Ushi No Tane Forum

I’m actually okay with this. Gives me a excuse to work hard for the things I want.

I have mixed feelings about having to gather materials for the outfits, on one hand it always gives me an incentive to keep playing, but on the other hand, collecting everything is super tedious, and with all the makers we're supposed to have, I'm sure they'll find a way to make it more complicated. Hopefully the outfits are worth it!

Also wow, I'm looking at some of these NPCs and I haven't wanted to marry a villager this badly since Ayame in TOTT

I don't mind that you need materials for clothes. Trio's mechanics were pretty good about things because you could get up to like, 10 wool from a sheep/alpaca per shear if you kept up with the product up treats. Granted, it took forever to get the Textile Mill, but in the meantime you could buy fabric from the Westown shops.

What I minded was not having the requirements in front of me all the time. I'd go to the shop, look at the requirements, and by the time I got back to the farm, there was a good chance that I'd forgotten what thing I'd need to have made to get the outfit. The guide was a godsend for my inability to remember what I needed to do. Don't think there's much they'll do about that though,

As long as the animal sanctuary never makes a return, it'll be fine. 100 in-game hours... Whoever thought that was a good idea, really needed someone to tell them that it wasn't a good idea.

Night Owl wrote: What I minded was not having the requirements in front of me all the time. I'd go to the shop, look at the requirements, and by the time I got back to the farm, there was a good chance that I'd forgotten what thing I'd need to have made to get the outfit. The guide was a godsend for my inability to remember what I needed to do. Don't think there's much they'll do about that though,

I just make a list of requirements as I go. Plus the guide really is a given.

I’m with Beansalad in having mixed feelings and I relate so much with Night Owl in remembering what materials are needed by the time I got back to my farm.

I think if there was less animal produce and the material wasn’t locked behind a grade barrier (like if you have good quality wool but you can’t use it because the outfit requires regular wool) I wouldn’t mind as much.

I personally only like having 1-2 of each animal so if it requires a lot of one particular material or it needs to be a certain grade quality; I will be upset

We’ll see how the game plays before I completely decide.


In other news, I finally preordered the game today so I’m super excited

We're not going to have a guide this time, though, not for quite a while...around a year after it releases, we may have a mostly complete one. Plus a lot of people really find it sucks the fun out to have to stop and check a guide or a notebook or something while playing. (I'm not one of them, but I'd say more people are than aren't, though the balance of people willing to take notes while gaming is probably a little higher in this fandom than in most.)

I am ambivalent toward requiring materials. I don't love having to jot down notes to know what I need to do to get the next outfit(s) I want, but I can tolerate it and have done it for the last three games (not the remake, of course.) I also like having things I want that I can't get right away. Though they could achieve that with money alone. I for one will not spend 30,000 on a cute outfit when I haven't yet been able to buy a house upgrade or the fancy cow or...well, whatever it is I need to buy. So to leave gameplay more flexible/customizable, they could still make outfits something you can buy with money alone. Or make the materials purchasable. Or even just the higher-grade/more difficult materials could be for sale, and the price on them could be on the exorbitant side to keep it from being something you can complete in the first game season (unless you really, reeeeeeeeally love clothes and are willing to forgo all else to have them.)

Well, nothing we can do but hope there will be some material purchasing options. They seem to be making 'makers' a big deal in Olive Town. We've seen more of them than in any game previous already, as far as I know...and that screenshot of an entire large field FULL of them. Obviously we're going to need to use them a lot.

I have never really minded the heavy emphasis on crafting to get customization options for your avatar in the previous games, though I can definitely understand that point of view. In Trio especially, it functioned very adequately as an end-game money sink for me.

One thing I would like to point out that it is INCREDIBLY easy to take clean screenshots on the Switch with literally the press of a button, way more easy than it ever was on the 3DS, as most games didn't have a native ability to take screenshots and relied on the now defunct Miiverse service. I think the screenshot button will definitely come in handy for me for the purposes of "remembering things"! I'm getting up there in age and "remembering things" just keeps getting harder and harder.

The ability to connect your Switch directly to a PC with the same cord you need to, oh, say, plug the pro controller into your Switch (USB-C if you just want to buy a cord) and drag and drop all the screenshots to said PC should also make it a very friendly game for guide makers.

