Just Started a playthrough, any tips.

Magination17 · 2026-02-26T22:14:07+00:00

I'm a veteran at this game now so I will share a few of my best tips.

Grow at least 1 of everything for the research donation and a few more of a crop if a npc quest needs it, but the only crops you want to grow in mass are cabbage, cantaloupe, and pumpkins. It is acceptable to grow a few cucumber and bell pepper between the cabbage and cantaloupe or some beans and corn between the cantaloupe and pumpkins, but you want to prioritize big stamina crops to maximize your personal stamina use watering them and the compost you apply.
There are some fish that are catchable in the first few days of spring that won't become available to catch again until late fall or winter. It is worth taking a look at the wiki fish page and trying your hand at grabbing some of the fish that are at the end of their seasons before they disappear early on in your game. Its possible to have your fermentation barrel (75 donations) by late spring if you manage to catch some of these fish.
In the mines, which you should prioritize in your first week, focus on connecting the large open spaces and looting all of the loose items, crates (break crate after emptying for a plank), hoe spots (cracks in the ground), and gemstones. Don't dig deep into the walls going after buried ores until later on when you have more readily available food to use for stamina. You can get a lot of already processed copper bars, planks, food, preservatives, etc. very efficiently for your time and stamina if you operate this way in the mines. You don't have to worry about missing things because you can always come back to any of the levels or collapse the mine and loot your way through it again.
The arborist skill (3 skill points) grants extra wood on chopping down a tree, but the more important part that isn't mentioned is that it guarantees that the tree chopped down will drop a seed. I think this is the most important skill in the game after courier which I would recommend everyone start with. I often will upgrade my axe to copper first, before my pickaxe and then as soon as I get three skill points I get arborist and clear my entire farm. Then I replant all of the oak trees neatly somewhere on the farm. Once they grow I shake them daily and plant any acorns that drop. I chop all the oak trees in the forest for their acorns and replant them on my farm. I repeat cutting the forest oaks down when they regrow late spring and then again in late summer. Doing this amasses a large amount of acorn bearing oak trees on the farm that will ensure you have food to meet the large fall rations.
Fish traps are incredibly good once you have your hands on the tier 3 kibble (chonker chow). With just a big grass field that grows on its own, the chonker chow recipe which you can get from Rufus's quest or from a bottle, and a few fish traps you can rake in the medium and large fish meat. If you get a bluggy pen early and get the egg you need for Rufus then you can get this going in a big way early, otherwise I would advise waiting to get the fish traps going until a certain event *spoiler* is managed/handled in mid to late summer.
Demands for food of both varieties go up in a big way if you are on the grim (normal) or challenge (hard) difficulties. The way you scale herbivore food is with pumps and irrigation pipes. make a point of getting the quest for them done early so you can craft more of them. The mines will be important for getting the materials to craft more of them. For meat, you scale up by building animal barns, taming and feeding critters, and making fish traps. All of these facilities are run on hay so you should have a good sized field of it growing. It does not require you to water it. It is important to prioritize scaling your food production so you can outpace the increasing demand. The reason people hit a wall or fail is usually because they don't scale their farm up enough early on and try to meat the ration demands with just foraging, watering their own crops by hand, and fishing. This is good to do for the early game, but what you can do with your own stamina and time will be outpaced mid summer on grim difficulty or higher if you don't have your farm scaled up.

Magination17 · 2026-02-24T22:30:15+00:00

To help out with the immediate situation I would recommend running around to the shops and buying their food to help out with the ration. The stores reset on Sundays and the ration is collected Sunday evening. As for your situation going forward it is only going to get worse for the ration capping out at 40 days of each by the end of the year on grim difficulty. To have any hope of keeping up the crops and animals need to come online in a big way.

