Time Management Emphasis? (Will I like this?)

[Magpie]

I love this kind of game, farming, building my piece of the world - until the dreaded daily deadline (or inventory management!) becomes the main focus. In Story of Seasons I did every chore at flat-out maximum speed with no time to talk to townspeople, explore new areas, or fish for fun without a deadline pushing, pushing, pushing me until it wasn't fun anymore. Terraria let me take my time, same with Animal Crossing, and both were more enjoyable for me. How would you characterize this game in this regard?

[Vroomi]

You can play at your own pace.


Idk.

[Seraphita]

Originally posted by k r y z t a l:

You can play at your own pace.

Pretty much this. If you liked Animal Crossing then it will be about the same thing except, instead of trying to play sims with animals, you'll be farming and socializing with NPCs. It's a very relaxed kind of game play. No rush, take your time, no time limit. Play the game day by day.

But yeah, it's not exactly like Animal Crossing. I was just using that example since you mentioned it. But at the same time, things happen at different hours and days so it's not that different. Only thing to know is that you cannot be up after a certain time of the night. It's the only daily limit.

It seems you love farming so yep. You just found your dream game. I believe you will love this.

[I Kinda Fail]

There ARE things that you have to do daily, like watering your crops, until you get sprinklers. And there are timed events, like you need to view a cutscene during Summer, or you need to get to the store by 5pm. There's only one or two cutscenes you can miss, but there's definitely a few things that you'd have to wait until next year if you aren't paying attention. (For example, you go to the mines on a holiday, and miss out on a holiday item.)

[lemontyseven]

There is a daily deadline, but its very relaxed. You can easily get plenty of stuff done each day. In fact, I'm often going to bed early because i don't have anything I can do. As @Zero said, the only daily limit is 2:00 am, after which you will passout and be penalized, unless you pass out in your home.

[Swiss]

I use time speed mod that I can slower or faster the time event stop the time and reset to normal.
http://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/169/?

[Leslian Lexter]

I usually have plenty of time left, when i go to bed.

[aqmlyn]

The biggest problem early-game is inventory management - you'll want to save up money to buy the two backpacks ASAP to get a reasonable inventory (just one backpack upgrade isn't too bad but it's still a pain) and even then you only get 36 slots compared to Terraria's 50. Your character has limited energy but food to regenerate it is pretty easy to find and there are special fruits you can find by doing certain special tasks to increase your max energy capacity later on - it nearly doubles it by the time you've found all of them. Time isn't too much of a problem unless you're going mining later on in the game, and even then you get 12 minutes a day before you pass out at 2AM, though you'll wake up with less energy the next day if you go to bed past midnight (days are 20 hours, each hour is 6*6, so 36, IRL seconds, 36*20 = 720, divided by 60 seconds per minute is 12 minutes). So if you have even just a primitive idea of a plan you'll be fine.

(Note there is a glitch you could perform to gain infinite energy but it's inaccessible until your 31st day of playing and doesn't carry over between days anyway. There's also a glitch to stay up beyond 2AM, but after 2AM it's pretty annoying and if you're just starting out I wouldn't worry about it.)

[esotericist]

To more fully answer the time pressure question, there's a few levels:

Daily: You have to make sure your crops are watered, tend to fencing around your crops (or you risk them getting overtaken by weeds), and if you have animals, tend to them. If you're doing foraging, heading out and exploring the town and outlying areas to look for things to collect.

Weekly: If you're trying to work on social relationships with gifts, you can give each villager two gifts a week. Any past that doesn't help.

Monthly (each season is a single 28 month): Making sure you plant crops that will be able to complete before the end of the season (with one exception, crops wither on season change), weighing the value of cheaper crops versus more expensive ones for what they'll get over the course of the month.

Yearly: If you're dealing with fruit trees, you need to plant them well in advance of when they fruit. It takes 28 days for a fruit tree to fully grow, and any day where anything is within the 8 adjacent tiles is a day where it does not grow. So you generally want to plant fruit trees well over a season in advance (an autumn-fruiting tree should be planted in spring, for instance).

Beyond that, there is a 'soft' deadline of two years, where on the first day of the third year, there's an event. But the event CAN be triggered again later if you desire.