Hmmm, I don't really like taking care of animals that much (I prefer to focus on crops), so I'm not too much a fan of having to get my own products, but I can definitely deal with it. I think it would be a lot more fun for me, if instead of gathering the materials, clothes unlocked in the shop as you unlocked different achievements, like by upgrading your coop, or growing a certain amount of a specific veggie, befriending villagers and other things of that nature; that being said, I'm sure there's plenty of people who wouldn't like doing it that way either, so it becomes a matter of: you win some, you lose some.

I feel like from a developer standpoint...I get the choice. Raising animals is one of the game's systems. They want you to interact with the game's systems, so they create "incentives" to do so. The trouble is definitely in the lack of freedom. If someone wants nothing to do with animal husbandry, or only wants to keep one of each type of animal they're going to be miserable. :/ Which is not the point.

Who knows, though. Whether it was because it came from a Harvest Moon title or because it was popular in Stardew, they DID give us sprinklers. Maybe that's a good sign. Sprinklers negate game systems (by simplifying them) just like buying materials would. Fingers crossed!

I'm actually not happy about the sprinklers, because it made me think of how useless farming felt in SoS: FoMT. They also took out raising crop quality yourself...you just had to wait and your crops would naturally improve slightly by year. I hated that. I *want* to take care of my crops. I do not want to take care of the animals. But it felt like they added all kinds of incentives and necessities to taking care of animals while rendering crop farming incidental. They basically took all the fun out of farming for me entirely in the remake. (Though that may not be because it was a remake. Maybe it was like that in the original, too.)

I feel like they always offer us ways to make crop farming easier, like statues that double your watering, watering cans that cover half your entire field when they're maxed, fertilizer water to remove the need to fertilize manually, etc... but they never give us much in the way of bypassing all the fiddly animal care. Upgrading your tools makes tasks slightly faster, but there is no auto-milker that milks all the cows in one barn at once, or shears all the sheep at once, or etc. You always have to care for every animal, in every step, individually. I want to be able to upgrade my milker eventually to a milking station that milks all cows (in one barn) at once, and for a brush to upgrade into a livestock salon that will brush all your animals in the barn at once, and so on. They can all have really cute designs and cute animation and make the animals throw out cute happy little hearts every time it's used. Then it'd be more on par with all the short cuts they always let you take with crop farming.

I really enjoy planting my seeds, fertilizing them with the right nutrients, watering them (sometimes with enhanced water, too) watching them reach each growth stage, and eventually harvesting them. I can ignore sprinklers if I want to...not use them. (Though in SoS: FoMT they made it so that if you didn't use the sprites to do your farm work, you'd take all of your time just watering every day...it wasn't balanced and I didn't feel like I had a choice...to make the game work properly, I had to either plant very little, or use the sprites.)

You could use the sprites on the animals, but it negated the benefits of taking care of them yourself...your animals' hearts didn't go up if the sprites were the ones doing the care, plus they auto-shipped all of the products they got from them, which wasn't good, so you had to take care of the animals yourself if you wanted to avoid that. I gave up on SoS: FoMT in autumn of the first year because I was just not enjoying it at all. It didn't let me do what I wanted to do because it wanted me to do other things, instead. It was a bossy game that tried to force me to be a livestock farmer who spent every day socializing (or risk losing FP every single day.)

Anyway, I don't know yet if I will bother with sprinklers at all. If the crop farming is more detailed this time, maybe, but I'd rather just keep upgrading my watering can and be the rain for my crops myself. *kicks SoS: FoMT in the butt on her way out*

Jeez I knew the game was coming out early this year, but now that it's actually 2021 it really feels like it's coming up fast. Or maybe that's just because I didn't get SoSFoMT until the end of last year.

Iirc A Wonderful Life was the only game (technically games) in the series that ever had a milking room. It's been so long since I've played but I remember how strange it seemed to push a button and have the whole herd taken care of.

The simplest solution (imo) is sort of in the Harvest Sprite vein, but to be able to hire people. Even if it ends up more of a sprite system to just put the materials they collect in a box you can access to do what you want with everything. :/ All the assets and animations for a milking room are probably extravagant for a game budget this size but...hiring someone isn't. It's just...pathing, I think. Animations can just be recycled from your character.

I'd really like to see that, personally. Toward end game in most HM/SoS titles I get really sick of the tedium and end up paring down my farm to the bare minimum when it would be neat to keep it at its "prime". Sprinklers for crops, workers for animals.

