Van's Favorite FAQ (Friends of Mineral Town)

What is Van’s Favorite?
It is an item sent to you through the mail after making 10 Transactions in both Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town (Will be abbreviated as mFoMT from now on) and the remake of both GBA fomts, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town (Will be abbreviated as SoS:FoMT from now on). It does not exist in the original Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town.

To quote a copypaste (I honestly don’t remember the source, sorry!):
“Van’s favorite is triggered by making 10 transactions per day. You have to start your transaction count at a multiple of 10 to get this to work. To find out where your count is, test making one purchase transaction (buy something once from Jeff at the supermarket), go to sleep. Look to see if you got Van’s favorite in the mailbox the next day. If not, restart, and make 2 transactions, sleep, look in mailbox. Repeat this with 3, 4, 5, up to 9 transactions until you get Van’s favorite the next day. That’s how many times you need to buy/transact to get it. After you get Van’s favorite, continue making exactly 10 transactions each day to get this item everyday. Keep record of each transaction you make so you don’t lose count. A few things to note, the quantity you buy does not matter, it’s the transaction. Buy an item, close window, that’s one transaction - doesn’t matter if you bought a quantity of 10 of that item, it still counts as one transaction. Renovations, tool upgrades, and buying food/drinks from the Inn or Kai’s shack counts as a transaction as well.”

In SoS:FoMT you can receive Van’s Favorite on the 2nd day if you want.

In mFoMT you will not receive Van’s Favorite until the day AFTER you receive the Shelves from the Shopping Channel, which will not show up on the shopping channel until you buy the 1st house upgrade. The counter still increments regardless if you bought the Shelves or not. So if counter is at a multiple of 10 once you receive shelves, and if you make no purchases after receiving the shelves and go to sleep, you will receive a letter with Van’s Favorite.

Even though the item has the name of a character that is only available in mFoMT once you connect the game to Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, you do not actually need to connect the games in order to start receiving said item.

Why do you go that far out of your way for Van’s Favorite?

If you sell these items to Won/Huang (same person, the name is Won in mFoMT and Huang in SoS:FoMT) you will receive anywhere between 48000G and 57000G. Because of this we can avoid relying super heavily on horse races during speedruns.

The only snag is that in order to be able to sell him anything, we need to first befriend him. As far as it’s currently been tested for both games the easiest/fastest method to befriend him is by buying Adamantite during a horse race, wrapping them and gifting it to him. It’s a bit ironic since you still have to bet on horse races but at least most if not all of the RNG revolving horse races is removed, plus it’s still potentially faster depending on which game/route/category for reasons such as actually being able to skip the 2nd horse race entirely.