beginner tips?

[I Kinda Fail]

Bought this game under recommendation from a friend, thought the trailer looked cool, and I loved Stardew Valley. I've just been having, like... a lot of problems already, but the game looks cool, so figured I'd ask for help before I give up.

- The control scheme: Do most people play with the default controls, or change it? I kept trying to hit M to bring up the map, but had to dig through the inventory to find it. I'm not used to playing with 2 toolbars at once, so rotating the 2 menus and getting used to these weird controls is confusing. Is it just something I should keep using until it feels natural, or do you guys remap the keys to something else? And what's the best way to play it? I'm used to using keyboard+mouse for Stardew, but my friend says it's best played with just the keyboard?

- Lack of explanation: Is there, like, an order you're supposed to do things in, where it explains as it goes along? I found the mines, killed everything with my sickle and left. I have no idea if there's better weapons to be found, but I assume there is... the blacksmith didn't offer to sell me anything when I talked to him. My friend told me you can use the hammer to smash walls in the mine, but I had no idea - it just didn't seem obvious at all. And for some reason, I can smash rocks and cut grass when I have zero energy, but I can't plant seeds? I kept trying to pick up flowers I saw, and couldn't, but my friend told me a good source of food are herbs in the forest? I never would've thought to pick up one plant if the other 3 plants I tried wouldn't work.

I want to play the game, but I'm just... not feeling it right now. The controls feel awkward, the framerate drop is annoying, (although I saw there's a fix by editing gamefiles,) and I just feel kinda lost.

On the plus side, I do see the developer commenting on here regularly, and the game is still being updated, so I'm not giving up hope yet!

[The Y'All Of Us]

So far as the weapons go, you will level up both your toolskills and your fighting skill. Increasing your tool skill makes the charge time of your swings shorter, and having the blacksmith upgrade a tool gives you an extra charge level for the tool. I haven't upgraded anything other than my axe yet, but my upgraded axe kills things twice as fast if I use charged swings- I saw someone mention that upgrading the sickle/hoe lets you attack in an AoE rather than a single tile and that sounds pretty rad.

Upgrading your fighting skill I think increases your damage output for all weapons.

Forage items can be a bit tricky- there are six flowers that you can only pick after 21:00 at night, which I never would have guessed unless I'd seen one change sprites right in front of me, but the Green Herbs themselves stuck out on account of their having an outline around them rather than just being background texture. Generally it took a lot of running up to things and hitting space before I figured out the difference between background and interactable object textures- though the Black Herbs in the dungeon totally surprised me when they turned out to be gatherable.

The seeds thing doesn't make sense to me but I suppose it must have been intentional because I'd rather believe that than 'every other thing in the tool slot is missing the code that prevents you from using it'. So far it seems as though Stamina=Potential XP or Mine Loot.

If there's an expected order for how you do stuff I too would like to hear about it because I sucked myself right into the mines and had to google "How to get out of the mines" after about twenty minutes going between floors one and two through exposed ladders. I'd thought I'd missed something important, but it turned out I just didn't know about the red dirt which no NPC mentions.

Also, since I didn't mention before- You can't cut down any of the trees. I wasted half a stamina bar trying once.

[vdweller]

About the controls:
It's not so much that the control themselves are weird as that you have been so accustomed by a certain control scheme from Stardew Valley that it's impossible to accept a new one for a seemingly similar game.

The tool/item slot cycling is a mechanic used in several Harvest Moon games. Given that those games were developed mainly with a younger audience in mind (children), I find it hard to believe that the developers of HM would employ an "awkward", "weird" or "confusing" control scheme for kids to use.

Bottom line: It's just different from what you've been accustomed to after hours and hours of playing SV. But this doesn't mean that you can't get accustomed to it or that it isn't functional.

It is not a mystery that reviewers from websites like Destructoid, who have played a lot of Harvest Moon games, actually "forgot" to mention the bad controls, but people whose only foray into the genre is SV do.

Lack of explanation:
There is an in-game help about the basics. Other than that, there is no "as it goes along" help. I hate games that do that so I couldn't bear making one myself.

General tips: Talk to people, give them presents. Each townsperson has 3 levels of friendship, when you reach it you'll know since they always reward you in some way.

Stores have signs outside stating their business hours. When you visit store owners outside those hours, they will just talk. This is what happened with the blacksmith.

When stamina is zero, you can't do some actions that train their respective skills (in your case, planting seeds trains farming). Otherwise people would max skills from day 1. There are perks on level-up and many items that will increase your max stamina, so don't judge from the get go, the more you play the more powerful you will become.

There are lots of things to discover, just go out there and don't be afraid to try things. Why breaking walls with a hammer is unnatural? Stardew Valley all over again.

