The Harvest Sprite Casino and Medal System


I was originally going to make this section part of the harvest sprites section. But the more I thought about it, the more that it seemed to require its own section.  A special thanks goes out to Andrew who inspired this section with a lengthy email that he sent me.  The email points out that this is another way to make money quickly early in the game.  However, I have tried it and I have found that digging through the second mine will yield a better profit in the long run.  The tricks mentioned here can generate about half a million gold in two to three hours worth of work off of dumb luck.  A run of the mine stopping at every floor divisible by three or five will yield 8 to 9 hundred thousand gold.  But, this is another option. 

However, I do like the idea of adding a section discussing the sprite casino and medals.  But I want to take a more structured and complete approach than the email outlined.  I am using some of the information from Andrew's email here, but I am going to add some more of my own thoughts and format to the plan here.  So, here we go. 

Harvest moon DS takes quite a bit from the system that was developed and introduced in mineral town.  One of the items that made mineral town so popular was the fact that the harvest sprites could help you work on your farm.  Hiring the harvest sprites in mineral town allowed you to increase the productivity of your farm by not having to do all the work yourself.  The sprites could do work faster and more efficiently that your character could.  They could also get to places you couldn't, for example they can pick crops in the center of a formation without cutting one of the plants down to reach them.  This meant that you wouldn't have to sacrifice a plant on crops that regrow.  Well, the harvest sprites are back and better than ever, but there were quite a few changes to the system.  This section is going to go through them. 

Well, the first major change begins with the number of harvest sprites available in the game.  Mineral town had only seven that could perform one of three jobs. Harvest Moon DS has quite a few more at 101 possible sprites and they can serve even more functions in this game.  But, the system you use to hire them is a little different this time around.  First, there are several teams of twelve sprites each that perform a specific task and this time you need to unlock them by doing various activities on your farm and around the valley.  A compiled list of the tasks is in the previous section for several of the sprites. Also, this time you need to pay the harvest sprite teams with medals that you can buy or win at the tree where they live.  The price depends on the number of days you want to hire them for and which team you hire. The experience system for increasing a sprite's productivity is still in place.  A harvest sprite will become more proficient at their job as they perform it over time. 

The new harvest sprite hiring system is based on a currency of medals.  You can obtain medals either by buying them from roller or winning them at the casino.  Medals cost 10g each, but it is easier to win them if you are patient.  Once you have medals purchased, you can go choose a team to hire by talking to Guts in the front lobby of the tree.  You can only hire one team at a time and you cannot hire a team until you have unlocked at least one sprite from the team.  This means that you cannot distribute the work load as easily as you could in mineral town between the sprites, so choose which team you want to hire carefully and plan on doing the rest of the work yourself.  The sprites have a lot more diversity in the jobs they can do in Harvest Moon DS, but they can only do one job at a time.  Not all of the sprites can work on your farm.  Some of them work in the casino and serve as the TV station hosts.  Guts hires out the teams and Jet also runs a small store in the tree next to guts where you can buy several accessories and the records for the fifth channel. The items and their prices can be found in their respective sections in this guide.   I will have the accessories section up hopefully in the next update. 

The Teams:

There are a total of 7 different teams of harvest sprites you can hire to work on your farm.  The cost of hiring each team varies and you can only hire one team at a time.  I have grouped their unlocking requirements in the previous section by team.  However, I want to give a more detailed explanation of how each team functions here.  Note, the harvest sprites will no longer work on festival days.

Healing Team (purple)

The healing team is useful if you need to recover stamina and fatigue and don't have the hot springs unlocked or have the funding to purchase bodygizer and turbojolt.  To use them, hire the team from Guts and select an area on the map.  Go to that area and you will find them standing in a central location in that area.  Speak to one of them and they will tell you that they can heal you by 10%.  Then they will restore 10 points of stamina and fatigue.  You can use them multiple time in one day.  You just need to wait a game minutes for their powers to recharge.  The more experience they have, the quicker their powers will recharge.  If you have quite a few of them, it is possible to get healed multiple times without waiting.  Just talk to different ones. 

Harvest Team (Green)

The harvest team does just what their name implies.  The go around the map and harvest items that can be shipped.  The will collect wild foraging items like colored grass as well as any ripe crops you have in the selected area.  The will begin the first area you selected and then move on to the next area after they finish with the first one.  They start out only able to handle a few bags of crops each, but as their experience increases, they can handle more and more crops.  They are essential to making a large profit from shipping out crops. 

Animal Feeding and Collecting Team Red.


There are two teams that can take care of the animals in harvest moon DS.  This team feeds your animals and collects and ships anything that they produce that is ready to ship.  They are helpful if your animals are happy and you have a lot of them.  You can select different spaces, but since all of your animals are on your farm you will likely be selecting there more often than not. 

