I don't understand Sym

[carp]

So, apparently he's supposed to offer to take me to see someone named "the overseer," but he, like, just never has. I have absolutely no clue how to progress his friendship. Just talking to him doesn't work, because he very rarely has a word balloon over his head indicating he has something new to say.

Once I managed somehow to get him to like six hearts when I was 19, and I saw a scene where he seemingly died, and then I never saw him again. I assume this means I messed up, but I cannot imagine how.

Am I just meeting him too late? Apparently some people are meeting him like at year 14, which seems ludicrous to me; Mysterious Stranger events don't happen nearly often enough for that. Please help me. I am very sick of playing through this game.

[Lee]

You gotta do the exploring events. It helps to befriend Dys, and go through all the areas. Most of all the Ridge is really important. If you overlook things before, he ends up talking to you in the Ridge at the latest, giving you another chance (so to say). Also, there's a boss event there that shows back up as a new boss event several times.

If you get really into exploring and just hang with Dys a lot, it's probably the easiest way to just bump into the relevant things. Also sometimes, speech bubbles show up once you've interacted with people some other way (gifts or something) or if you end the month and come back.

If you hover over the exploring options (Explore Nearby, Forage in The Valley, and so on), it'll say how many important things are still left. That way you can see if anything new showed up or if you just finished the area and everything will respawn the same way next year.

Sometimes you gotta talk to Utopia for relevant new options to show up. So it'll say "Events respawn next year" or something, as if you've done everything you can, but once you go back to any area and do some dialogs with Utopia, there will be new events.

[carp]

Originally posted by Lee:

You gotta do the exploring events. It helps to befriend Dys, and go through all the areas. Most of all the Ridge is really important. If you overlook things before, he ends up talking to you in the Ridge at the latest, giving you another chance (so to say). Also, there's a boss event there that shows back up as a new boss event several times.

If you get really into exploring and just hang with Dys a lot, it's probably the easiest way to just bump into the relevant things. Also sometimes, speech bubbles show up once you've interacted with people some other way (gifts or something) or if you end the month and come back.

If you hover over the exploring options (Explore Nearby, Forage in The Valley, and so on), it'll say how many important things are still left. That way you can see if anything new showed up or if you just finished the area and everything will respawn the same way next year.

Sometimes you gotta talk to Utopia for relevant new options to show up. So it'll say "Events respawn next year" or something, as if you've done everything you can, but once you go back to any area and do some dialogs with Utopia, there will be new events.

I doing absolutely all of that and the friendship is just not updating fast enough. Like, I'm going to the ridge every month and doing everything and talking to him every time he has a word balloon and I simply cannot get him to anything above six hearts by the time I'm 19. And yeah, I usually meet him my third or fourth time on the ridge. I don't think I've even ever gotten more than one mysterious stranger card before I get to the ridge, and it's not like I'm skipping past a bunch of events, or anything. It just never happens. (It is also EXTREMELY annoying to keep having to uselessly go to the ridge instead of working on other stats to check and see if the idiot alien has a speech balloon yet or not.)

Do you have to sneak out during glow to get his friendship high enough? That seems like a silly question... apparently you're supposed to be able to meet the supervisor long before you are able to sneak out during glow, but I have no clue what I'm supposed to be doing, here.

[Lee]

Maybe try the nearby area, actually. I usually get the mysterious stranger cards there. Might be coincidence, though. It isn't really certain events that you need, I think, there's actually a bunch of dangerous events around where you gotta fail the card challenge or pick a dumb option so he ends up having to swoop in and save you. Once he did that 3 times, one of those yellow "!" events should show up in whatever area and you can meet him.

Gifts help, too. He will like anything and not even take it - just admire it, get a ❤ boost and give it back.

You can get a bunch of random situations with him by befriending Dys that you don't need to waste a month exploring for, too. For example, after one Vertumnalia, if you "think of Sym" or something around those lines instead of partying with neither Stratos nor Helios, you can meet him outside the walls.

[Lodestar]

He also doesn't need to have anything new to say for you to talk to him- every time you explore you can talk to him, which raises his friendship. If you do that, gift when you can, and explore somewhat frequently you should be set.

[kyotod]

The expedition regions work in a pattern. The first one has 1 fixed yellow event in every year (in very rare cases 2). The 2nd has one out of a bunch of "less" important ones for example. The minor events in every region are more or less always the same (like 90%), just with different placing and sometimes different outcomes. In the first region you always will have one blue "stranger" event. In a later year (the 5th i think) there is a yellow one. Another early one is a blue in the 2nd region, when you watch the giants.

2 other tipps:
1. when sym "dies" your on the right track, as long it doesnt happen to late in game.
2. for expeditions its extremly! helpful to get 100 perception as early possible. (eagle eyes makes that easy achiveable until 2nd explore region) . Cause with this you can freely walk over the hole region and decide with events to take and which not.