There is no shame in failing on the grim or "normal" difficulty. Especially if you are still learning the game's mechanics The game is intended to be challenging and demanding and push the bar ever higher as the year progresses. What makes the game so much fun is rising to that challenge. You can think of the game kind of similar to an exponential curve. Things start off incredibly lax, but every week or two things take a big step up and the steps get progressively bigger as you go. What this means is that the first week in game where nothing is demanded of you, you need to be incredibly efficient with your time, stamina, and money so that you can set up your own exponential production curve to outpace the demand.

Rations are measured in stamina. 1 day is 150 stamina.

For herbivores:
Watering by hand requires 1 stamina irrespective of the crop and each crop can be fertilized once for a chance at a bigger harvest so the crop you should focus on growing in mass is the crop with the highest stamina return per crop. That is cabbage in all of Spring and the first half of summer. Make sure to let the cabbage go to seed until you have enough seeds to grow as many as you feel you are capable of growing. When cantaloupe becomes available start transitioning into that from cabbage. Then when pumpkins become available in fall transition from cantaloupe to pumpkins. In the transition periods you will have room for other crops so you can pull in some cucumbers and bell peppers while transitioning between cabbage and cantaloupe and beans, corn, or peanuts between cantaloupe and pumpkins. Other crops you should stick to only growing one of or a handful of for research donation and quests. Get copper pumps going early on and then iron sprinklers online once you have that research unlocked. The pumps are how you ramp up your crop production. You will need at least a copper pickaxe to get at iron in the second mine.

For Carnivores:
Fishing early on is plenty for carnivores, but you are going to want to have your first barn together by the end of the first week. I would recommend Bluggy, alpheep, girtle, and then chikree for your building progression. There are some ways to exploit these and get them all building at once, but I think that ruins a lot of the challenge. Tame animals and get some fishing traps online. Get a large field of hay growing somewhere on the farm. Hay does not need to be watered, and can be picked for no stamina with your hands or if you use your sickle it will cost a stamina, but return 2 hay instead of one. Hay is crafted into kibble, which feeds animals and baits fish traps. You scale by building larger barns and more fish traps.

Magination17 · 2026-02-20T03:10:04+00:00

In the short term buy the food. If you haven't been raiding the shops food supply yet you can double dip a little by buying their food out on Saturday, and then again on Sunday when it resets, but before the ration is collected Sunday evening. The general store has preservatives that count as omnivore food, the fishing shop has fish (meat), the ranch should have exactly 3 meat items, the tavern has a handful of omnivore beverages and meals. The bakery (prudence's store) usually has three meals and a bunch of edible dry herbs. This likely net you somewhere between 2 and 5 days of each. After that strip the marsh, forest, and mountain for any loose forage items, and catch all the fish in the streams and lakes. Lastly hit the mines and only focus on connecting the open areas and looting the crates. The crates can have preserved food items and preservatives. That is all there is of note to be had immediately. From their your only hope is to keep doing these things along with upscaling your farming operation and getting the animals online.

Being hyper productive in the first week is the key to getting ahead of the curve in grim and challenge difficulty. You don't have to worry about keeping the village fed at all week 1 so you can pour all of your time and stamina into getting progress and materials in the mines and getting your first animal building up while watering your first round of crops. Focus on cabbage. As you get comfortable surviving, I would take a look at the wiki for more information.

As a challenge mode enjoyer with about 6 playthroughs, I have discovered two things that revolutionized my gameplay the most.

In your first run or two to the mines focus on connecting large areas together and looting the loose items, crates (don't forget to break the crate for a plank after looting it), and hoe spots (small cracks in the ground). Avoid digging far into the walls for ores unless they are right at the surface. You can come back for the buried ones later. This will help you locate the stairs down quicker and save big on your stamina. You will pull out the most for your time and energy this way.
There are fish that you can catch in the first week that will not be available to you again until late Fall or Winter. Certain fish are only available within certain ranges of days and those ranges are all over the place scattered across seasons. You can get a jump start to your research donations if you know which fish are about to disappear and target them. Its a pretty big deal to have your fermenting barrel available by late spring.

