Sun Haven (PC)
Jan. 1st, 2025 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroClearly inspired by the success of Stardew Valley, this is a farming sim with heavy rpg elements and Zeldalike combat. You move to the new town (a medieval fantasy pastiche) and start your new job, which defaults to farmer but you can also start as a crafter, rancher, warrior, etc. rather than learning those skills as you go. You do farm chores, explore the surrounding dangerous areas, meet all the townsfolk and run errands for them; you know, the usual.
Interestingly, unlike Stardew, you don’t have an energy meter, so you can chop trees all day. Instead, you have a mana meter that you use on various spells you unlock (Air Skip to move faster and Teleport are the most valuable in my opinion, but the rain spell to water all your crops or the bubble spell for easy fishing are also great. I barely used the combat magic!) Also, the experience system is much more explicit and most quests give you several options for bonus experience rewards. The quest system is great and the maps show you where people are, including marks for available and open quests. You can save mid-day (you always resume at your farm). Characters have daily dialogue trees that you can use to gain hearts with them instead of always needing to feed them gifts (though that’s an option, too). All crafting/cooking is done through stations, but they’re all queue-able so you can stack up a dozen recipes and just come back the next day. You get both swords ands crossbows for combat, and the crossbow combat is really easy and the best way to deal with most things.
There are SO MANY things in this game. So many plants, so many recipes, so many craftable items and different crafting stations you need to build them on, so many people and quests and areas. The museum is loaded with bundles of crops, fish, mineables, collectables, and craftables…but plenty of items never appear in bundles at all! Plus, one of the ways you permanently increase stats is by eating, so every time you pick an apple you need to decide whether to eat it, gift it, sell it, juice it, bake it, etc. Thankfully, for foods it tells you how many you’ve eaten, which made my plan to eat at least one of everything for the stat gains (they decrease exponentially with each additional food of the same type) much easier. I would have loved a quick view of what you still need for the museum/endgame bundles, but instead I just took notes.
There’s a core set of crops you can grow in every season (including wheat, corn, rice, tomatoes, etc.) that are the ones you need for the majority of cooking and quests. There are also fish available in every season that are mostly the ones you need for other purposes. Basically, except for museum completion (which is unnecessary and doesn’t even have a lot of achievements attached to it), there doesn’t seem to be anything locked to a specific season. Which is good!
I started as a farmer and didn’t really start into fishing until the late summer, which was part of why my museum collection of fish was incomplete (I ended up missing three summer fish and a trinket that I never pulled up). The mining setup never really won me: You need to collect “rusty keys” in each area to temporarily open gates, but if you craft metal keys (copper in the first area, iron in the second, etc) you can permanently unlock the gates and go straight to deeper mines. The elven and monster mines have their own gimmicks, but at the end of the day mining was the path that interested me the least and was the least complete of my museum collections. Actually, no: Ranching was the activity that interested me the least, and I never did any of it. No barn, no farm animals on any of the three farms. I bought all the milk, eggs, and meat I needed for cooking. I also didn’t go far into the smithing tree (a branch of mining) because equipment I was able to get was more than sufficient (leaf armor -> feather armor using quest rewards -> the phantom set from the final bundles). I generally found that stat bonuses from food and quest rewards were much more beneficial than scraping out equipment upgrades.
There a small shrine to the Corn God behind the Sun Haven café that gives the “Corn for the Corn God” quest, which I highly recommend doing, because for 50 corn (easy to grow in any season) you get the Corn Sword, which is better than any sword you can buy and lasted me happily through the end of the game.
In the endgame, you approach the Moon Dragon and are given the option of trying to appease him by filling seven of the nine bundle altars in his chamber. This was a great capstone to this style of game because it gave you the chance to show off everything you’ve achieved (and nothing was time-locked or super-rare; the crops bundle was all any-season crops and the rarest items were fish that had low appearance chances). Or, alternately, you could ignore that and just fight him and have a final boss instead.
I found it really interesting the percentage completion rates on some of the achievements: More players apparently reached level 50 in combat and reached the fifth mine level than made it to the first summer season, for instance.
I didn’t use them, but I appreciated that the game included toggles for things like the length of days, monster attacks on your farm, or character invincibility. Customization options for gameplay so you can experience this game the way you want to are always great. Oh, and every character is default bisexual, so you can just date whomever. There are apparently mods for things like walking speed, museum tracking, and sprinklers; I didn’t feel they were necessary but I understand how people would appreciate them.
The only noteworthy issue is that there were some graphical and plot glitches. Nothing gamebreaking, just places where sprites didn’t load properly (weeds on the monster farm were a big offender) or animations were janky. I did the bundles for the Moon Dragon, but I got the cutscene as if I’d beaten him in combat…and then immediate after the cutscene like I appeased him. Everything continued just fine after, but it was weird.
I’ll admit I’m also annoyed that you can’t get 100% achievements without playing the game several times: There are several plot achievements that you can only unlock one (of two) in a playthrough, several that unlock when you choose a character type (so you need to restart five times to get them all), and a bunch that require constantly getting divorced and remarrying to get max hearts on romanceable characters. I got a respectable 58% achievement completion and opted to stop there, though I could have romanced some more characters and grinded a few more. I also left the museum only mostly-complete, mostly because the remaining items were all mining or ranching-based.
