s another fun option.
Stardew Valley: The Board Game
I was very excited when I walked into a con game room and saw the Stardew Valley board game on the table, because I love Stardew Valley and thought this had some real potential.
When we started reading the instructions Beowife started getting concerned, because there are So. Many. Systems in this game; and plenty of them aren’t even explained in the main rulebook. There are more than a dozen different types of tokens and also a dozen different decks of cards. There’s a bag of fishing tokens and a bag of artifact tokens; there a system for fishing and a system for crab pots and a different system with its own deck for the mines and a farming system and a foraging system and a friendship system and tools you can upgrade and a whole setup for constructing buildings and buying animals. You have TEN goals, four from the Grandpa deck and then six Community Center bundles (which are hidden at the start and need to be revealed with friendship points). Oh, and there are four different sets of the produce and forage tiles (for each season) and four season decks with optional festival cards for replay value. They seriously tried to cram everything from the game into this and re-create the feeling of playing Stardew Valley multiplayer.
Besides the fact there were too many systems, too many of the rules for those systems were under-explained. We had to look up online how the hoe worked. We never figured out what the Spouse token was for. There were lots of items cards but we never actually got to the point where we got any of them; but we did end up carrying around fishing trash because it wasn’t clear if it ever had a purpose.
The game is for 1-4 players (you can play it solo or cooperatively), and it’s labeled as “45 minutes per player” as the play time which, given that it took us 90 minutes to get through setup and one season (with 4 players), seems optimistic. But even with the change of seasons and the various profession bonuses and upgraded tools, the game loop isn’t actually interesting enough to support 4-6 hours of gameplay, much less repeat plays.
I thought it was interesting to compare this against Minecraft Builders & Biomes, which was also a board game adaptation of a very open-ended video game with a big variety of systems, but that works incredibly well as a game. And I think the reason is because they picked a small number of mechanisms to mimic and built a fun game loop out of those, rather than trying to come up with an equivalent of every system in the video game.
Overall: I think Beowife had much more fun complaining about the game (and was clearly very entertaining to the two other players as she did it) than she did with any aspect of actually playing. It’s just too overloaded with systems and randomness without creating a consistent and entertaining game loop. I’m glad we tried it, both for the experience and because now we know not to buy it.
I was very excited when I walked into a con game room and saw the Stardew Valley board game on the table, because I love Stardew Valley and thought this had some real potential.
When we started reading the instructions Beowife started getting concerned, because there are So. Many. Systems in this game; and plenty of them aren’t even explained in the main rulebook. There are more than a dozen different types of tokens and also a dozen different decks of cards. There’s a bag of fishing tokens and a bag of artifact tokens; there a system for fishing and a system for crab pots and a different system with its own deck for the mines and a farming system and a foraging system and a friendship system and tools you can upgrade and a whole setup for constructing buildings and buying animals. You have TEN goals, four from the Grandpa deck and then six Community Center bundles (which are hidden at the start and need to be revealed with friendship points). Oh, and there are four different sets of the produce and forage tiles (for each season) and four season decks with optional festival cards for replay value. They seriously tried to cram everything from the game into this and re-create the feeling of playing Stardew Valley multiplayer.
Besides the fact there were too many systems, too many of the rules for those systems were under-explained. We had to look up online how the hoe worked. We never figured out what the Spouse token was for. There were lots of items cards but we never actually got to the point where we got any of them; but we did end up carrying around fishing trash because it wasn’t clear if it ever had a purpose.
The game is for 1-4 players (you can play it solo or cooperatively), and it’s labeled as “45 minutes per player” as the play time which, given that it took us 90 minutes to get through setup and one season (with 4 players), seems optimistic. But even with the change of seasons and the various profession bonuses and upgraded tools, the game loop isn’t actually interesting enough to support 4-6 hours of gameplay, much less repeat plays.
I thought it was interesting to compare this against Minecraft Builders & Biomes, which was also a board game adaptation of a very open-ended video game with a big variety of systems, but that works incredibly well as a game. And I think the reason is because they picked a small number of mechanisms to mimic and built a fun game loop out of those, rather than trying to come up with an equivalent of every system in the video game.
