April 19
Well, apparently a normal day requires an oddball one for follow-up. A few things worth mentioning occurred today.

First, I got a new villager. Or maybe "villager" is the wrong word; how about "resident" instead? I saw the farm caretaker, Takakura, wander into his house. Seeing as I almost never see him there, and if you're going to get an event with a character it's most likely going to happen in that character's house, I follow him in. Well, I was kind of expecting something to happen but I can assure you that this wasn't the event I was expecting.

It turns out Takakura has a plant. Not a flower or anything, more like a giant two-headed Little Shop of Horrors Audrey thing, except really cute. Yep, the game has gone pleasantly insane on me - my new resident is a giant talking plant. It's a talkative thing, too. Once you start it going, it'll keep on talking and talking and talking, with the occasional break to ask if you're done listening. I haven't said yes to that yet. I'm trying to befriend it and don't want to hurt its feelings. Thankfully, time stops when you're talking to things, so I can just keep on listening without wasting huge chunks of the day.

The plant, named Tartan, also has a secondary purpose: it grades items. You can show it an item and it will take it into this bud on its front right where the two necks come together (and it is as strange as it sounds) and give you information about what it is you gave it. The strange thing is that as near as I can tell, it's the exact same info you could get from the item screen. It's probably something I'll experiment with more later, but at the moment it's pretty redundant. Still, I've got a chatterbox two-headed giant plant living in my village now and that's really all that matters.

The other thing that happened is that I think I may be able to break the game's economy. One of the big things about the Harvest Moon games is the way they progress on a curve. At first you can only do a little so you only get a little back, and then you can do a bit more, and a bit more, and all of a sudden you've got a good head of steam and the money is rolling in at a decent pace, and you plow that back into your farm, and eventually you've got a seriously robust economy at your back. Well, it's fall of year two and I think I ran across all the money I could ever hope to have in the game.

First off, lets talk about fruit seeds. Fruits are ridiculously expensive, at least by the in-game economy. A vegetable seed may run as high as 50g or so, but a fruit seed can be 800g-1500g. I got grape seeds a while back, just to see how they worked, and this summer the tree flowered, followed by lots of grapes this fall. (Yes, I said "tree." Grapes in Harvest Moon grow on trees. I try not to think on it too much.) Well, out of curiosity I tossed a grape into the seed machine, and sure enough it split into two seeds. Cool, I can grow lots of grapes now, think I, but what I really want is some plant variety so I'll just toss these into storage.

Fall goes on, I give the grape tree (grape tree!) a shake or two a day and harvest what drops, put most in storage and save a few for the larder. I eventually have twenty grape clusters and I sell them to Van for a fair chunk of change. And then it hits me that grape seeds are really expensive. I wonder if I Van will buy the two seeds I have sitting in storage.

Grapes sell for about 40g or so a bunch. Grape seeds sell for 450g. One grape cluster = two seeds, so I can get either 40g or 900g per grape. Ooh, that's a tough one.

Of course, now fall is almost over and no more grapes are growing, but thankfully I've got five in storage that I'll happily turn into 4500g in a few days. Still, I can't help but wonder if maybe that's not how the game economy is supposed to progress. Now I'm being haunted by the math of 20 grapes x 2 = 40 seeds x 450 = 18000g! That's half my food processing building (30,000g) plus a bit right there!

But I've got a peach tree coming in now. Maybe they bloom in spring?

April 20
Not every day is a new adventure. Today I basically ran around and did stuff, tending crops, splitting those remaining grapes (I had six as it turns out, not five!), and generally keeping the farm maintained. When I ended the day, fall was over, and now I've completed the first day of winter.

One of the nicer effects is the change of seasons. The only obvious difference from one day to the next is the wild plants you can find; the seasonal change itself is more gradual. Today, Winter 1, looks almost identical to yesterday, Fall 10. By Winter 3 there'll be snow on the ground, but at the moment it's just looking a bit more barren around the edges. When Spring 1 hits I won't have instant life, but rather a gradual arrival of it over a few days. It's pretty nice to see.

Last winter I had a new resident, and though I don't think I mentioned it at the time it, was an abominable snowbeast, known as a bumble to anyone who's ever seen Rudolph. So far this year, no bumble. I hope he shows up soon, I liked him.

Continue to: Days 7, 8 and 9