Friendship Basics

Your relationships are based on your interactions with villagers, sprites, and animals. There are two gauges that will rank your relationships:

To see your current relationship status, open the main menu by using the X Button and then tab over to the Friend/Love Menu using the shoulder buttons on your Nintendo Switch. You can see your relationship with the villagers, the Nature Sprites, the animals on your farm, and your pets.

Increasing FP and LP

There are several ways to increase your friendship points and love points. The easiest is to simply talk to the person. You'll earn +1 FP and, if applicable, +200 LP with the person. For Kai, you'll earn +2 FP and +200 LP.

Giving gifts is another easy way to increase your relationships. Marriage candidates have gifts that will increase both friendship and love points, while non-candidates have gifts that will simply increase friendship:

Giving a gift to a person on their birthday will multiply the amount of FP and LP you earn by a factor of 5. For example, giving a loved-quality gift to a marriage candidate on their birthday will earn you +2500 LP and +45 FP! Try to give a gift to a villager or marriage candidate on their birthday. Remember that a marriage candidate's birthday will move to their alternative date if you happen to select your own birthday as their default birthday date.

You can further increase your birthday boost by adding wrapping paper to your gift. Head to Jeff's grocery store and press the A Button when standing to the right-side of his shopkeeper's counter, next to the wrapped gift. Each item you wrap costs 100 G, and will boost the LP and FP you receive by 25%.

Another way to increase your relationships is by participating in town festivals. These events will be marked on your calendar and announced on the news channel of your TV. Some of these festivals are gatherings in Rose Plaza, while others are smaller gatherings; the pre-marriage Valentines Day and White Day festivals do not have a gathering at all!

For contest-based festivals, typically you'll earn +5 FP with the villagers who are attending the festival, and then another +20 FP for claiming victory in the contest. For romantic-type festivals, you can receive +1000 LP or +2000 LP depending on the festival. Competition events don't earn love points, but you can earn some friendship points during romantic festivals.

Besides festivals there are romantic heart events and random villager events that can increase affection. During a romantic event you're oftentimes given a response to choose to a question or situation. Picking the positive choice will earn you +2000 LP. With random villager events you can earn friendship in some of the events, but not every random events awards you with a friendship boost with the event participants.

For animal and pet affection, you'll earn love points by interacting with the animals, brushing them, and letting them stay outside for 5 hours. With pets you can feed them Pet Treats too.

Decreasing FP and LP

Ideally you want to increase a person's friendship or love, but there are some actions that can negatively impact your relationships. There's not much in the game that would require you to intentionally decrease your point totals. Only the rival events require a low level of friendship/love to trigger, but you'll most likely trigger all those events early in your game.

Unlike the GBA game, there isn't a way to throw anything onto the ground to decrease FP/LP. Littering isn't possible in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town.

Locked Access

Trying to go upstairs or beyond locked doors may trigger a response that blocks your access to those areas. Many of the villagers have areas that they don't feel comfortable allowing you to go into until you have raised your friendship with them. After all, a villager need to be assured that you don't plan to go snooping through their underwear drawer.

Front Doors

The front doors to villagers' houses will unlock earlier in the day as your relationships improve. They will also keep their front doors unlocked later in the evening too:

There are exceptions when dealing with a few shopkeeper villagers:

The villagers whose friendship levels control the keys to their front doors are:

Gotts and Mugi don't appear to unlock their front doors at an earlier time based on your relationship status with them.