Overall: I think Beowife had much more fun complaining about the game (and was clearly very entertaining to the two other players as she did it) than she did with any aspect of actually playing. It’s just too overloaded with systems and randomness without creating a consistent and entertaining game loop. I’m glad we tried it, both for the experience and because now we know not to buy it.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
lol nope
In seriousness thank you for the writeup, I was curious what this game was like. And agreed, getting to try a game for free and deciding you don't like it is a good outcome sometimes!
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
Fowers, who make some really good board games, have branched out into cozy gaming. On first blush the aesthetic feels a little too... same as the others. Except there are some decent (and in some cases thirsty) character design and also IT'S PINBALL!
Fields of Mistria
The town of Mistria was hit by an earthquake and they need more hands and more income to get it fixed. How do you lure in asucker new resident to help? Offer them the nearby crappy overgrown farm and a chance at adventurous living, of course. Maybe the local dragon god will bless them with magic powers while they’re busy gathering forage and plying your population with gifts.
Another Stardew Valley-like, and another one still in development (Early Access, even!), so the final release version may be tweaked from my experience and will most likely have more content. (I played v0.13.3 in April 2025.) It has a relatively slow start, with the tutorials for the various things spread out over the first week.
A particularly nice quality-of-life addition: Stores (and the museum) are always open. If there’s no-one there, you still interact with the signboard on the desk and (presumably) make your purchases on the honor system. You still need to chase down people to solve quests, but you never have to worry about whether someone will be manning the carpenter’s shop so you can buy a coop. The other really nice quality-of-life addition I haven’t seen elsewhere is that crafting stations will automatically draw from any chest you haven’t locked, so you don’t have to carry around most of the things you want to build or cook with.
Notably, it adds bug-catching to the activities and list of things for the museum, though I found that to be more of an ad-hoc activity (if you see a bug, catch it) because they appear everywhere randomly but infrequently, and none of them are particularly worth the money to save and ship after the first few days. The museum is home to the bundles; each one is five related things (spring crops, fall bugs, etc) and each has a prize for 100%. You also need to assemble a bundle every 20 floors in the mines using items found in the previous floors.
Nicely, while there are versions of the tools and five armor pieces for every type of metal (copper, iron, silver, gold), you have the option to make or buy them. If you make them you acquire Blacksmith experience and can unlock perks on them; but you can also just dump a bunch of cash to get them all the day they’re available. Everything is in the quest system (including “heart” events with villagers) and nothing is missable—quests never expire and stay on the board until you take them. Big story quests usually involve rebuilding or remodeling something in the town. Annoyingly, most of those quests involve contributing large amounts of wood and stone, and while you’ll load up on stone in the mines, wood involves the tedious process of chopping trees for only 5 wood each. (At least the trees everywhere except your farm regenerate each day. A full day of clear-cutting the town environs nets you 200+ wood, and you can do it again the next day. Your farm, on the other hand, generates a LOT of debris and I occasionally had to dedicate whole days to keeping it under control.)
You can’t get the level 3 backpack until you remodel the general store; I was hitting the inventory cap a LOT before that. Similarly, you get endurance potions for reaching certain renown levels in the town (which permanently increase your endurance meter), but you’ll still be eating a lot of snacks, especially if you’re fishing. Fishing eats up the meter shockingly fast. I made a lot of trail mix (tons of wild berries and water chestnuts in spring) and coconut milk (12 coconuts on the beach every three days in summer) which kept me in decent shape through fall and helped boost my cooking skill—there are a lot of recipes you can’t even try until you boost your skill level. On the other hand, I sold virtually all of the food the villagers gifted me because the sell prices were really high compared to the forage I was collecting.
Like Sun Haven, there’s magic you can learn, including a full-heal spell, a rainfall spell (no sprinklers!), an instant-growth spell, and a flame spell that unlocks several areas. (In practice, magic regenerates very slowly and mana crystals are hard to come by, so unless something changes you’re not going to be using spells much. I certainly didn’t.)
The game doesn’t really want you doing crafting at home; it wants you to go into town. You can buy a crafting bench (to make furniture and fences) and “home kitchens” (which can only cook dishes up to a certain level), but you need to go to the town and use the Inn’s kitchen for high-level recipes, the anvil to make metal bars and blacksmith equipment, and the mill to process grain and make cheese and mayo. (You’re definitely not making mayo or wine for the cash in this game!) Also, most crafting takes time, so the clock does a fast-forward while you’re doing the processing animation. In practice, this means that you can make “artisan goods” for use or gifting but it’s not worth the time for money-making purposes.
