A few tricks for getting ahead early

[jmc003]

Hey, all. I’ve seen some people confused or annoyed with some of the early game, so let me provide some advice on how to get ahead.

First off: one thing the game isn’t as clear about is that activities provide a stat boost (listed on the top) and in most cases a skill boost (bars under the header). You lose stat points each month, but not skill points. Upping skill points is how you advance to better classes which give more stat and skill points. When you’re in the scheduler, you can select “progress” to see what classes are coming available and what skill levels you need to advance.

Okay, so it’s year one and all your stats always suck because every month you lose everything, right? There are two ways to handle this. First, you can just ignore most of it: stats at 0 aren’t going to get worse, so just focus on one stat at a time to build it to a good level before switching over to a different one. But this makes for unbalanced play, usually - you get real good at some things and terrible at others, which makes it hard to explore options or build a character who can handle adversity.

The real answer is to go to Public School. It’s the only class without any skill attached, but instead, it ups ALL of your stats. Unless you’re spoiling her rotten, going to Public School one day a week completely offsets all your stat losses and usually grows you a few points in each - you can often hit the 50 INT goal just through regular public school.

The second thing to know is how to handle her negatives - mood, stress, and stamina.

First and foremost, get her Stamina pumped up. No matter what direction you want to raise her in eventually, you NEED to spend that first year with gymnastics and swimming to build up her stamina so that she can rest less often. Stamina tends to give out quickly, and doesn’t have as easy a workaround as mood or stress; but she seems to recover stamina as a percentage of overall stamina, so getting that stat bigger makes resting more effective.

For mood and stress: these tend to raise slower than stamina drops, and go away when she rests. Depending upon your parenting choices, they might raise faster if you’re strict or slower if you’re generous - do what you’re comfortable with because it’s a pretty balanced trade-off. Really, the thing that is most helpful in managing mood and stress is taking the “spoil” option for a week. It’s expensive, but it makes her rest days super-effective in getting rid of mood and stress issues.

Starting off, she’s going to need to rest three or more times a week to keep her stamina up. As you improve her stamina, your goal is to get her to be able to get through each week with only two rest days (and maybe a third every couple of weeks with holidays). When her mood gets too low or her stress too high, but you’re in an otherwise good pattern for dealing with stamina, spoil her for a week to wipe out her stress and re-fill her mood bars. Her discipline will drop a bit, but often it just takes one week of spoiling her to get it back up.

Blueberry gum of course is a good mood boost, and great in the first year when hey hand you a bunch; if she’s in a bad mood but not stressed, giving her some gum is a good answer. But taking the time to shop for gum is a waste, especially when the gum costs more than spoiling her does.

Last note- if she’s having mood issues but not stress issues, spend the last day of the week having her hang out with a friend. It’s not as good at restoring stamina, but it’s a much bigger boost to mood.

Hope this helps!

[SilverHawk]

Thank you for this, I'm playing on the Switch at the moment and this helped a lot.

[Sanger Zonvolt]

I have never seen any stats or skills go down. Did they change this?

[Blackhole Aberrant]

Having your mood sufficiently high at the end of the month prevents this now, thankfully. I believe it was somewhere around 80 mood but I might be misremembering.

[Fringehunter7719]

Mood over 50 at the end of the fourth week of the month, which if you're resting or socialising on the last day of the week to avoid the penalty for tasks on that day is quite hard not to achieve.

You can also tell after today's patch that the only thing that really matters for getting ahead is maxing out the spartan parenting modifier, now it correctly displays that it grants two and a half times the rate of skill and stat acquisition. That blows the relatively small losses from end of the month blues out of the water.

[nin]

I would also recommend Lavish Meal to maximize growth rate. Buying Well-Balanced meal for New Game Plus is also a good idea.