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Fields of Mistria (PC)
The town of Mistria was hit by an earthquake and they need more hands and more income to get it fixed. How do you lure in a sucker new resident to help? Offer them the nearby crappy overgrown farm and a chance at adventurous living, of course. Maybe the local dragon god will bless them with magic powers while they’re busy gathering forage and plying your population with gifts.
Another Stardew Valley-like, and another one still in development (Early Access, even!), so the final release version may be tweaked from my experience and will most likely have more content. (I played v0.13.3 in April 2025.) It has a relatively slow start, with the tutorials for the various things spread out over the first week.
A particularly nice quality-of-life addition: Stores (and the museum) are always open. If there’s no-one there, you still interact with the signboard on the desk and (presumably) make your purchases on the honor system. You still need to chase down people to solve quests, but you never have to worry about whether someone will be manning the carpenter’s shop so you can buy a coop. The other really nice quality-of-life addition I haven’t seen elsewhere is that crafting stations will automatically draw from any chest you haven’t locked, so you don’t have to carry around most of the things you want to build or cook with.
Notably, it adds bug-catching to the activities and list of things for the museum, though I found that to be more of an ad-hoc activity (if you see a bug, catch it) because they appear everywhere randomly but infrequently, and none of them are particularly worth the money to save and ship after the first few days. The museum is home to the bundles; each one is five related things (spring crops, fall bugs, etc) and each has a prize for 100%. You also need to assemble a bundle every 20 floors in the mines using items found in the previous floors.
Nicely, while there are versions of the tools and five armor pieces for every type of metal (copper, iron, silver, gold), you have the option to make or buy them. If you make them you acquire Blacksmith experience and can unlock perks on them; but you can also just dump a bunch of cash to get them all the day they’re available. Everything is in the quest system (including “heart” events with villagers) and nothing is missable—quests never expire and stay on the board until you take them. Big story quests usually involve rebuilding or remodeling something in the town. Annoyingly, most of those quests involve contributing large amounts of wood and stone, and while you’ll load up on stone in the mines, wood involves the tedious process of chopping trees for only 5 wood each. (At least the trees everywhere except your farm regenerate each day. A full day of clear-cutting the town environs nets you 200+ wood, and you can do it again the next day. Your farm, on the other hand, generates a LOT of debris and I occasionally had to dedicate whole days to keeping it under control.)
You can’t get the level 3 backpack until you remodel the general store; I was hitting the inventory cap a LOT before that. Similarly, you get endurance potions for reaching certain renown levels in the town (which permanently increase your endurance meter), but you’ll still be eating a lot of snacks, especially if you’re fishing. Fishing eats up the meter shockingly fast. I made a lot of trail mix (tons of wild berries and water chestnuts in spring) and coconut milk (12 coconuts on the beach every three days in summer) which kept me in decent shape through fall and helped boost my cooking skill—there are a lot of recipes you can’t even try until you boost your skill level. On the other hand, I sold virtually all of the food the villagers gifted me because the sell prices were really high compared to the forage I was collecting.
Like Sun Haven, there’s magic you can learn, including a full-heal spell, a rainfall spell (no sprinklers!), an instant-growth spell, and a flame spell that unlocks several areas. (In practice, magic regenerates very slowly and mana crystals are hard to come by, so unless something changes you’re not going to be using spells much. I certainly didn’t.)
The game doesn’t really want you doing crafting at home; it wants you to go into town. You can buy a crafting bench (to make furniture and fences) and “home kitchens” (which can only cook dishes up to a certain level), but you need to go to the town and use the Inn’s kitchen for high-level recipes, the anvil to make metal bars and blacksmith equipment, and the mill to process grain and make cheese and mayo. (You’re definitely not making mayo or wine for the cash in this game!) Also, most crafting takes time, so the clock does a fast-forward while you’re doing the processing animation. In practice, this means that you can make “artisan goods” for use or gifting but it’s not worth the time for money-making purposes.
Like Roots of Pacha, they have big dreams for an animal breeding mechanic—you can get either gender of animal (males give feathers and horns, females give eggs and milk) and if you give two of them special biscuits they’ll mate and the offspring will usually be an odd color. In practice, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to doing this besides thoroughness. (Unlike Roots of Pacha, there’s no system for turning animals into meat. Like Stardew Valley, Mistria is a pescatarian town.)
Plot- and character-wise there’s nothing really surprising here: There’s a buff blacksmith and his taciturn brother; there’s the hardworking farmer girl and the sexy witch lady; there are several second-generation villagers looking to get out of their parents’ shadows and make names at their chosen professions; there’s a trio of mischievous kids; there are several cranky but helpful old people. I did think the “Friday Night at the Inn” events were very cute, where the whole town gathers and there are several different events (including one table of an ongoing ttrpg adventure) that you can watch unfold over time.
Overall: As noted above, this version (the March 2025 update) is only version 0.13.3, which I’m guessing means there’s a lot of content they hope to add before calling it complete. Hell, by the time it’s “finished” my current save file might no longer be valid. I got to the lowest available part of the mines, got through all of the available town story quests, and did a full year (which meant I filled most of the museum). That’s probably enough to call this version “completed” until the next big update rolls around. This is cute and has a lot of potential, and I suspect a few of the bits I was most annoyed by (needing to collect So. Much. Wood. For one) will end up with workarounds eventually; along with plenty of additional quests and storyline. There’s certainly 30 hours of entertainment in the current version.