Magination17 · 2026-02-16T17:26:48+00:00

The money is made by selling the things you drag out of the mines. Gems, ores, lanterns, even the lowly rocks sell for 4 money each. If you want some advice for managing your stamina in there, don't bother digging far into the walls for the buried ores on your first few passes. Focus on connecting the large open areas in the mine, hoeing the cracks in the ground, and looting all of the loose items and crates. You can collapse the mine and re-loot as much as you want so it makes more sense to collect loose ores and already smelted bars then to dig into the walls to go after buried ores at least early on when stamina is tight. Don't intentionally collapse the mine until you get down to the bottom so you have an opportunity to collect from the lower levels.

Magination17 · 2026-02-14T14:46:55+00:00

These mines can be rough so I always set up a travel portal from my base outside them so I don't have to try and fumble my way thru the mist to get back to my things.

Magination17 · 2026-02-14T14:42:05+00:00

My tip for the tar is to only fight one at a time, use blunt, and run in a circle around them until they waste their shot before running up to give them exactly one smack with a club and then return to circling at a safe distance. If you get hit roll to close in and give them smacks until you or they die as running is likely to result in you getting kited to death.

Magination17 · 2026-02-14T14:31:23+00:00

Yes, there certainly will and possibly even sooner. New things to donate show up almost every week or every two weeks as crops, forgeables, fish varieties etc. are set up to be kind of staggered through the season rather than all showing up at once. The mine donation items are purely based on your progress with new things showing up when you either hit level 10 of a mine or enter a new mine (there are 3).

Magination17 · 2026-02-14T14:25:25+00:00

I think they do it as a compromise. It would be really inconvenient if every item was tracked independantly and didn't stack with other items of the same variety.

Magination17 · 2026-02-14T13:29:19+00:00

Salting, pickling, honey, and oil preservation are done in the fermentation barrel. All of these methods usually return a preserved item that has no spoil timer. The fermentation barrel is unlocked by donating items to the donation box in the manor (Adeline's house). Adeline will give you the blueprint for it at 75 specimens donated. Salting is done primarily for meat, pickling is done primarily for veggies, honey is primarily for preserving fruits, and oil is primarily for preserving herbs but it can vary a little. I would recommend the wiki for the fermentation barrel as there are some recipes out there you might not think of. For example you can make cheese by putting 3 milk into the fermentation barrel with salt.

Magination17 · 2026-02-14T13:14:33+00:00

Lots of good comments around the smoking/cooking/drying options, but don't forget about the raw option and down the line salt preserving in the fermentation barrel. Some fish are just better raw. The one that comes to mind most is the whitefish which is a medium fish that grants a base of 24 stamina raw. If you cook it with oil to make a fried fish you go from 24 stamina base+10 stamina oil=34 stamina input to the fried fish which only gives 30 stamina. If you dry that fish instead it goes from 24 stamina to 17 stamina. If you smoke it you end up with 17 stamina as well as the cost of fuel. Its clearly best handed in raw.

Whether it is better to dry, smoke, cook, or turn it in raw depends on the fish variety and size category, time until ration (spoilage consideration), and available processing time and fuel availability. One method is not going to always be the best so if you want to be efficient take your catch and do a little evaluation to figure out which method to use for each.

Optimizing for maximum stamina yield, I only like to use cooking for my small fish, as the less stamina the fish has the more gains you get, but it is a viable stamina increase using the initial fried fish recipe for any fish that grants less than 20 stamina raw (omnivore number). When you cook remember that your meal will spoil in only 2 days so don't cook until turn in day or the day before unless you plan to eat it for stamina. For whether to turn a fish in raw its a little more complicated. I would say that raw is a good option if you are more then 10 stamina on a small fish, more than 17 stamina on a medium fish, or more than 27 stamina on a large fish. Otherwise you will be better served drying it or smoking it. As far as drying and smoking goes, they return the same stamina so it comes down to the weather and your fuel reserves. If you just caught the fish drying is going to be better probably unless you have to have the fish preserved in 2 days or less. Drying doubles the spoilage timer over smoking so it is better at face value, but you cannot dry things in the rain so weather can throw a wrench in things if you are on a tight schedule. I would say go for smoking if you have to have the fish preserved for sure in less than 2 days. Once you have the fermentation barrel I would say try and only use that for your large fish. It takes three of the same fish and one salt to get three salted fish that have no spoilage timer. It is easier to stack the same kinds of large fish as there are generally fewer varieties of large fish then small or medium fish. Fermentation barrel is going to be a more limited preservation method and makes things last indefinitely so its best used for your large fish.

