I built a second house. It's HUGE and the game doesn't have enough furniture to furnish it, so I'll stick to the cosy starter house for now.
The mechanical draw of having multiple houses is you can have additional crafting stations going: 2 stoves, an easel, and a piano. I doubt I'll ever get grindy about that but it's good to have options.
I realized I forgot to share Trout Park, which will become Koi Park whenever I unlock koi. Just a fun scenic area that takes advantage of the game's neat waterfall mechanics. The only part I don't like is the different tiers must be harvested independently. I'd like to experiment with higher waterfalls, and see if I can come up with a way to connect tiers though I'm sure I can't..
Last game, I set up a pretty complicated orchard where the seasons flowed into each other, so all the winters were together, etc. But it wasn't perfect because there were a few outlier trees that were hard to fit into the pattern. This time I decided I'd simplify my life and set up 4 seasonal treelines that have an assortment of trees that produce that particular season. This is exclusively so any given season, I can auto tractor down the line and fully harvest everything, and not have to devote so much land to rows and rows of trees.1
Finally organized my mess of animals. As I've mentioned before, I'm not a fan of the sheer volume of animals there are, and I'm still thinking of ways to maintain a decent stock of animals without it completely overwhelming everything. I've started planting feed supply crops just for them in their little areas. I tend to run short of grains, and corn is the cheapest and fastest grain crop, so I've got some nice long fields of corn contained with white fences.
My tree unlocks lag behind everything else, and those are the ones I want to work on. I think I'm gonna set up something similar to my flowers, and have clusters based on what I want to unlock most quickly, but idk. I also started making "type" forests, so for example, near Trout Park there's a pear forest filled with different trees that all produce pear-type resources. It's not as efficient as long ass rows of trees, but I like the way it looks a lot better.
I wish the game had seasonal signs.
I've had a few visitors and everyone has been very nice. I put up a "do whatever you want and have fun" welcome message, but I think having a meticulously organized color coded farm naturally encourages people to keep things tidy, and the guests have maintained my planting patterns.
After a long day of chores I decompressed by spending time arranging my crops by color, as one does. I also set up a color grid for flowers so I can decide what order I want my final flower garden to look like. I've waffled between organizing them by color, because pretteh, versus organizing them by type so it will be convenient to harvest the type I need.
I decided to allow full permissions on my farm, since the only thing I don't want people to grief is holiday crops and those are protected now. One big complaint people had in FT was guests harvesting crops and not re-plowing after, but FT2's auto tractor automatically does that, so I don't think I have to worry too much about finding a bunch of empty, unplanted fields but we'll see. The game has signs that can dictate what crops are planted where, and other things, so you can get pretty granular with permissions if needed. I doubt I'll get any visitors, but if anyone gets on my nerves I can just lock it down again.
Previously, I organized trees by season, so I could harvest an entire section at once, and I had reeeeeaally long rows of each type. I think this time, I'm going to organize by season again, but have them in continuous sections of 27 or 36. I've only unlocked about half of them and they are still adding trees so I'm not to the point where I can really plan it out too well.
I'm continuing to putter around in FT2 and play around with landscaping. I finished the holiday questline with days to spare by achieving several of the lower-quantity milestones every day after they reset. This really worked for me, as it was non-grindy and I had a little thing to look forward to each day. I'm really glad they reworked the system this way.
One of the new items is a security booth. This allows you to set custom permissions for a plot of land. It is AWESOME. In FT, I was always wary of giving full access to the farm because I had seasonal crops I didn't want anyone to harvest. Now, you can remove permissions for a section as needed.
I also unlocked a second house. I wasn't sure how many houses they'd offer in the base game. At this stage, there's not a lot of decorations so it's more about being able to run multiple art/sculpting/cooking stations.
FT2 is all I have the bandwidth for right now. I've been playing a few minutes every day but I keep forgetting to take screenshots.
The littlest discovers make me disproportionately happy. Yesterday, I unlocked garden boxes and discovered you could put tiny trees in them.
Progress on the special event continues. It looks like I'll be able to unlock everything doing a little bit each day, which is awesome and a welcome improvement over the grind of the previous game.
It's special event time! Yay! They look cool when you harvest them!
At first I was annoyed because I hit a 16,000 solo harvesting tier which is obviously prohibitive, but I then realized the daily goals reset. It's set up this way to prevent people (not mentioning any names, aka me) from setting up autoclicker unlocking everything in a day. So if you check in each day and harvest a bit, you should be able to unlock a decent amount of stuff over the next two weeks, maybe even all of it.
I opened my farm so other people can visit, but I think I'll see how long I can ride solo. There's a probably outdated cheat engine table floating around (and there's a malware pretending to be cheats on github so don't download that). I don't think it's a coincidence the malware popped up shortly after the event started.
My brain was mushy yesterday, so I piddled around with this puzzle game. The chests are rooms that are reset, so part of the challenge can be moving the chests, or going inside them multiple times. It's interesting.
I feel like an aquarium idler should be right up my alley but this game is boring as shit.
If the fish behaved more like fish (schooling, etc) it would be interesting to watch at least, but as it is, I pop in once or twice a day, sell all my fish, and buy more. And... that's it. You can decorate your tank, and you can upgrade and buy more tanks, but outside watching fish that don't really act like fish there's not much going on here.
I've been messing around with these match-3 games. They kind of stress me out, and I'm terrible at them, but you gain stats over time and I keep coming back to it for a few minutes each night. I think I'd like to mess around more with match-3 games, but maybe one that doesn't have a time element.
I haven't played Castlevania Symphony of the Night since the late nineties. I decided to try it with this fan translation. It's aged excellently. I remember almost nothing about this game, so it's basically new to me.
I'm not sure why the stylish glasses have an intelligence penalty, but I'll take it.