Animal Brush and Pet Team (Yellow)


This is the second animal team.  They will brush and pet your animals each once a day.  They are useful if you need to raise the affection level of your animals without tending to them yourself.  Be careful though.  You still need to feed your animals and collect their products yourself if you hire this team to work for you.

Collection Team (orange)
When you hire the collection team, they will go to the area's you selected on the map starting with the first area you picked.  Their purpose is to collect the fodder, lumber, and stone locate in those positions on the map.  They will clean an area out and move onto the next area.  The amount of material they can collect depends on their experience.  They are useful if you don't have the time or stamina to collect building materials yourself.

Watering Team (Light Blue)


The purpose of the watering team is to have them water your crops.  They can handle multiple areas of the map and follow the same progression as the harvest team.  The amount of crops they can water is dependent on their experience.  The more they have the more crops they can water.  They are helpful when you want to conserve stamina on watering crops.  You can hire them intermittently with the harvesting team to make efficient work of harvesting your crops. 


Fishing Team (Deep Blue)


The fishing team collects and ships fish from the area you select on the map.  They are useful if you want to expand your list of the fish in the game and they allow you to make a profit just by hiring them.  You will want to spread their area's out from week to week as you hire them to catch different types of fish.  The level and number of fish each sprite will catch and ship increases as they gain experience.  You will notice that they require a good number of fish to unlock.   You can hire the team to gather the fish for you, but you need to catch the last fish in each interval yourself to unlock the next sprite.  For example, if you wanted to unlock the 1000 fish sprite, even if the team caught 2500 fish, you would still need to get 2501 your self to unlock the next sprite.  You can only unlock one sprite per fish you catch, so if you need to unlock two sprites you will need to catch 2 fish yourself. 


Medals and the Casino:

The new system for hiring the sprites works on medals rather than giving them gifts and razing their affection like in mineral town.  You can buy medals directly from Roller for 10g each or you can win them from the casino games.  Note, you must unlock Roller and each of the dealers before you can play their specific games.  Roller also runs a small store where you can exchange medals for seeds, accessories, and some pamphlets that reveal some of the recipes and the shipping prices of the level 1 crops.  A summary of the games is give below.

Poker: Dealer Hops

There are three games that you can gamble medals at and poker is the first from the left.  You need to unlock Hops before you can play poker.  To begin the game, speak to Hops and select play poker.  Then select the number of medals you want to bet by using up and down on the control pad.  You can bet between one and 10 medals on each game per hand.  Once you place you bet, push the A button to begin the hand.  You will be dealt five cards to make your starting poker hand.  The deck consists of 52 normal cards and one wild card joker.  You will win medals on a pair or better.  After the cards are dealt, the game will highlight a winning hand if you have one, at this point you can discard any of the cards and draw more.  The joker is a wild card and can serve as any card in the deck.  The payouts are as follows:

Poker Hands and Payouts
Hand Payout
one pair break even
two pairs 2 to 1
three of kind 3 to 1
straight 5 to 1
flush 10 to 1
full house 20 to 1
4 of a kind 50 to 1
straight flush 100 to 1
royal flush 1,000 to 1

Note: N to one means you win N time your bet. I.E. 2 to 1 means you win twice your bet.

If you get a winning hand, you can play another minigame to go for double or nothing or pocket your winnings.  The strategy you want to use is pretty simple.  First, if you have a winning hand, i.e. a pair or better on the start keep the winning hand and redraw the rest.  If you don't have a winning hand, look at your cards and try to get one.  It's tempting to hold the hire cards, but don't.  A pair is a pair and Aces have the same pay out as a pair of twos.  You want to look either for cards that are connected for a straight or save whatever suit you have the most cards in the go after a flush.  If you have the same number of each, go after the straight because it has a higher probability of coming up than the flush.  This is a mathematical fact.  The straight will come up 3:2 roughly over the flush. 

Black Jack: Dealer Tep:


Black jack is a simple casino game where you try to get as close to 21 as you can with cards.  You have two options, you can either hit and draw another card or stand and keep your current total.  Your goal is to get closer to 21 than the dealer without going over.  Number cards are worth their face value and face cards are worth 10.  An ace is worth 11 unless it would put you over 21 in which case it is worth one.  The dealer plays the same rules as real casinos, which means that it stops drawing cards when its score is 17 or higher.  The strategy is simpler really, you want to hit until you have 16 or more.  When you pass that mark, the probability is that you will more likely bust than hit under 21.  Black jack pays 2:1

Memory: Dealer Jum:


Memory is just like the game we all played as kids where their are a bunch of face down cards and you try to find matching pairs turning two cards over at a time.  You can see what your opponent turns over, so if you match a card you can find its partner from memory hence the name of the game.  You and the computer alternate turns turning over two cards at a time.  If you get a pair you get another turn until you miss.  Whoever has the most pairs wins.  The computer uses a simple strategy.  First, it turns over a random new card.  Then if it know where the match is it will take it and repeat this process.  Otherwise it will choose a second random new card and try to get luck.  You should follow the same plan of action.  It will sometimes give you the option of who goes first.  Your odds are better if you go second.  Just trust me here, the mathematical proof is too long for this guide and is over most people's head to begin with. 