Like Roots of Pacha, they have big dreams for an animal breeding mechanic—you can get either gender of animal (males give feathers and horns, females give eggs and milk) and if you give two of them special biscuits they’ll mate and the offspring will usually be an odd color. In practice, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to doing this besides thoroughness. (Unlike Roots of Pacha, there’s no system for turning animals into meat. Like Stardew Valley, Mistria is a pescatarian town.)
Plot- and character-wise there’s nothing really surprising here: There’s a buff blacksmith and his taciturn brother; there’s the hardworking farmer girl and the sexy witch lady; there are several second-generation villagers looking to get out of their parents’ shadows and make names at their chosen professions; there’s a trio of mischievous kids; there are several cranky but helpful old people. I did think the “Friday Night at the Inn” events were very cute, where the whole town gathers and there are several different events (including one table of an ongoing ttrpg adventure) that you can watch unfold over time.
Overall: As noted above, this version (the March 2025 update) is only version 0.13.3, which I’m guessing means there’s a lot of content they hope to add before calling it complete. Hell, by the time it’s “finished” my current save file might no longer be valid. I got to the lowest available part of the mines, got through all of the available town story quests, and did a full year (which meant I filled most of the museum). That’s probably enough to call this version “completed” until the next big update rolls around. This is cute and has a lot of potential, and I suspect a few of the bits I was most annoyed by (needing to collect So. Much. Wood. For one) will end up with workarounds eventually; along with plenty of additional quests and storyline. There’s certainly 30 hours of entertainment in the current version.
The town of Mistria was hit by an earthquake and they need more hands and more income to get it fixed. How do you lure in a
Another Stardew Valley-like, and another one still in development (Early Access, even!), so the final release version may be tweaked from my experience and will most likely have more content. (I played v0.13.3 in April 2025.) It has a relatively slow start, with the tutorials for the various things spread out over the first week.
A particularly nice quality-of-life addition: Stores (and the museum) are always open. If there’s no-one there, you still interact with the signboard on the desk and (presumably) make your purchases on the honor system. You still need to chase down people to solve quests, but you never have to worry about whether someone will be manning the carpenter’s shop so you can buy a coop. The other really nice quality-of-life addition I haven’t seen elsewhere is that crafting stations will automatically draw from any chest you haven’t locked, so you don’t have to carry around most of the things you want to build or cook with.
Notably, it adds bug-catching to the activities and list of things for the museum, though I found that to be more of an ad-hoc activity (if you see a bug, catch it) because they appear everywhere randomly but infrequently, and none of them are particularly worth the money to save and ship after the first few days. The museum is home to the bundles; each one is five related things (spring crops, fall bugs, etc) and each has a prize for 100%. You also need to assemble a bundle every 20 floors in the mines using items found in the previous floors.
Nicely, while there are versions of the tools and five armor pieces for every type of metal (copper, iron, silver, gold), you have the option to make or buy them. If you make them you acquire Blacksmith experience and can unlock perks on them; but you can also just dump a bunch of cash to get them all the day they’re available. Everything is in the quest system (including “heart” events with villagers) and nothing is missable—quests never expire and stay on the board until you take them. Big story quests usually involve rebuilding or remodeling something in the town. Annoyingly, most of those quests involve contributing large amounts of wood and stone, and while you’ll load up on stone in the mines, wood involves the tedious process of chopping trees for only 5 wood each. (At least the trees everywhere except your farm regenerate each day. A full day of clear-cutting the town environs nets you 200+ wood, and you can do it again the next day. Your farm, on the other hand, generates a LOT of debris and I occasionally had to dedicate whole days to keeping it under control.)
You can’t get the level 3 backpack until you remodel the general store; I was hitting the inventory cap a LOT before that. Similarly, you get endurance potions for reaching certain renown levels in the town (which permanently increase your endurance meter), but you’ll still be eating a lot of snacks, especially if you’re fishing. Fishing eats up the meter shockingly fast. I made a lot of trail mix (tons of wild berries and water chestnuts in spring) and coconut milk (12 coconuts on the beach every three days in summer) which kept me in decent shape through fall and helped boost my cooking skill—there are a lot of recipes you can’t even try until you boost your skill level. On the other hand, I sold virtually all of the food the villagers gifted me because the sell prices were really high compared to the forage I was collecting.