I'm not envisioning a whole milking room, just a counter along one wall of the barn. You could just pop the cows into a line along the wall via a (short!) cutscene, have some milking sounds get made and a few bubbly hearts float up from the happy cows (or whatever), and it's done. They add and remove features and animations and things to every game. I don't see why it would be costly for them to improve animal care, for once, any more than it costs them to add any other cutscene or alter any other mechanic.

Hiring people would be fine, too, though I don't want to have to pay extra every time, or arrange the hiring continually if it expires every few days (such as with the Sprites), when upgrading a watering can to water half your field in one go is a one-time expense. I just want them to give me as many options to make animal care easier as they do for crop farming. How they go about it doesn't really matter to me. Be fair, Marvelous. Let us choose what to spend our time on. Crop farming, livestock farming, socializing, fishing, crafting...practically nobody likes every aspect of these games equally and prefers to spend more time on the bits they find the most fun. I feel like they've never really taken that fully to heart and invested as much as they could into flexible gameplay. (Though Trio had some decent mechanics that let you play a bit more flexibly in terms of mining/foraging/socializing, at least. But I think Olive Town is going to be more rigid than that. I think we'll have to spend a lot of time on foraging and crafting this time around. Hopefully socializing remains more forgiving. Or better yet, I hope I'm wrong, and it's ALL flexible. But I don't think there's yet been a Bokumono game that had the level of flexibility I'd like to see.)

I wonder if they've brought back critter catching, or if that's still out. I don't know if I want them to bring it back or not. Also, fish. I couldn't tell, but are fish named, this time? Or do you just catch small fish, medium fish, big fish...etc? I don't know how I want that to work either, though. It was weird to catch named fish but have them just turn into sizes in the inventory, but it did save space and was simpler for cooking.

As for the milking room (or wall) based on the quality of the cutscenes we've seen so far I'm betting ANYTHING that requires more animation gets heavily scrutinized. :/ I'll have to pay attention in credits to how many animators they have.

(As I'm typing...a milking room may actually be the simplest - just having it not be a place the player can go in. You push a button, watch the first cow go in, and all the milk appears in a box outside.)

Oh boy I didn't even consider they would go back to just having sizes of fish. D: That would be sad.

What I want for fishing depends entirely on how good or bad the minigame is. I wasn't a completionist about it, but I enjoyed the minigame in Stardew and eventually in Portia, which helped encourage me to fish. Pretty good minigame + a little downtime and I enjoy hunting for new types of fish. Aside from that just...traps. Pretty sure I remember seeing at least one variety of trap this time. Guess the question now is how long they last (and how tedious they are to craft).

That's a possibility. At some point (maybe after your milker is upgraded to max or your barn size is maxed or...whatever) you could order a milking room upgrade, and an archway is added to one of the walls. Go over to the arch, ring a bell or press a button and all the cows get an exclamation mark above their heads and start walking toward it. Then they can either walk through without the scene changing at all, or they can cut to a scene just showing one or two of your cows lining up/walking through the arch. Then it cuts back to normal view and your cows are back and little hearts are bubbling up from them to show they're happy to have been cared for, and it's all done. I think they could condense it into something quite brief (nobody likes long cutscenes that they have to see every day, ime.)

I liked having the named fish, too, but I do like when inventory is condensed, and I like not having to keep so many different things for cooking, so I have mixed feelings. Of course, I don't know how cooking will work this time, since it takes actual time on the clock to do it, now. I'm still upset about that, though...I won't mind as much if you can cook a stack of 99 hot milks in one go for the same 30 minutes it takes you to make a single one. Though I don't even know if we CAN bulk-cook this time, let alone it not taking extra time if you can. I'm worried about cooking. I really like cooking as a method of money-making. I think of it as being part of an artisanal community, sorta, like a farmer's market where they sell produce along with preserves and pies and so on.

I suspect, though, that this time cooking is going to be rather restricted. I think they don't want us to use it to make money this time...I think they want to force us to use makers as much as possible in Olive Town. Just my suspicion based on what I've seen so far. Maker products may be the money-maker this time around. Guess we'll see in about two months.

EDIT: Xseed put up a video about modes of transportation. Though what I took away from this is that the trees seem to lose their leaves in winter, which is neat. (Unless it's only in that area that that happens.) Except I hope it doesn't mean that crop farming grinds to nothing in winter. I think I saw seeds on a crop field there when he was riding the motorcycle around, and it was winter then, so...I can't remember if the confirmed winter crops or not yet.