Double or nothing games:

If you win the first of the three games, you have the option of trying to go for double or nothing as part of two minigames.  They are listed below.

High Low Draw:


This game begins by showing you two cards, one face up and one face down.  You goal is to decide whether the face down card is higher, lower, or the same as the face up card.  If you select correctly, you will get double the medals you have won so far.  If you select incorrectly, you will lose all the medals you have one for the hand.
Just pick the side of the card that has the greatest odds of winning.  9-A choose low, 2-7 choose high and the 8, go with your gut.  This game is the better choice for the double up.

High Draw:


This game is another double up minigame.  Its pretty simple, you are shown one face up card and 4 face down cards.  You then try to pick a down card that is higher than the face up card.  The number of winning cards depends on the size of the card face up.  You will lose automatically if an Ace comes up and you don't get an Ace in the draw cards.  The other game is easier because you always have a chance to win.

Okay, now that each of the games are outlined here, it's time to explain the best strategy for making medals.  To start with, you cannot win all that many medals for just betting 10 and winning a minigame.  To make a great deal of medals, you need to play the double up game and win several times in a row.  To begin with, but about 100 medals and save your game.  If you run out of medals, just reload your game and start over.  This way you won't have to worry about buying medals again.  The following strategy is based on Andrew's Contribution and partially on my own experience working with this idea mathematically and trial and error.  Thanks for the idea Andrew. 

Alright, I am going to give some of the actual odds of winning.  You can verify these by doing some high level math.  I have and you can take my word for them.  I did this a while ago, so I can guarantee these are within about two percent.  Start playing poker!  The help on the game boy and the strategy above will show you what to do.  If you play black jack, using any strategy and the computer follows the Vegas casino style, you will only win 44% of the time in the first place.  There are several good books on the market that explain this probability well.  Playing the memory game, you will win about 52% of the time if you go second and 48% if the computer makes you go first.  Again, this is a simple problem but it involves a probability matrix that I don't want to explain here.  However, with a joker in the deck, the odds of you getting a pair or better without drawing cards is 58% roughly and if you follow the strategy above, the odds of winning are about 66%.  You should always bet 10 medals, the goal is to get to the high low double up game.  Also, look at the payouts above, black jack will always pay 20 medals and memory will pay 100 at most.  However, Poker can outdo these payoffs quite a bit by hitting 4 of a kind or better.  So, clearly poker is the best choice. 

Okay, once you get to the double or nothing game, you want to start playing the high low double up several times in a row.  By winning several times in a row at the double up, you can quickly earn a good deal of medals.  4 wins in a row will yield at least 160 medals and about 7 will yield a 1000 medals or more.  If you have more patience, you can win even more medals into the upper thousands, but keep in mind the odds of you getting more than three right in a row are less than 50% The point where you choose to stop is up to you.  I usually stop if I win a thousand or more.  Save each time you win a bunch, so you don't risk a major set back. You will likely have to play between 25 and 30 hands of poker to win 1000 medals, but this will only take a few minutes and can save you a lot of money in the long run.  Andrew made an interesting point in his email.  If you have the patience to put together 65000 medals, Roller has the animal cape accessory that he sells.  You can buy it and sell it to van for more than half a million dollars.  You can then repeat this process by buying more cloaks to make more money.  Either way this is a very efficient way to get medals.  It takes a little trial and error to get the hang of, but I doubt you'll want to buy medals ever again after you figure it out. 

Just another useful side note, while this trick is profitable and does work.  It is time consuming and relies heavily on luck to make money.  If you are willing to win the double up 17 times in a row, you can buy the cloak outright, but this is risky and terribly taxing on patience.  It takes several hours to get that lucky usually.  I have only been able to do it once.  I still recommend the mine trick over this route to make easy money.  While it takes a little longer, it is garneted to work and if you stop on every floor divisible by 3 and 5 it will usually yield between 800,000g and 1,200,000g per run. More than double the money from this trick.  Still, it is a good alternative if you hate digging in the mine.  Thanks again for the trick Andrew.