The Ushi No Tane websites specialize in information, FAQs, and guides about the Nintendo console versions of the Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, and Legend of the River King video games. These game genres are created and published in Japan by Marvelous (JP). In other regions, you'll find Natsume, XSeed Games/Marvelous (USA), Marvelous (EU), and Rising Star involved in the series' release.

The latest version of the mainstream farming series that have been released in various regions of the world are:

• Japan: Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (January 2023)
• North America: Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos (September 2023) and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (June 2023)
• Europe: Harvest Moon: The Winds of Anthos (October 2023) and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (June 2023)

The latest version of River King, in all regions of the world, is River King: Mystic Valley (JP 2007, NA 2008, EU 2009).

Since 2000, Ushi no Tane has been run by a grouchy old lady who happens to be fond of video game agriculture along with two feline helpers: Intern Captain Bootu and Intern Hondo Mewnaka. The website is not officially affiliated, sponsored, endorsed, or employed by the developers of Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, or River King. This is simply a fan site.

Latest Farming Video Game News

Happy Farm'n Friday! I finally grew something new! Huzzah! Take that terribly-rainy weather! A few months back, I tried starting poppies indoors, despite other gardeners' tales about how difficult they are to transplant outdoors. I tried four varieties, and it turns out they really are difficult to grow indoors. Only the Rose Feathered Poppy survived long enough to be moved to an outdoor flower pot. Now it's tall, blooming, and greeting everyone who comes to the front door, mainly package delivery folks and those pesky buggers who keep trying to sell me unwanted pest control services. I like my spiders just as they are!

With the dry weather last week, some of the dahlia tubers had started sprouting. But on Wednesday night, after it rained (again), I discovered why most of them hadn't produced any leaves - those dang slugs! I caught the nasty pests slime-handed, mowing the tender dahlia sprouts down to the dirt. Picked off 7 of them and then decided to try the 'ol beer trick, hoping that a small cup of booze would entice the slugs and keep them away from the flowers. All I have in the 'fridge were a few bottles of Schofferhofer grapefruit beer (it's definitely an interesting flavor), but in the morning, the beer offering had worked. Many little slugs had fallen into the trap, and the dahlias were mostly intact. Baiting slugs with beer had worked better than Slugoo granules. Now I have a use for old beer that nobody wants to drink, and I've tasked Mr.Fogu to create more slug beer-bait traps with the 3D printer.

As for my adventures through Rune Factory 5, I headed into the depths of the Kelve Lava Caves and collected the remaining materials to craft a Wind Cloak. Now, why would anyone craft something other than the +385 defense armor? That's nuts! I expect this armor to be with me for the rest of my adventures through Rigbarth. There aren't any other recipes in my forge that have more defense than the Wind Cloak.

Kickstarter Farm'n Game News

Pathea is looking for players to test the multiplayer function of My Time at Sandrock (Steam Store Link). This new gameplay feature is only available to Sandrock players who funded the game's development at a tier that contained early access and have played the game for at least 20 hours. The application period is open until July 21, after which 4000 players will be granted access to the multiplayer feature between August 8 and August 15. You can learn more about the multiplayer alpha on the Steam Store announcement page.

SquareHusky has been hard at work on his post-life farming game, Everafter Falls (Steam Store Link). First, the companion pet farmer has been reworked to handle multiple farm tasks, allowing a player to assign their pet to work on one chore (such as watering) while the player tackles a separate chore. Additional changes included adding fish silhouettes in the water and creating a weather station to transmit the upcoming forecast to a panel inside the farmhouse. One big change was the removal of the planned randomly-generated dungeons, as SquareHusky explained that the game engine would generate dungeons with confusing paths and dead ends; it simply wasn't fun. Now, dungeons will have a staged design with randomly-generated rocks, ores, and enemies such as the new Treasure Duck that will spit out phat loot if defeated before disappearing. Plans for an alpha build are expected after the next few developer blogs.

The latest news from Cloudscape (Steam Store page) includes a new island that players can visit. Wimnim Island is a sky island players can visit where they'll find shops, an animal ranch, and a museum. The island's general store, Frut's, is managed by a plant-like shopkeeper, Cheri Frut. She will sell seeds, sod, grass plugs, and tropical clothing. Developer Konitama plans to have animals for sale at the ranch, which can then be raised on the player's cloud island farm.

The Wandering Village (Steam Store page) will be at the Gamescon video game expo in Germany, taking place from August 24 to August 28. Stray Fawn Studio has been working hard on their giant-monster agricultural game. They've improved the user interface, added more animations for the giant Onbu, built a new Knowledge Point and skill tree system, designed new crops, and reworked the poison system and the spread of poison plants. In this game, some zones of the world have been poisoned, negatively impacting Onbu (and the village) as they walk through the toxic area.

The demos and other digital events that featured Roots of Pacha (Steam Store page) have given Soda Den a lot of helpful feedback to improve their prehistoric life-sim farming game. Besides new character creation options, adding more details to the landscape and a shortcut path behind a waterfall lets players quickly travel back down the hill. Soda Den plans to spend the upcoming months working diligently towards a full 1.0 release of their game.

A closed early-access release for Ova Magica (Steam Store page) is planned for the end of September. ClaudiaTheDev explained that she added a color saturation setting that players can use to tone down the game's bright colors. There is also a new egg-hunt event where locating hidden eggs around town can be traded for in-game items and crafting blueprints. How fun!

Lastly, the active campaign for The Gods Fabled: Soil Frontier has reached 50% of its funding goal, with about 2 weeks left before the campaign ends. Developer Zoyji recently explained how the animals on the farm will have moods that change throughout a day. Bad-weather storms can scare your animals and reduce product quality for a while, and interacting with animals will increase their happiness. Each animal's personality, such as brave, rude, timid, or bubbly, will influence how they react to environmental situations. For example, brave animals are less likely to be spooked by storms. Based on player feedback, Zoyji also added an option to harvest animal meat. Since some players don't want to partake in animal slaughter, this feature can be disabled in the game's settings. Likewise, an animal can be tagged as unkillable in the animal interaction menu.

HMGB 2 Comic

In this edition of the 1999 Harvest Moon 2 GB comic by Igusa Matsuyama, "Peat" decides he wants to go to the village after all...

Until next time!

Cher
(Getting closer to completing the HM: One World guide!)

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