Story of Seasons A Wonderful Life beginner tips for fast money

Everything you need to have an efficient farm in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life

Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life is a complete, and incredibly faithful, remake of Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life that launched in the early 2000s on both the GameCube and PS2, and as we say in our full Story of Seasons AWL review, it’s one of the best of the series.

In this guide we’re breaking down some simple and incredibly helpful tips that you can use in order to get ahead in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life. Most of these tips focus on how to quickly make a profitable and high-quality farm, but you shouldn’t ignore the relationships you can form away from the farm.

Milk, eggs, repeat

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Every morning you should follow a pretty similar routine. If the weather is nice, let your animals out to graze. Milk your cows and goats, if you have them, and make sure all the animals have plenty of feed. Once the animals are taken care of, go and tend to your crops. Crops need watering at least once a day, but twice is better during summer. In the evening, around 12 hours after the first milking, you should go milk the cows again, and that’s a good time to check for eggs, too. Make sure to roughly follow this routine every day for success on your farm.

Essential upgrades

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You can upgrade your farm via the ledger. Farm upgrades are pretty expensive, and these are the main things you should be saving for. A Seed Maker is essential once you start breeding S rank crops, for example. You should always check Van’s inventory every 3rd and 8th of the month, as he will often sell unique outfits or upgraded tools.

Wool, the money maker

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Wool is very profitable in the early game, especially higher grade wool. Quality Wool can net 3.5k, easy, but Golden Wool? 6k each, and all you need to do is take good care of your sheep. Therefore, a male and female sheep pair should be one of the first animal pairings you buy after chickens.

Happy animals, more money

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Feed and brush your animals regularly, and you’ll get more money. Cows will upgrade their milk from B to A or S rank, wool quality will increase, and eggs can even become Gold Eggs, which sell for five times more than a regular egg. It really is that easy – take care of your animals, and they’ll take care of you.

Mining, fishing, flowers

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You need to live off the land in A Wonderful Life, and you should also make a profit from it. The Mine in the Northeast corner of Forgotten Valley is a great place to make cash, when Carter is actually present after 10am almost every day. Fishing can make you cash, if not. Flowers and herbs will grow all over the valley in predetermined areas – make sure to grab them all when they spawn, and save some flowers and herbs for rare recipes or seed hybrids.

Fertilizing the field

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The field that your barn animals can graze in starts out pretty sad. It will grow back, eventually, but the grass here spreads. If you cut it all down – it’ll be dead forever, but if you leave it, it’ll grow high and healthy. If you spread fertilizer on the field in a zig-zag pattern, the grass will quickly grow back in full, at which point you’ll pretty much never run out of grass to cut for animal fodder.

Infinite fertilizer

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When you have more than enough fodder, you can turn that into infinite fertilizer. You’ll need to Fertilizer Maker from the farm upgrades in the ledger, but you can just throw 99 fodder into it, and it’ll spit out hundreds of bags of fertilizer. It’s incredibly easy to get fertilizer this way, and means you’ll have no excuse to not have S rank crops every season.

Marriage material

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You’ll need to marry one of the inhabitants of Forgotten Valley at the end of the first year, and if you don’t decide who you like the most, the decision will be made for you. You’ll be given a Blue Feather at some point by the Harvest Sprites. Use the relationship menu to see how NPCs feel about you, and once it’s in the high red section, you can give them the Blue Feather to propose. Only NPCs that have hearts below their character profile are romanceable. 

S rank crops

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Got infinite fertilizer yet? Once you have the Seed Maker and Fertilizer Maker it’s becomes foolproof to get S rank crops, and even easier if you buy the Fertilizer Spreaders – they really do automate getting good crops. And it’ll pay off in the long run, believe it.

The circle of life

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Everyone dies eventually, that’s true for your animals, and it’s true for the residents of Forgotten Valley, too. Every year time will move on, people will die, move away, grow up, and change permanently, potentially locking you out of special scenes or the ability to get unique tools and items. If you want to make the most of having A Wonderful Life, make sure to talk to your neighbors and build relationships while you can, because you never know how long you have left.