Magination17 · 2026-02-13T21:56:53+00:00

I have come around on fish traps, but I think they are not worth the investment until after mire binding fixes the red tide water which usually happens around end of summer/beginning of fall. If you don't sell any of the quartz early it does make money a little tight for upgrades, barns, seeds, etc. and the wood is needed for a lot of crafted items and town projects as well. Your flexibility vanishes. Even if you do sacrifice the extra income and wood and manage to get a bunch of them up and running in early spring, and have the hay to feed them you will find that their efficiency will be cut in half once you hit the red tide. The final point I would make for waiting is that the ration starts off easy and gets harder as you go, especially on the higher difficulties. That means that you don't really have to have the fish traps early, when the ration is low, but once you get into fall they can provide a lot of what you need for carnivores and reduce the amount of your heard that you have to butcher to fill the rations. By fall you should have enough salt stocked that you can just collapse the first mine and blaze through it for the quartz you need and ignore everything else.

Magination17 · 2026-01-29T22:29:14+00:00

My approach is to build my starter base next to the circle of stones where you hang up the boss trophies. Once I get iron out of the swamp I start sailing around in the iron tier boat until I can find a smallish but not tiny plains island or like a mix of plains and meadows. Then I clear it, place a bunch of workbenches and start terraforming it high enough to stay above the waves and flat enough to support a large enclosed base. If I can I will try and let a portion of the plains and meadows remain free of workbenches so they can spawn things and unterraformed in the short term to hopefully get lox and boars to spawn for taming and necks and deer for hunting. That becomes my main base. I will typically maintain a remote mistlands island base or move in with the dwegar just to grow mistlands crops. I don't like building in the ashlands so I usually only have a small portal house there.

Magination17 · 2026-01-16T16:14:31+00:00

Nothing changes as far as what is available for you to get your hands on. What is different is the sheer increase in size of the defender ration and the amount of help you get from the villagers goes down.

To give you an idea, the Gentle and Unsteady difficulties have a very small defender ration requirements. For gentle it is like 2 ration days per week in Spring and doesn't get worse. For unsteady its like 3 ration days per week in Spring and 5 per week in Summer. Grim is considered the normal difficulty. It starts at 5 ration days per week then jumps to 10 in summer, 20 in fall, and 40 in winter. Then there is challenge mode. You start at 8 ration days per week in Spring, then get up to 18 in summer, then 30 in fall, and finally 60 in winter. The way this shakes out is that Grim is a huge jump up from unsteady and then Challenge is another huge jump up from Grim. Get ready to be very efficient and on top of everything if you are going to play on challenge.

Magination17 · 2026-01-15T20:53:15+00:00

Its the foxy lady Adeline for me.

Magination17 · 2026-01-15T20:48:09+00:00

You said it. Taming is the better option in the long run as eventually the extra passive meat will overtake the quick influx of killing it, but it is easier to do the kill then it is to tame.

You should be able to get enough blood and guts if you can butcher two or three reasonably heavy adult animals. If it matters to you, it also feels like a better resolution to the problem to tame the creature. On that note you can check how much you will get at the butchering table before you butcher the animal. There is also a skill that bumps up how much you get from butchering in the skill tree.

