Resource Management

Harvest moon DS is a game that revolves around managing three key resources effectively to work your way ahead in the game. There is quite a bit for your character to accomplish in this game, but you need to learn to manage your resources well in order to get the most productivity out of your days. The three resources I am talking about are stamina, money, and time. If you learn to balance them, you will be able to acquire more of them to use. The purpose of this section is just to outline the details of each resource and the ways to maximize their uses. I want to describe and look at each one in depth.

Stamina:

The first resource you have at your disposal is your stamina. I should note that you also have fatigue, but I consider them one resource since the activities that deplete stamina also deplete fatigue at the same rate if your stamina is gone. Your character begins the game with a maximum stamina of 100 that depletes as you use tools and work. You character also begins with a fatigue limit that increases as you do work if your stamina has been depleted or certain other conditions have been met. Stamina is a valuable resource, since it determines the amount of work you can do each day. If you stamina runs out fatigue takes over. Be careful though, if your fatigue reaches 100 and you have no stamina, you will pass out and be forced to go to bed. When you wake up you will lose half of your money. So, be careful to keep an eye on these meters during the day to avoid passing out.

Using Stamina:

You will lose stamina by using tools on your farm. You can also loose it by falling down holes in the mines. You will usually lose at most 1 point per floor you descend, but you will never lose more than 100 units per fall. Listed below are the activates that can reduce your stamina. Note, the level of tools assumes that you charge them up to their highest level. For example, you can still use the mythic hoe to till one square of ground for 2 stamina

Primary Tool Stanima Usage
hoe, sickle, axe, hammer, watering can, fishing pole
Level	Stanima Usage
Iron	2
Copper	4
Silver	5
Gold	5
Mystrile	10
Blessed	15
Mythic	20

Other Tool Stanima Usage
Tool	Stanima Usage
Clippers	8
Milker	4
Brush	2
Sowing a bag of seeds	2
Using animal medicine	2
Using a miracle potion	2
Using the legendary sword	5
Falling down a hole	1/floor or less if a long drop
Getting touched by an enemy	1 per hit

Fatigue:

Fatigue is the second part of the stamina resources. If you run out of stamina, using a tool or performing a task will increase your fatigue by an equal amount to the stamina. There are a few other things that will cause fatigue in addition to doing work. You need to be careful, because, if your fatigue rate is too high you won't be able to recover stamina as easily. Listed below are activates that increase your fatigue.

Activites that use Fatigue
Activity	Fatigue Increase
Using the teleport stone	2
Using a necklace to work through the map	2+work
Working on a rainy or snowy day	1+work done

Extending Fatigue and Stamina:

In prior harvest moon games, you would collect power berries to increase your maximum fatigue and stamina rates in the game. Unfortunately, harvest moon DS doesn't have any power berries to find. You increase your maximum stamina and fatigue by equipping several of the goddess and kappa accessories found throughout the game. You can either buy them from Van or find their cursed versions in the third mine. Be careful when using them though, because if you remove the accessory you will immediately lose any additional stamina or fatigue that it grants you. Unless your worried about running out, it is easier to just monitor your stamina and fatigue and replenish them as necessary.

Monitoring Stamina:

It is important to keep an eye on your stamina and fatigue as you work on your farm and around the valley. The easiest way is to buy the yellow bangle from the casino for 2000 medals or 20000g. If you equip it will print out your current values in the lower left hand corner of the screen. This is especially helpful if your in the mine because your stamina is constantly being drained fighting and looking for items. Remember that your stamina goes down and your fatigue goes up as you work. This is the best way to monitor your stamina directly, but you can do it without the bangle. Your character will go through a range of motions at various points during the losses. Pay attention to these bench marks when you don't yet have the bangle or don't have it equipped.