Like Sun Haven, there’s magic you can learn, including a full-heal spell, a rainfall spell (no sprinklers!), an instant-growth spell, and a flame spell that unlocks several areas. (In practice, magic regenerates very slowly and mana crystals are hard to come by, so unless something changes you’re not going to be using spells much. I certainly didn’t.)
The game doesn’t really want you doing crafting at home; it wants you to go into town. You can buy a crafting bench (to make furniture and fences) and “home kitchens” (which can only cook dishes up to a certain level), but you need to go to the town and use the Inn’s kitchen for high-level recipes, the anvil to make metal bars and blacksmith equipment, and the mill to process grain and make cheese and mayo. (You’re definitely not making mayo or wine for the cash in this game!) Also, most crafting takes time, so the clock does a fast-forward while you’re doing the processing animation. In practice, this means that you can make “artisan goods” for use or gifting but it’s not worth the time for money-making purposes.
Like Roots of Pacha, they have big dreams for an animal breeding mechanic—you can get either gender of animal (males give feathers and horns, females give eggs and milk) and if you give two of them special biscuits they’ll mate and the offspring will usually be an odd color. In practice, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to doing this besides thoroughness. (Unlike Roots of Pacha, there’s no system for turning animals into meat. Like Stardew Valley, Mistria is a pescatarian town.)
Plot- and character-wise there’s nothing really surprising here: There’s a buff blacksmith and his taciturn brother; there’s the hardworking farmer girl and the sexy witch lady; there are several second-generation villagers looking to get out of their parents’ shadows and make names at their chosen professions; there’s a trio of mischievous kids; there are several cranky but helpful old people. I did think the “Friday Night at the Inn” events were very cute, where the whole town gathers and there are several different events (including one table of an ongoing ttrpg adventure) that you can watch unfold over time.
Overall: As noted above, this version (the March 2025 update) is only version 0.13.3, which I’m guessing means there’s a lot of content they hope to add before calling it complete. Hell, by the time it’s “finished” my current save file might no longer be valid. I got to the lowest available part of the mines, got through all of the available town story quests, and did a full year (which meant I filled most of the museum). That’s probably enough to call this version “completed” until the next big update rolls around. This is cute and has a lot of potential, and I suspect a few of the bits I was most annoyed by (needing to collect So. Much. Wood. For one) will end up with workarounds eventually; along with plenty of additional quests and storyline. There’s certainly 30 hours of entertainment in the current version.
Thanks for the thorough run-down of the game, Beowulf. It's been on my wishlist for a while and for now it sounds like it can stay there. I think I need a little more than what it seems to be offering now before I jump in.
Pajaro Pete
(He/Himbo)
Fields of Mistria is really gonna depend on if you vibe with the character writing or not. There's A Lot of it compared to a lot of other games in the space, and it's generally very charming but part of that is because there are a lot of characters actually interacting with each other, rather than characters awkwardly trying to carry on a conversation with your mute protagonist.
Combat is a little more involved than Stardew Valley, in that enemies have, like, attack patterns you need to learn. It's nice, but I was a little disappointed that the different mines biomes didn't really have more thematic enemy types, instead opting for palette swaps with slightly different attack patterns.
Very confusing that NPCs have friendship meters but nothing in the road map or existing game seem to indicate it does anything? Like, the roadmap talks about more heart events for the Hot Local Singles In Your Area, but nothing about events for the other characters. Which is weird, especially when it comes to, say, the Saturday Market folks also having friendship meters?
Combat is a little more involved than Stardew Valley, in that enemies have, like, attack patterns you need to learn. It's nice, but I was a little disappointed that the different mines biomes didn't really have more thematic enemy types, instead opting for palette swaps with slightly different attack patterns.
Very confusing that NPCs have friendship meters but nothing in the road map or existing game seem to indicate it does anything? Like, the roadmap talks about more heart events for the Hot Local Singles In Your Area, but nothing about events for the other characters. Which is weird, especially when it comes to, say, the Saturday Market folks also having friendship meters?