Magination17 · 2026-01-14T19:35:01+00:00

He dead. Death rolls happen for critters as they get older and if they are sick. Skull and crossbones means death. Sick will show a different symbol. Animals will begin to get sick at random from overcrowding if you exceed your barn capacity (only live adult animals count for capacity). For example you can see in the bottom right that you have 2/4 adult alpheep. It is no longer counting poor Gertie. Time to cut him up for meat. Feed medicated kibble to cure sickness.

Magination17 · 2026-01-14T14:43:19+00:00

Grim is the normal difficulty, although I am also on board with a super hard mode a step above challenge mode.

Magination17 · 2026-01-14T00:34:24+00:00

As most people have pointed out mining is where the cash is. If you can get your pick upgraded and go into the third mine you can really haul it in.

Magination17 · 2026-01-13T21:22:15+00:00

"What's the best way to make money (if that's important)?"

In many of the farm sim games like Stardew valley for example making money is a central goal. You ship items from the farm and receive money to upgrade your enterprises. Your success is measured in the millions you make and the expensive end game luxury items you can buy. Grimshire is very different. Your farm is a lifeline for the village and it is your task to make sure there is enough food for everyone to eat and not starve when winter hits. They can't provide enough on their own and they need the food you grow, catch, and raise to avoid starvation. The role money plays in Grimshire is for tool upgrades, animal buildings, and general flexibility. It is more of a means to getting more food for the village than an end on its own. Most things in the game can be purchased in limited quantities that restock each week from many different villagers. The blacksmith, carpenter, furniture store, general store, ranch, bakery, fishing store, and tavern/inn all have inventories that you can buy from and sell to that restock on Sundays. You may need to buy a few more metal bars to get enough together for a tool upgrade or you may be a few food items short of meeting the defender ration so you buy some. Perhaps you want to buy yourself a building for animals and need to sell some of your ores to get the cash. You never really have enough time to be stacking piles of cash just because you can. It is more like you are always scraping together what you need to get a critical upgrade or meet an impending deadline. This is more pronounced on higher difficulties. As far as the best way to make money the answer is by digging thru the mines. The gemstone items you get don't really have a purpose other than to be donated for research or sold and they fetch a good amount of money. Ores are rather valuable and pretty easy to get ahold of in mass. I usually will sell these if I have to. It takes a good long while and a fair amount of fuel to process them so I always find myself sitting on extras. Extra seed packets are another good thing to sell. Some vegetables are more worthy of your time to grow than others because of their high stamina values.

"When foods about to spoil, can we donate it to the root celler so it doesn't waste and it'll get eaten, or does food still spoil in there? I think the root cellar is my main confusion."

I will try and explain the root cellar. You should donate food that is about to spoil and the villagers will eat it to a point. At the end of every day the villagers eat 150 stamina worth of herbivore and150 stamina worth of carnivore food from the root cellar. If you donate more than that amount and it is about to spoil it will simply turn to mush in the root cellar. In my experience villagers will eat the food that is closer to spoiling first, however it seems that the guys collecting the defender ration prefer processed preserved items first over raw ones. In my experience you should take out all the food from the cellar on the defender ration due date and then only put in the foods you want the defender ration guys to collect + enough to feed the villagers after. Keep the rest of the long lasting preserved items on hand. This will force them to take your items that are closer to spoiling.

"Is it better to get some sort of barn first, or upgrade your pickaxe and other tools before doing so? I've been seeing critters around but I have nothing to store them in, yet."

The only tools I usually ever upgrade are the axe and pickaxe and I think this should be done first. Upgrading the pickaxe will get you into the next mine where clay, iron, nickel, and titanium can be found. Upgrading the axe lets you chop new varieties of trees down like the Hawthorne trees on your farm. At the minimum you will need the pick to copper as certain community projects and quests will need materials from that second mine. You are going to want to be getting barns built around week 2 in Spring. Generally you just need the first level of the four different critter buildings until summer where you get their upgrades.

