14.

Quick Start Mini guide

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A special thanks goes out to my two brothers for helping me find and
develop this little quick start trick.

Warning, while this tactical start works, it also ruins the neat balance
on the system set up by the game. Some people might view it as
cheating, but it works. As most of you know, you start the game out
with only iron tools and 100 pts of stamina and fatigue. Each swing of
a tool will burn two points of stamina or two points of fatigue if your
stamina is depleted. You also start with a basic house, no materials,
your runk sack, one outdoor shipping box, 500g, and two bags of turnips.
Also, only three of the harvest sprites are unlocked and you cannot hire
any of them to the 8th at the earliest. Basically you have nothing and
it is supposed to take you two to three years to get on your feet.
However, I have found a tactic that can have you being a millionaire
before the 15th of your first spring. Read on if you want to take the
easy way out.

Well, the game expects you to spend your first day planting your two
existing bags of turnips and for you to buy and plant two more from the
store. This will deplete most of your money and stamina between
planting and watering them. Then your supposed to spend the rest of the
first day foraging for wild crops to ship and gathering materials if you
have any strength remaining. But, you are going to want to do something
else completely. In fact, if you are following this approach, you
probably won't gather material or start your farm until the middle of
spring or begin working on your wife or harvest sprites for that matter.
So, lets get started.

Spring 2

Get up on your first morning and immediately leave your farm. Don't
prepare any soil or plant any seeds. Head directly downward and turn
left at the fork in the road. Next, follow the road over and across the
bridge past Vesta's farm. Head over to the next intersection and take
the upward path that leads to the waterfall and more importantly the dig
site. Enter the dig site cave and save your game on the first file.
Note, this is where the mines are located later, but they aren't
available yet. However they will be shortly and they are key to your
success. Equip the hoe and start to plow the ground in the room looking
for dig site items. Whenever you find jewelry memorize its location and
continue to dig to find some more. Then, when your strength is
depleted, load your game and dig up the items from memory. This will
give you several sellable items for only 2 points of stamina for fatigue
each. Each time you exit the dig site, the floor will reset and
distribute additional items randomly. Repeat this process until you
have about 30 to 40 pieces of jewelry. Then, wait outside the door of
the mine for 10pm to arrive. You can forage nearby if you want and have
the time to do it. At 10pm reenter the mine and you will have a short
cut scene with carter where he borrows your hammer to open the first
mine. After the first mine is open, go back home and go to bed.
Don't ship anything just yet.

Spring 3
Get up and go back to the dig site cave just as you did the day before.
Once you arrive, head over to the left corner and enter the first mine.
Work your way down to the bottom floor which is the tenth. You can do
this by falling one floor at a time through the holes or by saving your
game and digging your way down with the hoe. When you reach the bottom
floor, kill the chick monster by hitting it with your hammer twice and
return to the surface. Once you emerge, use the digging trick from the
first day and gather another 10 to 15 pieces of jewelry from the first
dig site floor. Then exit the dig site and head back towards town. Go
back across the bridge and go to the inner inn and go up to the second
floor. In the upper left hand corner you will find that Van has come to
town and opened his shop. Talk to him and select the sell items option
at the bottom of his list. Sell him all of the stuff that you dug up
from the dig site over the last two days. He will pay you about 1900 to
2500g per item which time the 35 to 40 items you have will yield a
profit of about 60,000g to 80,000g which isn't bad for what you have to
work with. But this isn't all the trick has to it.

You are going to give all the money right back to Van. He has a number
of tempting items for sale, but you want to buy 8 turbojolt XL's and
spend the rest on bodygizer XL's. This will give you about 40 to 50 of
them. Next, exit the inn and head back over to the dig site entrance and
wait for 10pm to arrive again. Head inside and the cut scene will
repeat, except this time Carter will use your hammer to open the second
mine. After you complete this head home and go to bed.

Spring 4

Get up and . . . you guessed it, head back over to the dig site area and
take the second door to enter the second mine. This is where it gets a
little complicated. The second mine has 255 floors to it and you need
to work your way down to floor 100. You want to do this by falling
though holes in the floor and dodging the enemy's every 30 floors or so,
you should stop to drink a bodygizer XL to completely replenish your
stamina. Once you reach floor 100 or greater, you can really start
making some money. Start saving your game before you fall though the
holes in the floor. What you are looking for are floors that are a
multiple of either 3 or 10 greater than 100. You will be able to tell
them apart because the multiples of 3 are really tall and the multiples
of 10 are huge. If you fall past one of these floors, you can just load
your game and fall though the hole again. Or you may want to dig down
one floor at a time with the hoe to avoid missing them. Now here's how
to make money.