Stamina at 50%:: Your character will pull out a handkerchief and wipe the sweat from his forehead.
Stamina at 20%:: You character will shrug his shoulders and lean forward once expressing being tired.
Stamina at 5%:: Your character will stop what he is doing and sit down on the ground.
Stamina at 0% and fatigue beginning:: You character will stop for a second and fall forward onto the ground. If you are going to use an item to restore only stamina and not fatigue, this is the time to do it.
Fatigue at 50%: Your character will stop and shake his head back and fourth like he is tired. This is a good point to restore fatigue if you are going to.
Fatigue at 80%:: Your character will fall to the ground exhausted and shake his head. A thought balloon with a skull in it will appear above him. Also, the music will slow down. At this point you are on the last bit of your fatigue. You should stop working and restore your strength. Failure to do so will cause you to pass out.
Fatigue at 100%:: Your character will pass out and fall to the ground. At this point you are in trouble. Someone from the game will come by and help you back to your house where you will wake up for the next game day. They will take half of your money for their trouble. This is something you want to avoid at all costs unless you are trying to marry the witch princess.

Recovery:

As your supply of stamina and fatigue deplete, you will need to constantly renew them throughout the game through several methods. I will list the best ones below. Remember that if your fatigue is high, you cannot recover stamina without first recovering fatigue.

Sleeping:

When your character goes to bed for the day he will recover both of these resources. If you get at least 6 hours of sleep, your stamina will completely refill and your fatigue will decrease by between 15 and 25 points. The earlier you go to bed, the more fatigue you will recover. You cannot recover more than your current maximum. If you go to bed late or with high fatigue, you will be forced to sleep in and loose valuable game time the next day, so be sure to pick a sensible bed time if your fatigue is high.

Food and Medicine:

You can also recover your stamina and fatigue using food and medicine. Most raw foods and crops will restore two stamina and one fatigue. Cooked meals and the colored grasses found throughout the valley will recover you more efficiently and vary by type. I don't have the space to outline all of them here. Try experimenting and see what works best under any give circum stances. Medicine provides the best recovery rates. Bodygizer restores stamina and turbojolt restores fatigue. You can buy them from Van's shop when he visits the valley. They are quite expensive, but they provide an instant large recovery in a portable. form. Their prices and recovery properties are listed below

Medicine Stanima and Fatigue Recovery
Item	Cost	Recovers
Bodygizer	500g	50 stamina
BodigizerXL	1,000g	100 stamina
Turbojolt	1,000g	20 fatigue
TurblojoltXL	2,000g	50 fatigue

Hot springs and healing team:

You can also hire the healing team to restore your stamina a fatigue at the harvest sprite tree. To use them talk to them after you have used some of your resources and they will recover your stamina and fatigue by a fixed amount. It begins at 10% and goes up as they gain experience. They can heal you about once an hour unless you have five or more of them where they can then heal you twice an hour. Another option is to unlock the hot springs and use them to recover your stamina and fatigue. There are two of them in the game. The first, which is located by the circus is unlocked by triggering Flora's blue heart event. This one will recover your fatigue. The second one located by the harvest goddess spring recovers your stamina. To unlock it, use the first one hundred times for more than an hour and Mayor Thomas and the harvest sprites from mineral town will build the second in a couple of days. The hot springs restore your stamina and fatigue at a point for each real second you spend in them. They are a cheap way to restore this resource, but they aren't portable and take a long time to recover.

Time:

Time is the second resources you have available to you in the game that you need to manage. It is divided into two aspects, the number of hours in a game day and the number of days in season. You need to be aware of these two facts when you are planning your life on the farm. Time is a resource that is constantly distributed throughout the game. It limits the amount of work you can get done in a game day and the number of harvest you can make of a particular crop during a game season. You seem to have more free time during the winter month than the others and when you have upgraded equipment to save you time. Below are some suggestions to help you manage your time better.

Day to Day:

You need to be aware of the passage of time in the game during the day. You can keep track using the clock in the lower right corner or the screen. You need to plan your time so that you don't waist it. Two minutes will pass in the game for each second that passes in the real world, so you need to think ahead. The best way to do this is to plan a daily schedule that will get your work done. A basic one would look something like this. Get up and begin by working on your animals around the farm. Once your finished there, go outside and start gathering and shipping any crops that need to be shipped for the day. Next, by this time the stores are beginning to open. Head out and buy anything you need. Then, you want to start your afternoon by heading around town and collection resources, mining, or foraging for things to ship. You should also use this time to give gifts and talk to the valley people. Then, you should return home and water any crops and head to bed at a reasonable time. This is just an outline, you are free to reorganize it to your likings of course. Just make sure that you don't try to do too much in a day that will cause you to run out of time.

