Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon

• You can walk through crops. The fat "c" shape is useless.

• When you run out of RP in a dungeon area, leave immediately. It's not as severe as in RF1, since in that one if you lost all RP and HP in a dungeon, game over. In RF3, you just get knocked out and get teleported to the hospital.

• The more you use your items, the less RP they take to use.

• Talk to everyone at least once a day. That's the best way to learn about events, what they like and hate, and so on. Once you hear an event mentioned (someone's birthday, a contest, etc) it gets marked on your calendar.

• Keep failed foods and cans/boots that you fish up, at least a few of them. You'll thank me later once you learn what they're for.

• Stock up on wood! Chop those stumps and sticks and put them into that wood storage shack. Upgrades for your farm will require lots of it.

• When the time comes to catch your first monster, I'd like to nominate the elephant as a strong candidate of interest. He won't produce anything for you like the cows or the woolies, but he'll water your crops for you every day. I named mine Dumbo and he is the hardest worker.

• Don't worry about time at all. There's no evaluation period or anything after a couple of years and none of the villagers are in danger of leaving, so feel free to set your own pace.

• Seeds can be planted in 9x9 grid if you hold down the button with a stack of 9 seeds equipped. This also goes for anything you apply to a field (Greenifier, Formula A/B/C, etc.)

• You start off with teleport spell that lets you teleport back to your house or out of dungeons, it's very useful.

• Doing requests are a great way to get rare materials or better gear early in the game.

• If you sell a high-quality seed, then the shop will also upgrade the seeds they carry to be that quality. High-quality seeds result in high-quality crops, which cook into better food, and sell for more money. You get high-quality seeds by using the scythe on a ripe crop. This will destroy the crop, and get you a quality seed instead. Sell that seed, run straight to the shop and then you can buy better-quality seeds. It's like permanently upgrading your ability to grow that crop. This is, as far as I recall, never explained unless you get extremely lucky in what a random NPC decides to tell you.

• There are plots of land in each of the four seasonal dungeons with colored grass growing on them; these can be used as farm plots to grow that season's crops, if you find yourself needing a Spring crop in mid-Fall.

• Grow onions in Spring. They're slow-growing & not super profitable, but they're used in a ton of mid- to late-game cooking recipes & you'll be glad you threw a couple stacks in your refrigerator vs spending a week running to the forest to grow them out of season when the time comes and you need them.

• Buy recipe bread every day. It's relatively cheap and crafted objects make exponentially more money than raw ingredients. Cooking bread is generally given as a reward for coming in the top 3 of any seasonal event & therefore less of a priority, but it isn't a bad idea to buy a few to burn through the various grilled fish & sashimi recipes.

• Seasonal harvest events are on the 28th of every season; make sure you have saved at least one crop to enter with!