Another Stardew Valley-like, and another one still in development (Early Access, even!), so the final release version may be tweaked from my experience and will most likely have more content. (I played v0.13.3 in April 2025.) It has a relatively slow start, with the tutorials for the various things spread out over the first week.
A particularly nice quality-of-life addition: Stores (and the museum) are always open. If there’s no-one there, you still interact with the signboard on the desk and (presumably) make your purchases on the honor system. You still need to chase down people to solve quests, but you never have to worry about whether someone will be manning the carpenter’s shop so you can buy a coop. The other really nice quality-of-life addition I haven’t seen elsewhere is that crafting stations will automatically draw from any chest you haven’t locked, so you don’t have to carry around most of the things you want to build or cook with.
Notably, it adds bug-catching to the activities and list of things for the museum, though I found that to be more of an ad-hoc activity (if you see a bug, catch it) because they appear everywhere randomly but infrequently, and none of them are particularly worth the money to save and ship after the first few days. The museum is home to the bundles; each one is five related things (spring crops, fall bugs, etc) and each has a prize for 100%. You also need to assemble a bundle every 20 floors in the mines using items found in the previous floors.
Nicely, while there are versions of the tools and five armor pieces for every type of metal (copper, iron, silver, gold), you have the option to make or buy them. If you make them you acquire Blacksmith experience and can unlock perks on them; but you can also just dump a bunch of cash to get them all the day they’re available. Everything is in the quest system (including “heart” events with villagers) and nothing is missable—quests never expire and stay on the board until you take them. Big story quests usually involve rebuilding or remodeling something in the town. Annoyingly, most of those quests involve contributing large amounts of wood and stone, and while you’ll load up on stone in the mines, wood involves the tedious process of chopping trees for only 5 wood each. (At least the trees everywhere except your farm regenerate each day. A full day of clear-cutting the town environs nets you 200+ wood, and you can do it again the next day. Your farm, on the other hand, generates a LOT of debris and I occasionally had to dedicate whole days to keeping it under control.)
You can’t get the level 3 backpack until you remodel the general store; I was hitting the inventory cap a LOT before that. Similarly, you get endurance potions for reaching certain renown levels in the town (which permanently increase your endurance meter), but you’ll still be eating a lot of snacks, especially if you’re fishing. Fishing eats up the meter shockingly fast. I made a lot of trail mix (tons of wild berries and water chestnuts in spring) and coconut milk (12 coconuts on the beach every three days in summer) which kept me in decent shape through fall and helped boost my cooking skill—there are a lot of recipes you can’t even try until you boost your skill level. On the other hand, I sold virtually all of the food the villagers gifted me because the sell prices were really high compared to the forage I was collecting.
Like Sun Haven, there’s magic you can learn, including a full-heal spell, a rainfall spell (no sprinklers!), an instant-growth spell, and a flame spell that unlocks several areas. (In practice, magic regenerates very slowly and mana crystals are hard to come by, so unless something changes you’re not going to be using spells much. I certainly didn’t.)
The game doesn’t really want you doing crafting at home; it wants you to go into town. You can buy a crafting bench (to make furniture and fences) and “home kitchens” (which can only cook dishes up to a certain level), but you need to go to the town and use the Inn’s kitchen for high-level recipes, the anvil to make metal bars and blacksmith equipment, and the mill to process grain and make cheese and mayo. (You’re definitely not making mayo or wine for the cash in this game!) Also, most crafting takes time, so the clock does a fast-forward while you’re doing the processing animation. In practice, this means that you can make “artisan goods” for use or gifting but it’s not worth the time for money-making purposes.
Like Roots of Pacha, they have big dreams for an animal breeding mechanic—you can get either gender of animal (males give feathers and horns, females give eggs and milk) and if you give two of them special biscuits they’ll mate and the offspring will usually be an odd color. In practice, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to doing this besides thoroughness. (Unlike Roots of Pacha, there’s no system for turning animals into meat. Like Stardew Valley, Mistria is a pescatarian town.)
Plot- and character-wise there’s nothing really surprising here: There’s a buff blacksmith and his taciturn brother; there’s the hardworking farmer girl and the sexy witch lady; there are several second-generation villagers looking to get out of their parents’ shadows and make names at their chosen professions; there’s a trio of mischievous kids; there are several cranky but helpful old people. I did think the “Friday Night at the Inn” events were very cute, where the whole town gathers and there are several different events (including one table of an ongoing ttrpg adventure) that you can watch unfold over time.
Overall: As noted above, this version (the March 2025 update) is only version 0.13.3, which I’m guessing means there’s a lot of content they hope to add before calling it complete. Hell, by the time it’s “finished” my current save file might no longer be valid. I got to the lowest available part of the mines, got through all of the available town story quests, and did a full year (which meant I filled most of the museum). That’s probably enough to call this version “completed” until the next big update rolls around. This is cute and has a lot of potential, and I suspect a few of the bits I was most annoyed by (needing to collect So. Much. Wood. For one) will end up with workarounds eventually; along with plenty of additional quests and storyline. There’s certainly 30 hours of entertainment in the current version.