Pajaro Pete
(He/Himbo)
While we're on the subject:
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is Coming Soon (maybe do not buy this on Switch), and a remake of Harvest Moon Grand Bazaar was also announced (also: maybe do not buy this on Switch). Man, I guess Pioneers of Olive Town was such a flop it scared them off attempting to make new games? I never payed Grand Bazaar, so I may pick it up.
Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is Coming Soon (maybe do not buy this on Switch), and a remake of Harvest Moon Grand Bazaar was also announced (also: maybe do not buy this on Switch). Man, I guess Pioneers of Olive Town was such a flop it scared them off attempting to make new games? I never payed Grand Bazaar, so I may pick it up.
Pioneers of Olive Town seemed undercooked, though not terrible or anything. I will be picking up Fields of Mistria for sure once it nears or hits 1.0 - it looks amazing, but I don't want to play it before it's about as full featured as it will get. I'm glad it's already good as is, though.
I'll probably pick up the new Rune Factory. I really enjoyed 3, 4, and 5 (I have also beaten the first game, which sucked, and played a bit of the second, which didn't seem much better. Haven't touched the non-numbered games in the series, though).
I'll probably pick up the new Rune Factory. I really enjoyed 3, 4, and 5 (I have also beaten the first game, which sucked, and played a bit of the second, which didn't seem much better. Haven't touched the non-numbered games in the series, though).
Actually they do have a new game in the works, it just doesn't have a release date yet.
I don't blame Marvelous! for remaking older games.
How do the Square take on the Farm Sim turn out? What was it called? Harvestella?
I loved Harvestella. Though it's much lighter on farming sim aspects than probably any of these games - mostly just exists as your main source of income and HP recovery items, though you can still have fun playing crop tetris if you want. Combat is pretty standard action RPG fare and probably the game's weakest point. Exploration is average but the locations can be pretty scenic, a couple I even found breathtaking.
The main draw is the plot and characters - lots of well written sidequests that really flesh out the world, recruitable characters all have social link style quests that are mostly interesting and endearing, and the main plot goes gonzo sci-fi/fantasy in mostly great ways. Character creation is limited (just your choice of male/female model, male/female voice, and male/female/nonbinary pronouns). You can marry ("life partner") any of the eligible characters regardless of gender, though that doesn't unlock until postgame and until then you pretty much progress everyone's sidequests in more typical modern social RPG fashion.
The main draw is the plot and characters - lots of well written sidequests that really flesh out the world, recruitable characters all have social link style quests that are mostly interesting and endearing, and the main plot goes gonzo sci-fi/fantasy in mostly great ways. Character creation is limited (just your choice of male/female model, male/female voice, and male/female/nonbinary pronouns). You can marry ("life partner") any of the eligible characters regardless of gender, though that doesn't unlock until postgame and until then you pretty much progress everyone's sidequests in more typical modern social RPG fashion.
Got it. Thank you! I remember the lead up to it and then it just seemed to have disappeared upon release.
Pajaro Pete
(He/Himbo)
This turned out to be the Grand Bazaar remake!
Huh, didn't realize that. Really going all out with it then.
I'm discovering that I really like the mechanics balance Stardew Valley struck AND I really like the 16-bit art style and setup. Like, the more 3D the games are, the less interested I am. And the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons set never clicked, for whatever reason.
So with that said, in this world of proliferating Stardew Valley clones, does anyone know anything about Everafter Falls, Littlewood, or Travellers Rest? (Coral Island also looks appealing, but again with the 3D art/layout.)
Meanwhile, Roots of Pacha v1.3 just dropped, adding two more regions, new plants, new animals, new minigames, new craftables, more NPCs, and more "main story". I'll need to decide if I want to go back to that right away or wait longer.
So with that said, in this world of proliferating Stardew Valley clones, does anyone know anything about Everafter Falls, Littlewood, or Travellers Rest? (Coral Island also looks appealing, but again with the 3D art/layout.)
Meanwhile, Roots of Pacha v1.3 just dropped, adding two more regions, new plants, new animals, new minigames, new craftables, more NPCs, and more "main story". I'll need to decide if I want to go back to that right away or wait longer.
Everafter Falls
When you get hit by a truck, it turns out that Earth was all just a simulation and you actually live on a floating island called Everafter Falls with a bunch of animal people (and a robot buddy!) who have peace, prosperity, and very minor drama.