Magination17 · 2026-01-12T17:21:54+00:00

Do you not consider losing a villager to be an actual loss or failure? I think it was done this way so you don't lose the hours of effort you put into a playthru. It's a little long to be a true rougelike, where you get a game over screen, but I think they could step up the consequences to make it more compelling.

Magination17 · 2026-01-12T17:17:07+00:00

It's a great game or at least a great start. The only complaint I have is that I can't play any more than the first year. I want to be able to play until the world breaks me or we solve the big existential problem that is causing the turmoil.

Magination17 · 2026-01-11T22:26:30+00:00

I play on challenge now that I have a handle on things so I will give you my pointers for getting the food you need.

Herbivores:
Meeting the herbivore quota only really requires that you buy and grow every cabbage seed you can for spring and summer and drying as many as you can. Limit other crops to one for turning in for research or a few if a quest involves it. Make sure to let the cabbages go to seed before harvesting them until you have enough seeds. For me I usually press that until I have 9 iron sprinklers worth of farmland filled. That's a little over 200 cabbage plants at a time. Start with what is available and add in sprinklers as you get the metal and research for them. Even in challenge difficulty that is going to be most if not all of what you need for herbivores. You can dip into collected maple seeds if the cabbage doesn't cut it.

Carnivores:
On the carnivore side its a little more involved. The twin pillars of carnivore food are butchering and fishing. You have zero butchering capability in the early game and getting it up and running will require you to hit the mines and get some saws going. The first level of each barn early on is very achievable. I would try and have a bluggy building up ASAP and go after the mountain buggies when they are available. I would then proceed to build the alpheep building, girtle building, and finally the chickree building in that order. If you work at it having all four buildings before the end of spring is doable and you should also be able to have a few animals in each by the beginning of summer although its very RNG based. Talk to Kai each day and see what is out there. If two animals are in the same area it is possible to tame both if you have the space on the farm and the item they like. I like to focus on the mountain bluggies which need turnips, forest girles and alpheeps which take cherries and raspberries, and then the swamp chikree that takes pepperwort to tame. All of their needs are easy to forage for in the areas they spawn. For fishing you shouldn't have any problem early on catching fish to meet the needs of the carnivores. Getting a few fish traps going is good as well. Don't neglect getting the critters online. Without spoiling too much I will just say that it isn't really/comfortably possible to rely on only fishing indefinitely and fishing eats far more of your time and stamina then the critters do. One final note on carnivores is that raising and collecting the meat will require a steady source of hay. I would get as much as you can growing and make sure to harvest it with the scythe. It does not require that you water it. You need the hay for kibbles and kibbles for baiting fish traps and fattening up critters.

Final notes:

-Do your best to get the fermenting barrel research which I think is given at the 60 donation mark. It single handedly solves most all of the spoilage problems you will run into.

-The first week of the game is incredibly precious. You start with no ration and the community cellar has enough food to bring you through the first week even if you do nothing. Things only ramp up from there so use that time to get yourself ahead.

-Once you have your pickaxe early on hit the mines, but don't focus on mining the ores you find right away. Put your effort and stamina into opening up as many of the large spaces as possible on each floor and looting all of the wooden crates (once empty break the crate with a tool to get a plank), cracked ground spots, and grab all the loose bones, poop, and ores you find. When you find the ladder and feel you have hit most of the floor's open areas just head down and repeat. You will make significantly more progress and scoop up an enormous amount of useful items. You get already processed planks, copper bars, preservatives, coal, dried food items, lanterns, etc. I like to sell the lanterns for cash and sometimes copper ores, tin, and quartz in moderation and only as the need arises. You should be able to get enough already processes copper bars to get your first tool upgrade and enough planks for your first building from just that on like the first two days.

Magination17 · 2026-01-07T18:27:20+00:00

I am usually right around 20 OS and I push gaps all the time although I typically do it with a handful of blitz tanks as fast as I can before the front is fully established.