Those blue flowers open up at night, go pick them up after 9pm. You never know what else you'll stumble upon.

Plant seeds (rain washes away freshly planted seeds so be careful), make some money, maybe buy a chicken later, do some mining, go fishing, fund town projects and make friends. The rest will follow.

There is a reason people who recommended the game started their review with stating vehemently that the game has nothing to do with SV. That being said, you can have a good time! There are plenty of tips and guides in the Guides section and people here are very helpful and will answer your questions. Just have an open mind and don't associate the game with anything else you've played, you're just setting up youself for disappointment if you do.

EDIT: Only keyboard or gamepad would probably suit you best.

[I Kinda Fail]

@dev

Controls: The only "similar" games to this I've played were Stardew and games like Starbound or Minecraft, which aren't farming games, but do have the toolbar. I have played one of the old Harvest Moon games, for the Gamecube, but that was with a controller; hence why I asked what the preferred method of gameplay is. Like how Stardew works with a controller, but I prefer keyboard+mouse, I wasn't sure if your game worked better with just keyboard, or controller, or if it just took some getting used to. I've simply never played a game with two on-screen toolbars, so it's strange to me.

Lack of explanation: Again, I'm just going based on my previous experiences in other games. I kinda figured that the hammer would smash stones on the farm, it just seemed strange to use a hammer instead of a pickaxe. The only thing I have to base it off of is Stardew and Minecraft, both of which use pickaxes to dig, and have separate weapons instead of using your tools as weapons... It's not that far of a reach to base my knowledge off two very well known games. As far as breaking walls with hammers, again, that's not common from my experience with games... Most games I play with dungeons will have specially marked walls to destroy, such as Legend of Zelda, where you can either use the sharp "Mole Mitts" to dig or a bomb to destroy the wall. If the hammer replaces the pickaxe, then sure, it makes sense - but I had no idea you could even destroy the walls. I thought they were solid and static, not something you could smash through.

I'll give it another try over the next few days just using the keyboard and see if that feels less awkward to me. The only real problem I had was the controls and the rough start, so if I can get the controls down, hopefully I'll love the game too :P

[mo123567]

I don't think a fun challange in a game should be trying to get the control scheme to work. The controls in a game should feel natural and be as easy to use as possible. The challange should come in the gameplay itself.

One area where Gleaner Heights almost surpasses Stardew Valley (in my oppinion, the preeminent game in this genre) is the battle system. Gleaner heights has what could be a more interesting and fun battle system but it is bogged down by a clumsy control scheme. I have over 70 hours in the game and I still can't avoid accidentily triggering stamina wasting abilities.

The Harvest Moon games I played did have bad controls but we are in a post Stardew Valley world now.

[oi__io]

Honestly Stardew Valley from day one of development was designed to be played with keyboard and mouse. It does support controller eventually but it was intended to be played with keyboard and mouse.

Gleaner Heights however apparently designed to be played with controller as default. I played with controller and I believe that was the way this game was meant to be played and I have no problem with the control so far.

I have never tried playing with keyboard and mouse for this game but I heard it's pretty annoying. If you have a controller laying around, give it a try and see if that makes a difference for you. Remember to set the gamepad dead zone to a higher value. I set mine to 0.50.

[The Y'All Of Us]

Keyboard controls seem fine to me, I can comfortably play the game with one or both hands, while using the controller there are confusing and frustrating button function overlaps.

WASD or the arrow keys to move, R/T to cycle your active tool from the toolbar, F/G to cycle the held item, Z to use the tool, X to use your held item, and C to put your held item back in your cbag so your hands are free. Since SPACE is iteraction and LSHIFT is active running or roll dodge (I keep autorun turned on so I only have to tap LSHIFT to roll at will) I just have my fingers rest on LSHIFT,Z,X,C since those are the buttons that get used the most, and I can open/close my inventory with ESC which is just a short handlift away from the control cluster.

If my cat decides it can't stand being left alone I swap to my standard WASD resting position and all the default keybinds are still exceptionally comfortable, resulting in the ability to play the game with one hand, while using my other to pet the cat/shoo the cat's continuous headbutting away from the keyboard.

I only had trouble with the controls for the first fifteen minutes or so, but I can pretty securely say that's clearly not the common experience- still, I find it hard to understand the sentiment of "The controls are bad" given my experience.

I even wound up teaching myself a little memory trick: Reverse/Tool, Food/Grab, Zeus (Z=Use), X-Ray (my guts because that tastes great when I press this), and Clear.

Doesn't stop my stupid jittery fingers from accidentally hitting the wrong diretional rotation buttion for my tools but honestly from a selection of four there's no bother about it since I can just slap either button a couple of times for the same result.

As for the mouse? Push that cursor off my screen and pretend it's not plugged in. Just unecessary.