Another Stardew Valley-like. This one dispenses with any hand-holding in favor of forcing you to figure out and discover your order of operations. Everything is “gated” by something else, but the game isn’t big on telling you the order to do things in. Also, it starts in Summer rather than spring and has 30-day season with no weekdays. There are “cheat sheets” for the various crafting machines posted on store walls, but it’s annoyingly difficult to figure out how to make some of the materials or where to find the ingredients.
Virtually nothing, on the other hand, is gated by either season or location, but that’s not actually great for the completionist, because it means that there’s no way to increase the chance of anything spawning, and there are a decent number of items that are so stupidly rare I never saw them at all. I couldn’t finish the cooking recipes partially because of a mushroom that the description claims is common but I never got. I almost completed the aquarium (I think I was missing two fish!), but there’s nothing you can do besides “fish a lot” to get any fish you miss. The museum requires a dozen insanely rare rocks—by lategame I was opening 20+ rare stones each day and I only got two of them. Similarly, shells spawn on the beach or you can force spawns with a shell extractor, but there are half a dozen insanely rare shells that I never saw either. (Apparently there’s a sidequest item that increases the spawn rate of fish and shells you don’t have, like the “epic terrarium” that always spawns a critter you don’t have…I just didn’t play long enough to get it.)
The one really standout feature is that any item you haven’t put in the museum appears with a star in your inventory. Because the museum is otherwise really annoying: You need to manually put donations into their display cases, and the “bundles” that win your prizes are organized by type of item, not by anything related to how you get them. So growing every summer crop and gathering every summer foragable fills a quarter in each of half a dozen bundles. In practice, you’ll fill a handful of easy bundles early in the game, and then in the late game you’ll end up swimming in museum credits you don’t need…but still only have half the bundles complete.
You get a pet who carries some of your inventory, substitutes for the hoe and watering can tools, and assists you in battle. You can also get a flying drone that can be upgraded to do many of the same features (and is the only other way to increase your carrying capacity.) You eventually also can get a pigeon friend and pixie friend that follow you, but they do very little.
There’s no heart meter for the villagers or romance options, you just watch their interpersonal dramas play out in cutscenes by doing their quests; and for a game of this length there are very few of those.
Staying up too late or dying in the mines (a series of procedurally-generated dungeon rooms) makes the “Spookies” come get you and force you to sleep soundly that night. The equipment system scales very quickly (your sword multiplies your attack power, which you can upgrade with potions or accessories) which is good because combat is a muddy affair of repeatedly swinging at small enemies that zoom into your space and are often hard to distinguish. Once you get good at catching and deploying pixies, you no longer need to actually mine in the dungeons and can race through them; this is also good because once you beat the final boss, the dungeon access is completely lost until you build the insanely-expensive “DungeonVR” chair.
The most important tip I’ve figured out is to use your first two museum credits on the Master Key, which allows you to open all of the Community Gates (and chests without needing other keys) and gives easy access to a lot of trees. The second is to learn to use pixies, because they’re your best source of rare wood, shards and rare stones (geodes). The third is to grab a pink bee as soon as you can (eventually there’s a quest that gives you one for free) because pink honey is the game’s best moneymaker. Get a few bee hives with a single pink bee and three regular bees in each, and put a rainbow pixie on your juice extractor, and you’ll be making three pink honeys each day and never have to worry about money again.
I ended up playing about 55 hours to get nearly everything and complete the “main plot”. (After you uncurse the fifth rune and unlock the Sacred Tree area, that’s very clearly a postgame area with special bonus items to unlock…but you also need to do all of them to 100% the museum.) I absolutely got my money’s worth. But my last big complaint? My final two achievements didn’t pop. Which is why I didn’t play another few weeks to try to get the “all giant lotus flowers” achievement or summon the aliens again so I could get all the stuffies.
Overall: If you play Stardew for the villagers and the romance options, there’s much less here than usual. If you play it for the completionist aspects of discovering all the different items and craftables and don’t mind occasionally needing the wiki because something is too obtuse, you might also have a good time.
When you get hit by a truck, it turns out that Earth was all just a simulation and you actually live on a floating island called Everafter Falls with a bunch of animal people (and a robot buddy!) who have peace, prosperity, and very minor drama.
