As you play, you unlock progressively more tasks that can pile up real fast: exploring the island, growing the rice, feeding the ‘family’, keeping track of armor/weapon/utensil upgrades, requests to build stuff, ingredients spoiling after a few days, fertilizer, bosses, hunting, cooking, et cetera, et cetera … it can feel overwhelming.

And once you start to look for guides, you get a whole lot of conflicting info, like one guide claiming that you NEED to use fertilizer twice a day and pump it full of stat boosters and salt, and the other one saying that you should NEVER use fertilizer more than once a day and not overfill it with ingredients and never use salt …

However, this sounds worse than it actually is. Each new “task” you unlock is but ONE possible aspect to play this game, and almost everything can be ignored entirely without dire consequences.

You are literally unable to permanently fail anything.

Monsters:

  • If fighting enemies is too hard or tedious, then just ignore them and grow rice instead. The more you do this, the stronger Sakuna will get, as her “powers” are directly tied to the growth of the rice. Eventually, you’ll be so strong that enemies aren’t a problem anymore, because they do not scale up. And even if they’re still too hard - there is no permanent game over. Losing a fight only loads your last (auto)save and those happen super frequently.

Harvest:

  • If growing rice is too tedious or you just don’t find the time to tend to the fields amongst all the fighting, hunting and cooking, then you can entirely ignore the field - like, 100% completely ignore it - and the “worst” that will happen is that your stats grow a little slower. But they will still grow either way. It is not possible to lose the rice either, because even if you forgot to do something “super important” like harvesting the rice and bringing it inside the shed before frost sets in - Tauemon will do it for you instead at the last minute. You WILL get stronger every year even if you do absolutely nothing.

Time-sensitive Events:

  • There is no time limit. Yes the seasons change every three days, but if you forgot to do something this winter, you can still do it in the next one. Nothing becomes unsolvable or unavailiable if you take a few years longer, so play the game at your own pace in a comfortable way. There is no need to rush.

Food:

  • The characters can not starve. Sure it is a lot more nice to have a full larder and let Myrte cook proper meals for everyone, and the meals provide some nice stat boosts to you as well, but neither Sakuna nor the others will drop dead if they don’t eat anything for a couple of years. Some cutscenes only happen when the “family” sits together to share a meal, but to unlock those, you can cook anything you want, like a fistful of weeds you just plucked out of the field a minute ago, or a cup of plain water for everyone. Nothing bad will happen even if you put zero effort into feeding them.

Long story short: you are unable to fail. Take your time, do the things you enjoy doing, and ignore the things you don’t like doing. Take your time to get the hang of how everything works and don’t fret about doing it “wrong” - because you can’t.

As for actual in-game tips and tricks, I’ve found the following useful:

Fertilizer:

  • You can use fertilizer right from the start. Normally, Tauemon explains the process to Sakuna at the end of the first winter, but nothing is stopping you from taking the … “stuff” … from the outhouse to the fertilizer pit right from the start. And you don’t even have to do something fancy with it - even “empty” fertilizer, e.g. when you did not add ANY extra ingredients, will boost the nutrients of your field, without any negative side effects (pesticide, herbicide etc)

Ingredients:

  • Once you unlock the option to let Myrte cook proper meals, you can change the menu anytime. Useful if you wanted to use certain igredients for the fertilizer and Myrte insists on cooking them instead - just tell her to cook something else.

Spiders!

  • Did you wonder why there are spiders, frogs and snails you can “catch and release”? Sakuna puts them into the field, and they help to keep pests under control. With enough “natural” critters, you won’t need to put medicine and remedies into the fertilizer.

  • Ducks actually eat the beneficial critters, so most people keep the ducks out of the field in favor of spiders and snails.

A Thousand Different Factors:

  • Water levels, growth stages and the timing of when to harvest / sow / till seem like super important, time-sensitive matters. You can still not mess those up, even if you drown your rice in a 100% flooded field or never water it at all.

Hulling:

  • For the first few harvests, go for White Rice while hulling. Brown and Mixed Rice give better food bonuses but less total/permanent stat growth so raising your actual stats is the better option at the beginning.

Dogs:

  • Once you get the (first) dog, send Kaimaru out to gather frequently. He’s the only one able to find more dogs, and once you have more dogs, you can send more people to gather at the same time.

Ice:

  • Having a block of ice at home will prevent food from spoiling for 1 day and then the ice melts into “renowed water”. If you have more than 5 blocks at once, only 5 of them will melt per day.

Oil:

  • Letting fish spoil turns them into oil for your lamp. It took me embarrasingly long to figure out where the oil came from.

Exploration:

  • Completing “exploration” tasks raises your exploration level, which in turn eventually unlocks more areas on the map. If you feel stuck, clueless or can’t figure out where to go next, you might just need to explore more in order to unlock the next area.

I hope I didn’t forget anything important, but I might simply update the “guide” then.