Settling in on the Farm, and Exploring Further

This preview is based on version 1.0.2, but features may be subject to change with future updates.

Despite the hustle and bustle abound in Olive Town, a major portion of your play-time will be spent clearing out and restoring your grandfather’s farm. It won’t be easy to return to its former glory, but with time and effort you’ll be able to settle into a routine that suits you while making the farm your own. While you won’t be living the high life until you get your bearings, you can take advantage of the land left to you. Repairing old buildings, such as the coop, will start your adventure off with a humble profit. Provided you own chickens, of course.

Not only can you repair standing structures yourself, but you can also commission Nigel to repair major roadblocks, such as the broken bridge to your farm’s next area. These roadblocks require quite a few materials belonging to the prior area, however, for a hefty fee you can just leave all of that work to Nigel. As each area unlocks, rarer resources will become available. Likewise, you will need to power-up your tools to take full advantage of them. With mines nearby, you’ll have no problem finding what you need to make upgrades for each new area.

No matter how you approach it, it’ll quickly become clear: Your first year on the farm is all about progression and figuring out what works for you. Whatever way you choose to spend your time, you’ll always be progressing in some way. As you upgrade your skills, tools, restore and build all-new facilities, there’s no doubt that you’ll forge a pathway to your own personal success.

With limitless resources at your fingertips, the next step in harnessing their full potential involves the use of Makers. Makers come in different types and sizes, and allow raw materials to be refined into completely new items. For most big jobs on the farm, you’ll need those refined items in order to progress. Stores can only sell unrefined materials, so it’s up to you alone to create them.

However, this in itself poses an issue, as you’ll have to devote some of your farmland to these machines. Normal makers (which are the basic type you’ll be able to make at the start) only have a 1:1 output. In some cases, variant items may produce more than this ratio. This is true for the mayonnaise maker, with which you can produce two mayonnaise with a Silkie egg, rather than one with a regular egg. If you’d prefer to keep your farm looking like a farm instead of a factory, you’ll find progression rather slow. Some of the rarest raw materials take up to 23 hours to refine, and without many makers, it can become quite tedious to build up enough of the items you need.

Moving on to animals, the generation-based progression from Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town makes a come back. Until you can breed your animals, they won’t produce more than a preset star level of byproduct. You’ll need to build a larger barn/coop before you can really get into breeding, but for the ranching enthusiasts, there’s plenty of room for a large amount of facilities full of animals and space to graze. Naturally, as Makers originally appeared in the series to make products like cloth, yarn, yogurt, and so on, those will also factor into ranching and allow you to cook new recipes or commission new outfits and accessories in town.

As you cultivate the land, expand, and decorate, it also helps to keep an eye out for wildlife that’s wandered in alongside wild vegetation to forage. Shipping a new plant could result in having seeds sold at the local stores and any farm animals such as chickens, cows, horses, and so on can be tamed and brought to a facility. For everything else, like our good friend the owl here, photos can be submitted to the Olive Town museum and some forageables are popular requests on the board at the town hall, which will earn you a little more money and gain some easy friends at the same time.

That’s it for our long-form article previews! We’ve been doing our best to avoid spoilers about unlocks or special events, so know that there’s more where this came from, but we’ll get more in-depth when we can post our full review. Until then, we’ll continue making shorter posts on Tumblr and Twitter and answering any questions or requests that we can.