Another Stardew Valley-like. This one dispenses with any hand-holding in favor of forcing you to figure out and discover your order of operations. Everything is “gated” by something else, but the game isn’t big on telling you the order to do things in. Also, it starts in Summer rather than spring and has 30-day season with no weekdays. There are “cheat sheets” for the various crafting machines posted on store walls, but it’s annoyingly difficult to figure out how to make some of the materials or where to find the ingredients.
Virtually nothing, on the other hand, is gated by either season or location, but that’s not actually great for the completionist, because it means that there’s no way to increase the chance of anything spawning, and there are a decent number of items that are so stupidly rare I never saw them at all. I couldn’t finish the cooking recipes partially because of a mushroom that the description claims is common but I never got. I almost completed the aquarium (I think I was missing two fish!), but there’s nothing you can do besides “fish a lot” to get any fish you miss. The museum requires a dozen insanely rare rocks—by lategame I was opening 20+ rare stones each day and I only got two of them. Similarly, shells spawn on the beach or you can force spawns with a shell extractor, but there are half a dozen insanely rare shells that I never saw either. (Apparently there’s a sidequest item that increases the spawn rate of fish and shells you don’t have, like the “epic terrarium” that always spawns a critter you don’t have…I just didn’t play long enough to get it.)
The one really standout feature is that any item you haven’t put in the museum appears with a star in your inventory. Because the museum is otherwise really annoying: You need to manually put donations into their display cases, and the “bundles” that win your prizes are organized by type of item, not by anything related to how you get them. So growing every summer crop and gathering every summer foragable fills a quarter in each of half a dozen bundles. In practice, you’ll fill a handful of easy bundles early in the game, and then in the late game you’ll end up swimming in museum credits you don’t need…but still only have half the bundles complete.
You get a pet who carries some of your inventory, substitutes for the hoe and watering can tools, and assists you in battle. You can also get a flying drone that can be upgraded to do many of the same features (and is the only other way to increase your carrying capacity.) You eventually also can get a pigeon friend and pixie friend that follow you, but they do very little.
There’s no heart meter for the villagers or romance options, you just watch their interpersonal dramas play out in cutscenes by doing their quests; and for a game of this length there are very few of those.
Staying up too late or dying in the mines (a series of procedurally-generated dungeon rooms) makes the “Spookies” come get you and force you to sleep soundly that night. The equipment system scales very quickly (your sword multiplies your attack power, which you can upgrade with potions or accessories) which is good because combat is a muddy affair of repeatedly swinging at small enemies that zoom into your space and are often hard to distinguish. Once you get good at catching and deploying pixies, you no longer need to actually mine in the dungeons and can race through them; this is also good because once you beat the final boss, the dungeon access is completely lost until you build the insanely-expensive “DungeonVR” chair.
The most important tip I’ve figured out is to use your first two museum credits on the Master Key, which allows you to open all of the Community Gates (and chests without needing other keys) and gives easy access to a lot of trees. The second is to learn to use pixies, because they’re your best source of rare wood, shards and rare stones (geodes). The third is to grab a pink bee as soon as you can (eventually there’s a quest that gives you one for free) because pink honey is the game’s best moneymaker. Get a few bee hives with a single pink bee and three regular bees in each, and put a rainbow pixie on your juice extractor, and you’ll be making three pink honeys each day and never have to worry about money again.
I ended up playing about 55 hours to get nearly everything and complete the “main plot”. (After you uncurse the fifth rune and unlock the Sacred Tree area, that’s very clearly a postgame area with special bonus items to unlock…but you also need to do all of them to 100% the museum.) I absolutely got my money’s worth. But my last big complaint? My final two achievements didn’t pop. Which is why I didn’t play another few weeks to try to get the “all giant lotus flowers” achievement or summon the aliens again so I could get all the stuffies.
Overall: If you play Stardew for the villagers and the romance options, there’s much less here than usual. If you play it for the completionist aspects of discovering all the different items and craftables and don’t mind occasionally needing the wiki because something is too obtuse, you might also have a good time.
Anyone playing the new Rune Factory? I'm liking it a lot. It's nice to have a Marvelous farming game that doesn't run like ass/is playable. Really wish the in-game clock didn't go so fast though.
I played a bit before going on a trip for a few weeks and am looking forward to getting back into it. It’s cute.