I have made it pretty deep into this game now, though it has no real goal or end game, and I thought it might be worth sharing some random things I have picked up that were not necessarily obvious, or I missed because, like a lot of folks, I mostly skip tutorials.
Basically, some.suggested things to do, ways to make money etc. This is not a “maximize” guide, its a “casuals want to survive” list of tips.
Anyway, on with the list
Daily Tasks
Eventually, like level 5 or something, you unlock daily tasks for NPCs. These are all fairly easy, and I definitely suggest doing them daily. They give a total of like 15k+ gold and some mats and other items as rewards. The gold being the most useful.
Also remember to actually accept them when first logging in. Its kind of annoying that they do not just auto accept.
Be a bit mindful on some tasks though. Many ask you to deliver and item to an NPC, and if you already have that item, it just sort of, auto completes and says “go see NPC.” Not a problem if its “Deliver 8 sticks”. You probably have hundreds of useless sticks. It can be a problem if its “2 Furniture” or “2 Foods”. You don’t want to go turn in your special banquet meal that cost you 3k in mats and a ton of time that sells for 5k to the merchant for a daily task reward of 2k. Make sure you have some cheap salads or something to turn in.
This goes for furniture too. Slap together a couple of chairs and turn those in. I had one where the NPC wanted Bird Watching Cards, and it turns out, you can turn in “Invalid Data” cards. I bet the food quest takes the burnt food actually. Serves that clothing store lady for constantly asking you to door dash her lunch.
Check the Shops
Speaking of the clothing store lady, half the point of this game is customizing your home and style. Both the clothing and furniture stores change daily. You don’t have to buy anything, but you may want to check in while doing your daily tasks, because at some point you will probably end up in the town square anyway.
On the shops thing as well, the furniture shop has several different display areas, I somehow completely missed the second large display in the front opposite the door. The slot behind the shopkeeper also tends to have special fancier items, so its good to keep an eye on for any unique items to decorate with.
Bird Cards
While down town, and once bird watching is unlocked, don’t forget to turn in bird cards to Bailey J. Its easy to forget because the bird place is upstairs and kind of hard to remember it even exists. You can turn in 5 cards daily, and it gives useful rewards like mats and repair kits. Its a much better value than selling to the vendor, the bird cards don’t sell for much.
Hobbies and Unlock Order
Speaking of unlocking hobbies like bird watching. You get to sort of choose the order, I personally recommend Cooking and Fishing first, then Bug Catching and Bird watching and lastly the Animal care thing. Some of those may not have been part of the choices. You unlock them all anyway. Cooking is basically the primary way to make gold, Fishing is secondary, and supports Cooking at some point.
The primary way to earn gold, and unlock more, is through hobbies. Bird Watching gets very little gold, its kind of tedious to do.
The Animal thing doesn’t seem to get you anything, and is extremely tedious to do. You have to find the feeder in the area, put food in the feeder, then find animals and feed them, which, unlocks some info about the animal? I guess? Maybe long term its useful or gets mats or something maybe they plan to expand it out in the future. I don’t know, I never bother with it, and I never see anyone doing it.
Fishing is your standard “catch fish” that almost every game seems to have a version of. Its wild how many variants of fishing games there are. The fish you get are good for cooking, but sometimes just selling them is fine too.
Gardening is automatically unlocked and kind of a constant necessity. You need garden stuff to do most recipes. Early on you will harvest and sell the raw vegetables for gold, but once you can cook you should at least make salads or jams to sell.
Harvesting is the very basic default hobby, its not really a hobby but its the core gathering methods. Its tempting to drive between every point, but I find its good to walk sometimes in order to harvest every tree and rock for materials.
Cooking, back to cooking. Cooking turns fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, etc into things that actually sell for worthwhile money. The main thing with cooking is making sure you top off your purchased supplies as well. I keep 20-30 of everything except meat, but if the current seasonal event wasn’t happening (as of this writing) I would probably keep more. The seasonal even is sucking a ton of gold for cooking mats that get used then sold to the season vendor for season coins instead of regular gold.