When you arrive on one of these floors, the fist thing you need to do is
save your game. Then take the sickle or hammer and kill and of the
chicken and chick monster's on the floor and save your game again. You
can easily dodge the bugs because they just move in a single straight
line and are easily avoided. Now, take the hammer and break all the
rocks on the floor. You are looking for two particular items. You want
either the pink diamonds or the Alexandrite, which look like a small
vertical green shaped bar. Remember where they are when you find them.
Once you clear the floor of rocks load your game and go back and dig
them back up conserving your stamina. You will usually only find one on
a floor that is a multiple of 3 and 1 to 3 of them on a floor that is a
multiple of 10. Pile them up in your ruck sack and continue onwards
repeating this hunting process. Make sure to drink a bodygizer XL every
15 floors or so to keep your stamina up. Try not to become fatigued.

Once you reach the 255 floor, kill all of the bugs on it and the door
leading to the maidens house will open and you can enter it. She will
be waiting there and gives you the legendary sword which is needed to
reach the field behind the waterfall later in the game. Once you have
it return to the surface. You will then need to make another two trips
down the mine on the 4th day or until you run out of stamina. Each run
will use up around 15 bodigizers and a turbo jolt or two. This means you
can make about 3 runs without running out of supplies. Take only the
pink diamonds and alexandrite and leave the rest of them down there.
When your done go home and go to bed. Be aware, that this is a major
time commitment. It takes about 2 to 2 and 1/2 hours to make one run of
the mine. So, it will take you 8-9 hours real time to do this.

Spring 5-7

Now is the time to kick back and relax a little bit. You can get your
farm started and plant and water the two bags of turnips you have. You
can also gather material and forage to start gaining a small amount of
income. If you have a girl you want to marry you can start courting her
and making friends with the rest of the town. Your options will be
pretty limited because you will have no money and no way to recover
strength outside of eating wild plants but be patient. You should focus
these three days on getting some of the easier harvest sprites by
examining the various areas in town and other easy ones. Make sure to
get all the casino and staff sprites unlocked. Also, you can head over
to the dig site again late at night to open the third mine the same way
that you opened the other two.

On Saturday, make sure to head over to Galen's house between 11:00 and
1:00 pm without a tool equipped and you will receive the fishing pole
when you enter the his house after a short cut scene.

Spring 8

This is the next big day because it is the next day that Van returns to
town. Head over to inner inn at 10:00 when his store opens and go talk
to van. From the 4th you should get between 35 and 45 pink diamonds or
alexandrite per run, multiply by three runs, and you have roughly 105 to
120 of them. You can sell each of them to Van for a little over 10,000g
each which should yield just over 1,000,000g. You want to buy 300
bodygizer XL's and 100 Turbojolt XL's Once your done here, head over
across the bridge to unlock roller who will give you access to medals
and the ability to buy items from the harvest sprite shop. Head up to
the sprite tree and Buy 3000 medals for 30,000g and buy yourself the
teleport stone and the information bracelet. The first will allow you
to travel around the map and the second will let you know how much
stamina and fatigue you have when it is equipped. This makes it easier
to keep track of them when you are mining to make better use of your
supplies. You can use the rest of your money to buy whatever you want
or save it for later.

Spring 9 and onward.

Over the next week or so, you will probably want to make another 6 to 8
runs of the second mine to gather money. You can use the money from
these runs to get your farm jump started and buy pretty much whatever
you want. You need to start having Carter build the structures on your
farm one at a time. You also need to start getting your tools upgraded
to the mystrile level. You can find the ore you need on the bottom
floor of mine one. It takes 5 days and 5,000g each to upgrade them from
the black smith. Start with the tools you have experience with and make
sure not to do the hoe or hammer too soon, because you cannot mine
without them. If you require experience with a tool, you can get it on
the second floor of the inn by buying medicine from van and using it in
the air to advance the experience meter. Once you have them all
upgraded, you can then start finding the cured tools in the third mine
on specific floor that I haven't found yet as well as the mythic stones
when the time comes. I will include their locations in a future version
of this guide.

Just a final note about this section. Some people may consider this
idea to be cheap and cheating. If you think this isn't right then don't
do it. This is a fun game with plenty to explore. This just gives you
access to money early in the game. Each person is entitled to their own
opinion and choices of how to play the game. My brother's and I found
this option and decided to share it. Use it if you want to. One other
important thing to mention is, while this produces money in only a few
game days, it takes several hours of real time to make a run of the
mine. This works well for the short term, but you need to switch your
focus to farming in the long run for three reasons. First, you need to
do farming to advance the game and open the harvest sprites. Secondly,
this is harvest moon, not maniac miners. If all you want to do is dig
up rocks to make money then you're playing the wrong game. Finally, I
have a degree in mathematics and I can prove it mathematically that you
can make more money growing crops than mining like this with less real
time involved. I will provide the detailed proof to this in a later
version of the guide. Overall, this is a useful approach to get you on
your feet, but it has it's limits. Good luck all.