How to keep it fun and casual: a guide for new players
Someone was requesting a new player’s guide for FoM, and I’ve been thinking of making a “New Player’s Guide to Keeping it Casual” post for awhile now. This is mostly for newer people or those who who don’t want a huge money farm and just want to enjoy the gameplay and story. I’ll mostly focus on year one, but here’s the formula I’ve found to making manageable progress without getting overwhelmed. I will also keep everything completely spoiler free. PLEASE be mindful of spoilers in your replies to this post, as I want this to be very new player friendly.
Here’s some general pacing rules that I find keep the grind from getting overwhelming. I made a post a few months ago about my “small farm challenge,” and a lot of this post follows those rules.
YEAR ONE: Focus on learning the game and getting into a groove. First of all, go to your Settings and turn on HUD numbers. This will show your energy and health in actual numbers and makes it easier to see how much energy you’re using to water crops during early game. This is the biggest mistake I see people make. My personal rule of thumb is to use less than half my energy bar for farm chores so I can still do other things throughout the day. Each plant takes one energy to water, so starting at 100 energy, I shouldn’t have more than 50 plants to water until my energy max increases. I tend to do even less than that so I can fish and explore the mines without having to wait for a rainy day. You can certainly do more and rely on cooking, but I personally don’t like to spend my whole day watering plants. I also changed the day length to the longest setting so that I don’t feel rushed. Again, that’s personal preference.
In FoM, there are basically two storylines: The town storyline that focuses on rebuilding and improving Mistria, and the mines storyline that focuses on the magical mystery with the dragon statue on your farm. Progressing the town storyline will increase your energy bar, and unlock more farming and building options (ranching, bee farming, improved weekend market). Progressing the mines storyline will unlock magic, improved tools, advanced crafting, and ultimately unlocking the two secret romance characters. Neither storyline has to be done in any hurry. To me, the mines storyline feels much more rewarding after building a relationship with the town and doing a lot of the upgrades first.
Year one farming: Keep it manageable. The scale of FoM is a lot smaller than Stardew, so only having 20-60 plants for the entirety of year one is perfectly fine! If you want to maximize profit, focus on crops, not flowers. Flowers have really low profits for some reason. The more expensive repeating crops like strawberries are the best, but you probably won’t be able to get very many your first spring. Just make sure to save a good amount of money at the end of a season to buy new seeds. There is a greenhouse in the game that you can eventually unlock, but it’s definitely a late game thing (like year three late), so don’t even worry about it. Currently (as of early access), there aren’t any other buildings like sheds for storage. You can also unlock beekeeping later, usually late year one or early year two. Every three days, each bee house will request a current season crop or forageable and give honey in exchange. I keep four bee hives and four insect terrariums on my farm, and this feels like a manageable number for early to mid game. If your bees are requesting something that you don’t have or is too rare to part with just for honey (I refuse to give my bees middlemist lol), just smack it with your pickax to reset it.
Year one mine goal: Only progress one biome (20 levels) of the mine per season, meaning you unlock one new ore type to upgrade your tools per season. You can even do this slower if you want. I do one per season for spring, summer, and fall, and then spend all winter collecting copper, iron, and silver from levels 1-59 so I have a good stockpile for crafting. One of the two secret characters unlocks after doing the quest at level 60, so I like to pick that up in spring of year two after spending the winter gathering resources like ore and wood.
Year one museum goal: Don’t worry about completing the museum during year one and just fill it as you feel like it. There are some cool cosmetics to unlock, but it’s all decorative.
Year one foraging: One of the hardest parts of being new to the game is not knowing what to keep and what to sell. I came up with this rule, which has worked for me in both FoM and Stardew. The first time you find a new forageable, fish, insect, etc., donate one to the museum to get that out of the way. After that, sell everything you find during the 1st - 14th of each season to get much-needed money during early game. From the 15th - 28th, save all of your forageables for recipes and (later) beekeeping. The exception is berries and water chestnuts. Sell one of each to unlock the recipes for them, then hoard the rest like a dragon lol.
Pro tip: I keep a stack of berries in my inventory for emergency energy. One berry = one energy, and every tool only needs one energy to use once, so you can eat berries in a pinch when you run out of energy. This is SUPER helpful for fishing. Normally, casting your fishing rod takes twelve energy to catch a fish, which is a TON compared to every other tool that just takes one energy. However! If you’re out of energy and eat one berry to get one energy, the game will still let you cast your fishing rod, and when you catch a fish, it’ll only take one energy. Eat one more berry, catch one more fish. Rinse and repeat. You can fish all day as long as you have a bunch of berries. The pink berries that grow in spring only sell for one gold each, so it’s way better to save them for fishing and (much later) the auto feeder for animals.
Ranching year one: Barns and coops will unlock as you progress the town storyline, so focus on selling crops and especially filling request board posts to increase the town rating if you want to unlock that quickly. Once you unlock ranching, keep it to a maximum of one medium coop and barn. I only have one of each product-producing animal total during years one and two until I feel like breeding animals (which is COMPLETELY optional and I usually don’t touch at all until end of year two). For chickens, cows, and bulls, you want one of each gender to get both types of animal products they drop. For rabbits, capybaras, alpacas, sheep, and horses, they only drop one type of product, so you only need one of each (any gender). That’s it. I went way too hard with animals my first playthrough and ended up super overwhelmed.
(Edit to add this section) Cooking: I almost forgot to add this part. Cooking in FoM is actually pretty important because you run out of energy a lot faster than in Stardew Valley. The best way to level your cooking is to turn certain crops into one-ingredient recipes. I’ll use corn as an example. After growing corn for the first time, sell your first harvest and donate one to the museum. After selling corn for the first time, you’ll get a recipe in the mail the next day for Grilled Corn. The only ingredient needed for Grilled Corn is one corn. Turn all of the corn you plan to sell into Grilled Corn, and sell the Grilled Corn instead. Not every crop has a one ingredient recipe, but there’s at least one per season. Even if it doesn’t increase the sell value by very much, this will level up your cooking with basically no effort, and will eventually generate dishes with bonus buffs once you have a few cooking level upgrades. I didn’t focus on cooking almost at all my first playthrough, and I couldn’t believe how much of a difference it made once I started doing this strategy during my second save.
Side note related to cooking: Here’s the loose guideline I've made for myself when it comes to how much produce to keep and how much to sell. I like to keep a small stockpile of crops to use for recipes, gifts, and quest board items. During year one, my goal for saving crops is to keep 10-15 of each. Year two, 25 of each, and Years three and onward, no more than 50 of each (even that is overkill, honestly,but I’m an item hoarder lol).
Dating: I’m probably in the minority, but my rule is no dating during year one. FoM has a lot of really interesting characters, and there’s no rush to date anyone right away, especially when you’re still learning the game. Focus on building friendships with characters that you’re interested in during year one, but don’t feel pressured to choose right away.
I think that just about covers early game. Remember that games like FoM and Stardew are meant to be fun and relaxing. If you’re not having fun, then change the way you’re playing. The people who post their gigantic tea farms that rake in crazy amounts of money are the exception, not the rule. Some people enjoy that type of challenge, but most of us just like to chill and relax after a stressful day.
Edit: added a few more things that I thought of, and fixed a few spelling/grammar errors because I’m picky like that lol.