Fruit Trees

Fruit trees are a low-maintenance crop that will produce fruit that can be shipped, given as gifts, eaten, or used as ingredients in meal recipes. They also don't require watering (super low maintenance!) and grow very quickly.

Planting

The basic five tree seedlings can be purchased from Vesta's farm starting in the Spring of year 1:

• Peach: 180 G
• Orange: 140 G
• Grape: 160 G
• Banana: 280 G
• Apple: 140 G

The generation 2 trees ("mysterious") are obtained by mixing the basic tree seedlings or fruit with Vinnie. The generation 3 trees ("rare") come from mixing generation 2 tree seedlings or fruit. Trees are not sensitive to field fertility. Even rare tree seeds will grow just fine in the least fertile field next to your farmhouse.

To plant the tree seedling bag, till the soil using your hoe and then plant the seed. The field squares directly touching the planted tree will turn into pavement. Trees need an empty field space surrounding their trunk. In the original Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions of A Wonderful Life, players could accidentally stunt their trees if they planted trees or other crops too close to a tree space. In this remake, the pavement around the trunk prevents that from happening.

To maximize field space, planting trees along the edge of the fields is a good idea. That way, the tree is bordered by unusable space, and only part of the field space is pavement.

You can remove a planted tree using your hoe on its trunk. The pavement surrounding the trunk will also turn back into soil.

Like crops, fruit trees will mature faster in summer and slower in winter. The number of days needed to develop into a full-grown tree starts at midnight on the next day after planting and accumulate every 12 hours. For example, if you plant an Apple Seedling on Summer 2, and it takes 5 days to mature during this season, then your Apple Tree will be full-grown on Summer 7 at noon.

Technical Stuff: Your Apple Seedling will have a total of .5 growth on Summer 3 at 12:00 am, 1 growth on Summer 3 at 12:00 pm, 1.5 growth on Summer 4 at 12:00 am, and so on. You'll reach a total of 5 days' of growth at 12:00 pm on Summer 7.

Fertilizer

The tree's foliage color will reflect the tree's quality rank. Rank B is light green, rank A is medium green, and rank S is dark green. Raising a tree's rank can be done by using fertilizer from Vesta's store and applying it to the tree's base. The downside is it takes many bags of fertilizer to raise the rank of a tree's produce.

• Gen 1 (basic): 27 applications of fertilizer to go from Rank B to Rank A, and 18 applications to go from Rank A to Rank S
• Gen 2 (mysterious): 36 applications of fertilizer to go from Rank B to Rank A, and 27 applications to go from Rank A to Rank S
• Gen 3 (rare): 54 applications of fertilizer to go from Rank B to Rank A, and 45 applications to go from Rank A to Rank S

There are two more straightforward ways to handle ranking up tree fruit. The easiest is to instruct Vinnie to mix any higher-rank seed bag with your tree seed. You can mix a higher-rank crop with tree fruit, but there's a chance that Vinnie will spit out a bag of higher-rank crop seeds instead of the desired tree seed. From my experience, this technique seems to be more successful when it's a seed-to-seed mixture instead of mixing raw produce, but on occasion, Vinnie can produce a failure this way too.

For example, you can mix an S-Rank Tomato Seed with a B-Rank Banana Seed and receive an S-Rank Banana Seed from Vinnie. This trick is much faster to achieve Rank-S than applying fertilizer one bag at a time!

Vinnie can't mix winter season Upseed Flowers with tree seeds, but you can mix a sacrificial crop seed bag with an Upseed to boost the crop seed to Rank S, then mix that Rank-S crop seed with a tree seed to achieve an S-Rank tree seed.

The second way to handle tree rank is to purchase Fertilizer Spreaders. These machines cost 60,000 G each and are attached to the three fields. Filling the spreader with fertilizer allows the devices to launch the powder into the air and across all non-S-Rank plants on the field. As long as fertilizer is in the machines, the fertilizer will auto-spread at 8:00 am and 8:00 pm. This method is a slower, generally hands-off way of achieving S-Rank trees. Once the tree reaches S-Rank, no more fertilizer will land on the tree.

If you happen to increase a tree's quality rank mid-season, the higher ranking fruit will appear the next year the tree produces fruit.

Harvesting

Tyically, trees will flower the season before they produce fruit. Once the tree's fruiting season begins, it takes about 2 days before you can collect fruit. You can harvest two ways:

1. Stand next to the tree and watch for the color of the field cursor. When the square cursor is yellow, push against the tree trunk using the Shake command. Ripen fruit will drop from the tree and auto-collect into your bag. There's no damage to the tree.
2. Let the ripened fruit naturally fall onto the ground. You can pick the fruit up off the ground like any other foraged item.

In practice, you'll do both of these things. Fruit might not be ripe when you shake the tree but may ripen later in the day and fall to the ground.

Each tree will produce about 16 fruit for about 6 days a season. While the tree will then flower again after all it's fruit has fallen, it won't have any more fruit until the next chapter (for Chapters 1 through 6) or the following year (Chapter 7).

In the original version of A Wonderful Life, a fruit tree produced about 24 fruit throughout the whole season. It must flower the season before the tree can produce. In the remake, a fruit tree has about 60% fewer fruit over half a season, but the fruit sells for 450% to 500% more than in the original game.

Another enhancement is that a tree can start producing fruit when it matures mid-season without the need for flowering. Any remaining fruit left on the tree when the season changes will disappear.