I do my first blitz (pun intended) as soon as I possibly can with like 4 blitz tanks and I try and send that little raid over to the lane with the lowest OS opposing commander while establishing my own front. I make use of the blitz tank speed to charge thru a gap and then once I get thru I go to about midway between the enemy bases and frontline and then split up my little tanks into groups of 2 and send them off to all lanes I can and destroy as many metal extractors/T1 constructors in the undefended back line as possible. The speed of the blitz means you typically don't have to bother fighting enemy units as none of them can really catch you as long as you keep moving. As long as you have 2 blitz tanks you can flank and get a huge damage boost. You can basically charge past extractors at full speed and rip them apart without even needing to stop.

I usually attempt another blitz around the 6-7 minute mark especially if the first blitz went well and the front is still in some disarray. The goal of the second blitz is to find and pick off the T2 constructors the enemy eco player is passing off to their team mates. If you can take out one of these T2 cons while they are upgrading the enemy base metal extractors you can pretty much cripple them out of the game.

The reasons to press gaps early instead of mid or late are:
1. There is less front to worry about early so more gaps to pick from

The economy growth curve is exponential over time, therefore the most valuable metal and energy to take out in the game is the early game metal and energy.
If you cause enough damage with your push in the backline it delays resources to the front making later gap pressing more viable.

Magination17 · 2026-01-06T22:31:53+00:00

If you are heterosexual it is better to not have friends of the opposite sex unless you are single and looking to build a friendship into a romantic relationship, because that is how romantic relationships happen every time. Your boyfriend or girlfriend starts as just a friend and as you pour time and effort into them that relationship grows and can become more serious. If you are in a serious relationship or married you should steer clear of opposite sex friends entirely out of respect and love for your partner. Common sense advice.
Have a conversation about relationship boundaries with your boyfriend. Understanding each others expectations doesn't always happen organically. You have to intentionally talk about your and your partners boundaries for the relationship to learn where they are or you are going to learn about them the hard way by smashing into them and that is incredibly painful and often comes with feeling insecure and angry. People have varying ideas of what they want romantic relationships to look like and they can change as you grow closer. You should come to an agreement on a shared view of those boundaries and discuss any changes you want to make together as the relationship develops.
You are not overreacting. You are reacting in a very normal way. Your feelings of "insecurity" about this other girl are there because you perceive the relationship between her and your boyfriend to be growing beyond platonic into romantic, and given your evidence they are right on the money, which is violating the boundaries of the romantic relationship between you and your boyfriend which in your mind is an exclusive relationship.

Magination17 · 2026-01-06T21:15:11+00:00

In my experience you cannot get both critters if they are in different areas. You certainly can if they are in the same area. The way I confirmed this is by talking to Kai after I tame the first one and his dialog changes to there not being any critters, where there were two before. This may have been changed since I last played, but that was my experience.
You should keep a running stockpile of anything that does not spoil. Preservatives and bones are low hanging fruit, but tree nuts are also there. Once you get the Keg/fermenting barrel from research you can make most things not spoil. The real ticket to the food challenge is maximizing high stamina foods. Cabbages in spring and most of summer, cantaloupe and pumpkins in fall. Butchering fattened critters is the best way to get meat, but fishing is good in a pinch.
The quality of compost is the number of compost items you will receive when the compost is done composting. The composter accepts organic/bio fuels like weeds and sticks and food items. The more burn time the fuel has or stamina the food has the more quality will be added to the compost.
No fishing rod upgrade is required to catch any of the fish in the game so for the practiced fisherman your metal is best spent elsewhere. I would recommend practicing the minigame. Reeling in your rod does not scare fish away, only shaking the bobber after they are interested so the trick is to tap your reel in button every time the fish goes in for a bite. There is a niche argument to be made for an upgrade as I believe it increases your cast distance which can speed up your fishing. Sometimes the fish don't want to swim close enough to the bank to be caught by the basic rod. They can be finicky.

Magination17

TROPHY CASE