Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[BigD145]

I'm in year 1 of winter and have never had more than about 40 squares of planting because I just can't water all that much and still level up other things along with gathering resources. Not having sprinklers or material for better than 4 tile sprinklers is keeping me super poor. I could sell some metals but then I'd have less materials to craft farming equipment and I still have a severe shortage of refined quartz. I can't make a recycler. I only have a handful of single heart npc's. I have no animal buildings because my money is going into better tools. I'm failing pretty badly. On the plus side I'm just one winter flower away from the greenhouse.

[variablenonsense]

If it's a multiple season thing then you don't need to worry about losing it when the seasons change, same with corn.

Also what's the other way to get that seed. Folks seem to indicate it's a reward from the museum. I got some sort of star seed from it as my first or second reward I think, not sure if it's the same thing.

It's a little brown seed. I've gotten two from fishing, besides the museum one. You craft it into a blue seed packet.

[Jopax]

How far along are you in the mines?

Spoiler: Level 40 and past (click to show/hide)

You start encountering ghosts which tend to drop blocks of refined quartz on death. Or you can just farm raw quartz on the lower levels and refine that with coal.

Also if you're struggling with watering stuff, even the first level of the watering can makes a big difference, and it's not so much having a lot of crops as it is having higher value stuff, atleast I've never had that much stuff planted, except when I'd get a community center bundle. Plus there's always that retaining soil fertilizer, tho I've never used anything other than basic since a chance to water itself is't something I needed too much.

Ninja Edit:
Does the packet have a star on it? It could be the same thing :S

[Mephisto]

What's the point of pigs if you can't butcher? Selling them?

Truffles, apparently.

[Cruxador]

Just to spite his anti-save-scumming stance, I'm quitting every time something unwanted happens and playing the day over. GOOD JOB STOPPING ME FROM SAVE SCUMMING, YA JERK.

kek

The only one you're screwing over is yourself. He made a decision that he believes is for the betterment of the game, so you're determined to erase all benefit of it? Like, if you actually think savescumming is fun that's your own choice, but doing it out of spite is an utterly pointless endeavor in masochism.

As an aside, I think the current save system is quite elegant, as it packages each day as a discrete play experience rather than allowing play to take on a continuous and disjointed format. From a game design perspective, it's a decision that I think is a good one.

There is a certain generation/mindset of Americans/people that will defend most anything against the criticism of others, constructive or not. They are well connected enough to react quickly and obviously have nothing else important going on in their lives. They are sad, empty people trying to fill a void as a social animal, it's just too bad they pick such pointless fights. Ask them what they really want to do with their lives and they'll shrug and say, "I dunno. Whatever." They will put their voice and weight in favor of things that will absolutely make their own lives worse. "Someone is being 'attacked' and I must defend them. I'm coming to save you, Pol Pot."

There are those who attack in this way too, though not (I think) in regards to Stardew Valley.

[SeriousConcentrate]

If it's a multiple season thing then you don't need to worry about losing it when the seasons change, same with corn.

Also what's the other way to get that seed. Folks seem to indicate it's a reward from the museum. I got some sort of star seed from it as my first or second reward I think, not sure if it's the same thing.

Well, I fished it up, then I gave it to the museum and he gave me an actual Ancient Seed packet I could plant. I haven't planted it yet still because I'm not sure what the deal with it is.

Also, how do you smelt? I have five iron ore lying around and I'd like to have a bar for the Recycling Machine, but there doesn't seem to be an option at the blacksmith. Do I just need more ore?

[Ibid Straydrink]

I'm in year 1 of winter and have never had more than about 40 squares of planting because I just can't water all that much and still level up other things along with gathering resources. Not having sprinklers or material for better than 4 tile sprinklers is keeping me super poor. I could sell some metals but then I'd have less materials to craft farming equipment and I still have a severe shortage of refined quartz. I can't make a recycler. I only have a handful of single heart npc's. I have no animal buildings because my money is going into better tools. I'm failing pretty badly. On the plus side I'm just one winter flower away from the greenhouse.

Strange that you are having a problem with keeping up with that many tiles. I've nearly reached the same point, and have managed to squirrel away almost 70k, thanks entirely to constant, large scale farming. It was grueling, to be sure, but I found that the key was conserving cash and concentrating on shipping as many crops as possible through Spring. Kale and potatoes were my primary exports. While I did dive straight into the dungeon crawling on rainy days, I avoided fishing and livestock,  and made a point to forage extensively until about late Summer, when agriculture, upgrades, and feeding young women berries occupied almost all of my time. At this point, I'd saved up around 15k, and invested all of it, mostly in multiple harvest crops- 36 tiles blueberry, 24 tiles corn, 24 tiles tomato, and 36 tiles melon. Of course, I made sure to gift folks in passing with the odd forgeable. At this point, I had enough disposable income that I was actually buying ice cream for villagers between harvests. >.>

Field snacks are your friend early on, and give an extra incentive for gathering wood. That said, it is a game, and all about having fun, so the PTSD-inducing grind of that play style probably isn't for everyone.

If it's a multiple season thing then you don't need to worry about losing it when the seasons change, same with corn.