Overall: If you want more Stardew Valley-like experience, this delivers it solidly.
Interestingly, unlike Stardew, you don’t have an energy meter, so you can chop trees all day. Instead, you have a mana meter that you use on various spells you unlock (Air Skip to move faster and Teleport are the most valuable in my opinion, but the rain spell to water all your crops or the bubble spell for easy fishing are also great. I barely used the combat magic!) Also, the experience system is much more explicit and most quests give you several options for bonus experience rewards. The quest system is great and the maps show you where people are, including marks for available and open quests. You can save mid-day (you always resume at your farm). Characters have daily dialogue trees that you can use to gain hearts with them instead of always needing to feed them gifts (though that’s an option, too). All crafting/cooking is done through stations, but they’re all queue-able so you can stack up a dozen recipes and just come back the next day. You get both swords ands crossbows for combat, and the crossbow combat is really easy and the best way to deal with most things.
There are SO MANY things in this game. So many plants, so many recipes, so many craftable items and different crafting stations you need to build them on, so many people and quests and areas. The museum is loaded with bundles of crops, fish, mineables, collectables, and craftables…but plenty of items never appear in bundles at all! Plus, one of the ways you permanently increase stats is by eating, so every time you pick an apple you need to decide whether to eat it, gift it, sell it, juice it, bake it, etc. Thankfully, for foods it tells you how many you’ve eaten, which made my plan to eat at least one of everything for the stat gains (they decrease exponentially with each additional food of the same type) much easier. I would have loved a quick view of what you still need for the museum/endgame bundles, but instead I just took notes.
There’s a core set of crops you can grow in every season (including wheat, corn, rice, tomatoes, etc.) that are the ones you need for the majority of cooking and quests. There are also fish available in every season that are mostly the ones you need for other purposes. Basically, except for museum completion (which is unnecessary and doesn’t even have a lot of achievements attached to it), there doesn’t seem to be anything locked to a specific season. Which is good!
I started as a farmer and didn’t really start into fishing until the late summer, which was part of why my museum collection of fish was incomplete (I ended up missing three summer fish and a trinket that I never pulled up). The mining setup never really won me: You need to collect “rusty keys” in each area to temporarily open gates, but if you craft metal keys (copper in the first area, iron in the second, etc) you can permanently unlock the gates and go straight to deeper mines. The elven and monster mines have their own gimmicks, but at the end of the day mining was the path that interested me the least and was the least complete of my museum collections. Actually, no: Ranching was the activity that interested me the least, and I never did any of it. No barn, no farm animals on any of the three farms. I bought all the milk, eggs, and meat I needed for cooking. I also didn’t go far into the smithing tree (a branch of mining) because equipment I was able to get was more than sufficient (leaf armor -> feather armor using quest rewards -> the phantom set from the final bundles). I generally found that stat bonuses from food and quest rewards were much more beneficial than scraping out equipment upgrades.
There a small shrine to the Corn God behind the Sun Haven café that gives the “Corn for the Corn God” quest, which I highly recommend doing, because for 50 corn (easy to grow in any season) you get the Corn Sword, which is better than any sword you can buy and lasted me happily through the end of the game.
In the endgame, you approach the Moon Dragon and are given the option of trying to appease him by filling seven of the nine bundle altars in his chamber. This was a great capstone to this style of game because it gave you the chance to show off everything you’ve achieved (and nothing was time-locked or super-rare; the crops bundle was all any-season crops and the rarest items were fish that had low appearance chances). Or, alternately, you could ignore that and just fight him and have a final boss instead.
I found it really interesting the percentage completion rates on some of the achievements: More players apparently reached level 50 in combat and reached the fifth mine level than made it to the first summer season, for instance.
I didn’t use them, but I appreciated that the game included toggles for things like the length of days, monster attacks on your farm, or character invincibility. Customization options for gameplay so you can experience this game the way you want to are always great. Oh, and every character is default bisexual, so you can just date whomever. There are apparently mods for things like walking speed, museum tracking, and sprinklers; I didn’t feel they were necessary but I understand how people would appreciate them.
The only noteworthy issue is that there were some graphical and plot glitches. Nothing gamebreaking, just places where sprites didn’t load properly (weeds on the monster farm were a big offender) or animations were janky. I did the bundles for the Moon Dragon, but I got the cutscene as if I’d beaten him in combat…and then immediate after the cutscene like I appeased him. Everything continued just fine after, but it was weird.
I’ll admit I’m also annoyed that you can’t get 100% achievements without playing the game several times: There are several plot achievements that you can only unlock one (of two) in a playthrough, several that unlock when you choose a character type (so you need to restart five times to get them all), and a bunch that require constantly getting divorced and remarrying to get max hearts on romanceable characters. I got a respectable 58% achievement completion and opted to stop there, though I could have romanced some more characters and grinded a few more. I also left the museum only mostly-complete, mostly because the remaining items were all mining or ranching-based.
Overall: If you want more Stardew Valley-like experience, this delivers it solidly.
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Date: 2025-01-02 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-08 02:50 pm (UTC)