HM:StH Any% Endangered Weasel Notes [New]

Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland
Any% Endangered Weasel Notes
[Updated 5 Apr 2021]

NOTES
- Goddess Questions: Mixed
- Immediately sleep until Summer 1
- Summer 1: Forage 3 VBs/Herbs for the Sprites, then 1 gift for Gwen; intro+gift Gwen
- Gift+talk Gwen everyday except non-rainy Tue/Thu; forage each gift individually as you enter the Carpenter's area (prefer VBs as they are closest)
- Summer 2: Go to the Sprite's burrow behind the barn; Intro+gift all three Sprites
- Summer 9: Go to the Sprite's burrow behind the barn; gift+talk all three Sprites; CS1 will trigger upon sleeping that night
- The day after the 8th interaction, if CS1 has triggered, CS2 will trigger
- After 14 interactions, CS3 can trigger:
	> DO NOT trigger CS3 on a Tue, as we must gift Gwen that day, and her Tue location is slow to reach
	> If your 14th interaction was on Mon or Tue, sleep until Thu for CS3
	> Else, trigger CS3 on the very next day
- If CS3 triggered on Sun/Mon/Wed/Fri/Sat:
	> Go straight to Goddess pond (skip Goddess intro CS)
	> Forage 5 Cranberries
	> Backtrack to the Carpenter's area; wait outside the house until Gwen exits at 5pm
	> When she comes to a stop, gift+talk with a Cranberry
	> Head back to Goddess pond
	> Grab a flower or herb and offer it to the Goddess; when she appears, select "Girl" (third option down)
	> Wait for CS4-5, skip when it starts; sleep once back at the farm
- If CS3 triggered on Thu:
	> Go straight to Goddess pond (skip Goddess intro CS)
	> Forage 5 Cranberries
	> Backtrack to the lake; wait outside the Cafe until Gwen arrives at ~2:30pm
	> When she comes to a stop, gift+talk with a Cranberry
	> Head back to Goddess pond
	> Grab a flower or herb and offer it to the Goddess; when she appears, select "Girl" (third option down)
	> Wait for CS4-5, skip when it starts; sleep once back at the farm
- Continue gifting Gwen with the remaining Cranberries; the day after the final CB, exit the house:
	> If CS6 triggers, continue
	> If CS6 doesn't trigger, you didn't get the Goddess luck--either gift an extra day to continue, or reset
- After CS6, head straight to Goddess pond; wait for 7pm and skip CS7
- Sleep for 7 days and exit the house to trigger CS8

ALTERNATIVES AND PITFALLS
The Goddess luck is obviously the most potentially frustrating part of the current route. It is estimated to save ~30s, so beginners are encouraged to simply gift with 21 of her +4 gifts; the route and cutscene timing would be identical up until the Cranberry forage, at which point they would just need two additional trips to Gwen. It also would not be necessary to sleep until Summer.

It is almost possible to skip the Goddess strat through a couple different methods, but none are able to give us enough extra affection. Gwen's Lake location, a "day-off" location for her, is a +6 convo under ordinary circumstances. This is +2 more than the convo boost of all our other interactions with her. The Goddess strat gives us +4 to put us at a final tally of 201 AP, so we technically only need +3 to hit exactly 200. The challenge is that Gwen only appears at the lake on Thursdays at 2:30pm, so a lake interaction is only feasible when combined with the day of our first 7pm meeting with her. And therein lies the problem: after CS3, her convo text changes from her normal text to "You'd better not have forgotten!..." (referring to the meeting), and this text changes the boost to +4, no matter what location she is in. Thus, her +6 lake boost is unavailable to us on the only day that it would be timely for us to try and use it.

Another idea is to try doubletalking her on the day of the meeting. However, we would need two. Two doubletalks are known to work in some instances (for example, Bob walking to and from his field after work), but it doesn't appear to work in this case. Though the mechanic is still not fully understood, if Gwen is talked as she approaches the cafe, then talked again as she stands in place, she will get +2, then +4, but as she walks away at 5pm (perfect for our purposes, since we only need to get to the Goddess pond by 7pm), she does not give a second walking convo boost. More testing is worth doing, but until and unless a viable alternative is found, the 20% Goddess summon+Cranberry strat appears to currently be the fastest route.

The day chosen for CS3-CS5 can be optimized slightly. Tuesday is bad because she doesn't get back to the Carpenter until ~8pm. Thursday is technically ideal (even without her +6 boost), because after the Cranberry forage, we only need to backtrack to the lake for our daily interaction (when she arrives at ~2:30pm), whereas on any other day, we would need to backtrack to the Carpenter's area and catch her outside at ~5:30pm. Thus, Thursdays saves two loading zones (into Carpenter's area, then back to lake area). The timecost for this may vary between platforms (slim vs. phat vs. PS3/4 vs. emu, etc.), but it is roughly 5-6s. Sleeping is only ~2s when done optimally, thus it is actually faster to sleep up to 2 extra days to get to Thursday, as you will save more time in loading zones than you lose in sleeping. This is why the notes specify to sleep until Thursday if the 14th interaction was on Monday or Tuesday (in the former case, we are sleeping 3 times, but we need to skip Tuesday anyway, so it's still only 2 extra sleeps). However, it should be said that if your sleeping execution is slow, it is better just to take the first non-Tuesday regardless.

One more tiny optimization can be attempted with the Sprites. Nak has a +5 convo in the Sprites' burrow, and this allows the runner to do a gift intro on one of the Sprites to save some text. The best candidate for this is Nic, as his gift intro text saves the most when compared with his intro text plus his gift text. However, this is unfortunately a yolo strat, as Nak gets +4 rather than +5 if it is raining, thus missing the 80 AP threshold by 1 AP. So if it happens to rain on the second Thursday, the runner must wait until the third Thursday, and if it rains again, it's a reset. Even waiting until the third Thursday does lose a few in-game days in the long run, and it means that CS3 will naturally trigger on Tuesday Summer 21, so the runner must be wary of this and sleep until Thursday Summer 23. This yolo Sprite strat is even trickier on the non-Cranberry route, as the Spring rainy season will have started before the third Thursday of the run, meaning a reset is even more likely. All in all, the time saved by doing the gift intro on Nic is less than the time lost in extra days if the strat fails, so it amounts to a very minor optimization.