There are a few other things you can do to save yourself time in the game. First, upgrade your tools, higher level tools allow you to do more work in less time. Also, hire the harvest sprites to share in some of the work load. They can free up a large block of time for you by taking up one of the tasks on your farm. Also, keep stamina recovery items with you so that you can renew your strength quickly without waiting time. Also, get the teleport stone as soon as you can. It will completely climate most of your travel time at the cost of a little stamina. Finally, you can use the necklaces to do work on the map from inside a building without having time pass at all. Managing your game time can be helped by these ideas, but the best way to maximize its use is by planning your day carefully.

Managing Days:

You also need to manage your days each season to get the most out of your time and profits. It helps to learn the growing times for each of the crops you plant because it allows you to schedule the harvest sprites around their growing times for watering and picking. Use the harvest sprites to accomplish whatever task you find the most time consuming. This usually falls to picking crops or watering until you have the upgraded can. Also, be mindful of festivals and when they occur. You will have to do all the work yourself on those days because the harvest sprites won't work on holidays and you will have less time because you attend a festival that eats up part of your day.

Make sure that when you arrange crops and other things on your farm, to do so that you can take advantage of your upgraded tools to get work done faster. Also, make sure that you have everything you need with you when you leave so you don't have to waist time back tracking. The same goes for shopping, but what you need ahead of time and buy a lot of it. This will save you having to wait for a shop to open and unnecessary trips out to the shop. You should also be mindful that several purchases in the game require an amount of time before they are available such as tool upgrades and buildings. Remember to buy things in the order that you need them. Learning to manage your time well requires practice just as it does in real life. If you plan ahead you will do better than if you don't

Money:

Last but certainly not least is the third resource money. They say that money makes the world go round and harvest moon DS is no exception. Money is probably the one focal resource in the game. The primary goal of the game is to gather money so you can use it to expand your farm. It is also the resource that most players notice directly. You are aware of your other resources in the background, but money isn't as renewable as they are. However, money can be exchanged directly for the other two. Money is used to but the tools and upgrades that allow you to work faster and with less stamina. It also allows you to recover stamina directly by purchasing medicine from Van. You begin the game will a very limited amount of money and you will need to generate several billion gold if you want to buy everything in the game. Harvest Moon DS has requires more money to buy everything than the rest of the games put together. However, it is also one of the easiest games to make money in. Below are some tips for money management.

Early in the game, you will find this resources to be scarce and the one you want to use most. Early in the game, you need to make a stable amount of money through either the mine trick or the medal trick at the casino. You'll find them in their respective sections. While these tricks work for a quick score early in the game, they are too time consuming and don't offer the best profit margin. The best way to make money is through leveling up the crops and growing lots of them. However, this requires a few game years and in the mean time, you need some money to survive. While you can run the mine as much as you want, it takes roughly two hours to do it, which can be tedious. If you want to minimize your need to run it try to conserve your spending. Only spend money on something if you really need it. Unless its for a tool upgrade or a building, you probably don't need anything that costs more than 100000g in your first year. Buy things as you need them, not as you want them. Also, make your early buildings out of wood. It provides a reasonable stability at a modest price. Wood buildings will last you for a couple of game years on average and until you can get the farm really going. You can always demolish them and replace them with stone or gold lumber later in the game. Also, use the casino medal strategies rather than buying medals for the harvest sprites. This will father conserve your funds.

Well, that about wraps up the details of managing the three resources of the game. I know the above section is a bit misleading in its suggestions. Conserving and expanding the limits on each of the resources above assumes that you have the other two in abundance. I know that you don't, but I am trying to supply the best and worst case scenarios under each of them. The three resources are linked and depend on each other to expand in their limits. Learning to balance them together takes planning and practice. A lot of trial and error will be needed before you get the hang of it. Money is generally the best to measure the other two with. If you are finding that you have an abundance of cash, the other two will fall into place. Learning to balance the three resources is what makes the system behind the game function at the mathematical standpoint. It is also part of the fun and addictiveness of the game. I wish all of you luck in your quest to make money and find balance in your busy farming lives.