One last side note on cooking. Occasionally there is a pop up “Meal With No Rice.” Its a weird translation, but it means your cooking costs you no ingredients. Its a good, randomly occurring bonus. It took me forever to figure out what it means.
Other Tips
Some other things that you can do pretty much anytime that are less obvious.
Every day there are two special nodes to mine, one is a large cartoonish tree man, the other is a bouncing crystal with a mole under it. One a day you can mine them for some Roaming Oak Timber and Flawless Flourite. These are very rare mats needed for fancier crafting. These NPCs seem to always spawn along the player home side of the main loop road, where player housing is.
There are also 8 total large trees, 2 in each corner of town, each on opposite sides of the main loop road. You cannot miss them, they are like 3x larger in diameter than any other trees. You can mine these once a day and they are the only source of “Rare Timber”, another hard to get material.
It doesn’t really do anything, but I find its good practice to give other players a heart at their mailbox. Mostly because at some point it MIGHT do something, and it costs you nothing to do. Its a sort of “Don’t go out of the way, but if I am passing by” thing to do. If you are near the mailbox, just click/touch the heart.
Speaking of other players, if no one else is doing it, its nice to throw down a repair kit before events. Heal your own gear, heal others’ gear, swap out and heal everything you can.
Also before events, eat. The UI is already a bit cluttered, but for some reason your stamina is not always visible. Chances are, you need stamina before heading out on a boat to cast out 50 times in a row to get fish.
When traveling around, use the little bus terminals. Its only 200 gold, but even if you don’t use those, travel to the central square is free. Travel to the seasonal event area is free.
Ka Ching sells backpack expansions. Buying these is recommended. Also, use your home’s warehouse for stuff you don’t want to get rid of but want to keep. Its easy to forget its there.
Pets are buggy as heck. If you can’t interact with your cat, you probably need to just log off and back on to reset it. They are also an incredibly needy money sink. It sounds awful, but get over letting your pet go hungry a bit if you need money, because the food.is expensive and they need at least 5 units a day to keep them from being hungry. I have a list of QOL feature suggestions going and “pets are too needy” is on there.
Building
Half the purpose of the game is building and customizing your home. The build system us fairly robust, but also kind of janky in places.
First off land, you don’t need to rush to max out the land area, it gets expensive at higher levels and after like, 9 plots, its less useful.
You can pick up and move most things. Moving a wall with stuff on it moves the stuff too. Moving a table with stuff on it, moves the stuff too.
A lot of things can be painted, walls, some furniture, etc. The interface for this has like 3 different methods depending on the object, its part of that jank I mentioned.
There is an advanced edit option in the upper right corner that makes base house design soooo much easier and gives a birds eye view.
Roofs are a pain in the ass. It took me forever to figure out roofs. There is a four way arrow icons that lets you drag roofs to be larger, adjust the curvature, etc. Roofs require a floor under them, floors double as ceilings. You can remove the floor after the roof is placed but the underside of a roof looks ugly. You can make overhands and whatnot though with floors hanging off over areas. In Advanced mode these are just handles on the edges you can drag.
Often when resizing or recoloring the roof, it will drop to the ground after and need re-positioned. More jank. Its annoying. You probably will need a temporary staircase to get high enough to reposition it properly.
Pillars are like roofs a bit. It has the 4 way arrow that lets you increase the height. I spent way too long trying to stack pillars to make a pillar that was not 2 feet tall. You can’t stack them.
When doing walls, especially the outside, you can use the eyedropper in the paint menu on an existing wall to copy its style, then apply it to your new walls. Each wall has 2 sides.
If you make an outside walkway with floors, you will want to put them up high on a wall first, paint the underside a neutral color with the ceiling painter, the. Place them, otherwise it will have an ugly “brown wood” edge with the default ceiling look.
Don’t be afraid to move things temporarily. Slap a door or a window in a random open space while building or modifying an area, then move it back. Maybe even build a temporary wall in the yard to use as a temporary place to drop stuff
Sometimes its easier to move items outside of build mode with the little tablet thingy.