There's specific schedules for events during the course of the year, but those events repeat every year. There are no events or opportunities you can miss forever, worst case scenario is you have to wait until the next year. Similarly, some tasks require resources only obtainable in a specific season, but there's always the next year.


My personal habit is to not worry about social things until the second year; the first year is for getting economy going, and prepping infrastructure such that I don't have to spend a significant amount of time and energy watering plants every single day. Generally, by the time winter hits, I'm in a strong position to minimize manual watering.

I hope this helps

[Spark0]

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to get things fast then grind out crops and focus on fishing early on until you get animals and other things that create wealth without too much time input (watering can take the most time). Winter is your downtime season to really talk to your town, go mining, do help-wanted, and challenges. Once I hit year 3 I would be done watering a lot of crops by 11 AM and still have time to go into town to relate during spring,summer, & fall meanwhile netting approx 10-20k g a day.

[esotericist]

Originally posted by SlackerBoe:

"You have to make sure your crops are watered, tend to fencing around your crops (or you risk them getting overtaken by weads)"

I have never used fences around my crops and never once has this happened.

I've had it happen in a few games, although it's easier to avoid in the farm map the game launched with; the farther you are from plants and the grassy-lawn bits, the less of an issue this is.

In the beta version currently up, there's new maps with more grassy areas, and I've had more aggressive issues with my crops dying without a fence protecting them.

[esotericist]

Originally posted by SlackerBoe:

Originally posted by esotericist:

I've had it happen in a few games, although it's easier to avoid in the farm map the game launched with; the farther you are from plants and the grassy-lawn bits, the less of an issue this is.

In the beta version currently up, there's new maps with more grassy areas, and I've had more aggressive issues with my crops dying without a fence protecting them.

Strange I always let a chunk of grass go just on the south border of where my crops were. Often the grass and the crops would be in neighboring spaces.

I'm guessing it's the foraging layout?

I'm waiting until after I finish baldur's gate to come back and finish some achievements after the updates out and has had some bug squashing time.

I'm currently on hill-top (the mining map).

Official release is scheduled for monday, and there's been quite a lot of very interesting bugs that I'm VERY glad to have not experienced myself.

[Magpie]

It sounds a whole lot like Story of Seasons, but perhaps a more varied and enjoyable experience. How bad are these bugs you're referring to? If I delay starting until after the update, there are likely to be bugs from the update as well.

Thanks, all, for your input. This Steam community is always so willing to help!

[esotericist]

Originally posted by Magpie:

It sounds a whole lot like Story of Seasons, but perhaps a more varied and enjoyable experience. How bad are these bugs you're referring to? If I delay starting until after the update, there are likely to be bugs from the update as well.

Thanks, all, for your input. This Steam community is always so willing to help!

I haven't played Story of Seasons, but I got the impression it was Harvest Moon heritage, which is what inspired Stardew Valley.

So there's going to be a lot of crossover in style and thematics.

As far as bugs in the current beta, we've had a fair range. Hilarious things like the person you're marrying ALSO attending the wedding as a guest, frustrating things like gamepad controls causing unexpected crafting events, weird things like a character's sprite being half a block misaligned from their shadow, and distressing things like 'game crashes when you interact with animals that have more than zero hearts'.

All of those are fixed, mind you; ConcernedApe is super responsive, and has done an impressive amount of bug fixing in the last couple days.

If you want to watch the sausage getting made, you can read up on the current status here.[community.playstarbound.com]. Honestly, I'm reasonably confident that it should be pretty solid come monday, and I'm pretty sure if there's critical issues he can't nail down firmly enough to meet the deadline, he'll delay as necessary.

[Magpie]

Thanks!

[LoqD]

Before you get sprinklers, if you plant too many crops, then you'll have problems getting things done each day. And because they take time to ripen, daily watering can leave you without much time for a week or two (pray for rain). Also, if you're really unlucky you can wind up with five fields of different crops ripening on the same day, leaving you with too much to harvest and replant in the one day.

That said, there are plenty of things to save you time (sprinklers, auto-feeders, warp totems, tool upgrades, etc) so it's not like you'll be stuck doing chores all day, every day.