Also what's the other way to get that seed. Folks seem to indicate it's a reward from the museum. I got some sort of star seed from it as my first or second reward I think, not sure if it's the same thing.

Also, how do you smelt? I have five iron ore lying around and I'd like to have a bar for the Recycling Machine, but there doesn't seem to be an option at the blacksmith. Do I just need more ore?

Smelting takes place at your own furnace. If you've somehow managed to get iron ore already, you should probably have been given the blueprints to build one. Once you have, make sure you have coal in your inventory, and interact with he furnace while carrying in the ore in hand. Voila!

[SeriousConcentrate]

No, I just checked and I don't have the blueprint. Where do I get it at? All the ore I've gotten has been from busting geodes, so maybe that has something to do with it.

[Greenbane]

No, I just checked and I don't have the blueprint. Where do I get it at? All the ore I've gotten has been from busting geodes, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I think the blacksmith's supposed to come by your house one morning, after you have first mined copper ore.

[Gabeux]

I'm in year 1 of winter and have never had more than about 40 squares of planting because I just can't water all that much and still level up other things along with gathering resources. Not having sprinklers or material for better than 4 tile sprinklers is keeping me super poor. I could sell some metals but then I'd have less materials to craft farming equipment and I still have a severe shortage of refined quartz. I can't make a recycler. I only have a handful of single heart npc's. I have no animal buildings because my money is going into better tools. I'm failing pretty badly. On the plus side I'm just one winter flower away from the greenhouse.

I don't think you're 'failing', maybe you just took a different path? Depending on how far you're on the mines, you could take notes on which levels ore spawns (if you really want it, you can ask/search of course, but I think each area of the mine has a different ore). I didn't focus on tools until much later (IIRC golden tools pick/axe only at the end of winter), so you can probably do a good amount of things in a day.

For money, you could fish a lot in winter, but I have no idea what are the best places to get decent fish. You could also maybe make tons of kegs/jars so you can make better money from foraging (unfortunately those take coal, gold or iron which can be annoying).

For Refined Quartz, I didn't know you could smelt it until Winter, and that sort of pissed me off. The recycler thing too, since I had low fishing skill for a long time.
But here's my solution to refined quartz shortage just in case:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Crab pots. I have 10-12 of them in the small pond thing near the farm house, and I retrieve the 'produce' and put more bait every day. You can make at least 500g daily, and with 3 recyclers I made enough quarts for 56 Quality Sprinklers, so it's very much tried tested. Plus, you don't use coal, and I still have like 30 refined quartz. It's boring..but it works.

My playstyle is a bit weird because I was definitely poorer than most people since I hate watering crops.
My focus is always on automation/lower workload (and the only automation seems to be sprinklers), so I'm used to the terrible early game, and a sudden instant insane change to gameplay once I finish some idea/plan. I managed to play the first 3 seasons without going crazy, but as I said before, Winter with no waifu changed everything. 

[SeriousConcentrate]

I guess I need to find the mine and go do that, then. I've done nothing but fishing and a little farming since starting. >.>

[Greenbane]

As an aside, I think the current save system is quite elegant, as it packages each day as a discrete play experience rather than allowing play to take on a continuous and disjointed format. From a game design perspective, it's a decision that I think is a good one.

It's a holdover from the earliest Harvest Moon games, when such strict checkpoints were likely a necessity to keep savegame complexity (and therefore size) down. But it's far less justifiable these days: game days are not too long, but they aren't exactly short either, and real life interruptions don't really follow the same schedule.

That said, the whole saving system is probably hardwired to work on the daily cycle, so it'd probably require a significant overhaul to enable saving at any time. If ConcernedApe would like to prevent savescumming, then he could implement random seeds (a la XCOM or Civ), but that'd also entail further programming work.

[frostshotgg]

You get an ancient seed packet from Gunther for donating an ancient seed artifact

[Gabeux]

Anyone needs help on how to get women?
I say: equality.

Spoiler: Image (click to show/hide)

Some things make me wish for a quick save / quick load feature just so I can do and say silly things without consequence. 

[Frumple]

As an aside, I think the current save system is quite elegant, as it packages each day as a discrete play experience rather than allowing play to take on a continuous and disjointed format. From a game design perspective, it's a decision that I think is a good one.

Depends on the aspect of game design you're talking about. It may (may -- I'm not sure I'd agree with that) be elegant from a play experience perspective, but it's bloody terrible from a UI perspective, especially wrt the oft mentioned aging gaming population. No amount of ideal play time framing is going to make up for the loss that comes from the reality that players, especially in cases like these where your primary 'nostalgia' market is now older, will have to leave suddenly.

I'd certainly call it bad on the net; whatever gains it makes in aesthetics it loses in punishing the player for little good reason. And I'm not sure it actually gains on aesthetics -- better game design would allow the player to drop in and out and define their own play session without making the experience "disjointed", and again not punish the player for having an erratic gaming schedule.

When I get around to playing the game, I'll definitely be using third party methods to work around it. It was bad, but necessary due to physical constraints, design during the SNES era, and it's doubly so without the necessity on the PC. Game like this, CA's reasons for making the saving design what it was is just kinda' bad.