How to Speedrun Harvest Moon (Script)

How to Speedrun Harvest Moon (Script)
[Updated 20 Sep 2023]

hey everyone, welcome to the channel. this is a little bit of a new project i've been thinking about doing for a little while. it's my way of hopefully giving back to a community that really deserves a lot more attention that it gets, in my opinion. it's a very friendly and very welcoming community, and also a very clever and creative one--a community that's been digging deep into some of your most nostalgic childhood games for the better part of the last decade.

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that community harvest moon speedrunning. and it's my hope that through this video, through this channel, i can bring some of that much-needed attention to the community, and share what it has to offer with a new audience.

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as speedrunning has exploded in popularity over the years, i think many speed communities have experienced a bit of a rennaissance. they've grown in size, in competition, and they've really grown in the knowledge about a lot of these classic games that we love so much.

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and it might surprise people to hear this, but a series like harvest moon really is no different. over the past 7-8 years, although many might not know that we exist, we've experienced a lot of growth, especially over the past 3-4 years. we've experienced a lot more development in our knowledge of the series, we have a marathon every summer, every winter, and we're really only continuing to grow.

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in this video, i'd like to address kind of the elephant in the room, and that would be, how does one "speedrun" harvest moon? i think it's no secret that certain genres tend to be much more strongly associated with speedrunning, like platformers or action adventure games, and i think that's because it's a little easier for viewers to actually see the progression of the run, as the runner advances from one level or area to the next, whereas harvest moon games tend to take place entirely in the same village with the player just slowly building up their farm.

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but harvest moon has its own internal logic and progression system that speedrunners study and make use of, and i hope that by providing a little bit of background and insight on that process, i can show you all what makes harvest moon interesting and fun to speedrun, and maybe get some of you interested in running or watching yourselves.

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as a quick note, throughout the video, i'll be using the term "harvest moon" or "HM" as a blanket term for the series, but this also includes so-called "story of seasons" games, which is just the name used for the series in the west since 2015. with that said, i hope you enjoy the video.

table of contents
i'll be dividing this video into four sections. first is common mechanics, where we'll look at some basic gameplay elements of the HM games and what tools and challenges they provide for speedrunners. next, we'll look at routing principles, where i'll describe some common solutions that runners use to address those challenges. we'll then look at the juicy stuff, exploits and glitches, which the series has no shortage of. finally, we'll have a look at how all these moving parts come together in some examples of real speedrun categories.

1:38:15 for watering
DOGGING AT ~1:08:00 IN DEMO'S ALL PHOTOS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Common Mechanics
	> Affection
	> Farming
	> Animals
- Routing Principles
	> Routing repetitions
	> Using downtime
	> Real time vs. calendar days (sleep strats)
	> Variable/on-the-fly routing
- Exploits and Glitches
	> Affection spams
	> Item dupes
	> Miscellaneous
- Speedrun Examples
	> Marriage/proposal
	> Achievement runs
	> Full-game runs
- Conclusions/Future of HMSR

CLIPS TO DOWNLOAD
- GDQ/ESA
- Me playing Dread*, SM64 footage, maybe some goldeneye footage
- Demo's all photos record*
- Dezert playing SNES (especially where he grows all the potatoes for Ranch Master)*
- Sam playing HoLV*
- Retro playing HMDS*
- My IoH run* and maybe Android's SI run*
- Laemp's AS run*
- Laemp's CC run* (to show gifting Katie) and my new CC run (to show Gina's location)*
- FoMT clips showing horse betting or dog sleeping*
- PoOT clip with the cow (try using Sam)*
- Vidja's MM run from the marathon to show the dupe glitch, maybe some historical clips of Lana*
- Maybe change the example of unlockable candidates from Lanna to Sabrina and show a clip of Sabrina moving to town, along with mining
- Clips of various marathon runs

Hey everyone, welcome to the channel. This is a little bit of a new project I've been thinking about doing for a while. It's my way of hopefully giving back to a community that really deserves more attention that it gets, in my opinion. It's a very friendly and welcoming community, and also a very clever and creative one, a community that's been digging deep into the inner workings of some of your most nostalgic childhood games.

INTRODUCTION
Speedrunning is still very much a niche hobby, but lately it's become a bit more of a household concept, at least among gaming communities. This is partly due to the visibility of large charity marathons such as Games Done Quick, but there's also been an explosion of speedrunning-related content that has brought awareness of this subculture to a much wider audience. In simplest terms, speedrunning is often described as "beating a game as fast as possible", and it's often said that almost any game could be speedran. But there are still a few games and genres which are more heavily associated with speedrunning, such as platformers and other action-oriented games. In these runs, it's usually a bit easier for players and viewers to understand the strategies involved in going faster--precise inputs, optimized pathing, advanced movement techniques, as well as flashier things like sequence-breaking glitches. In that sense, you can literally *see* the time being saved.

But there are many other types of speedgames where saving time is not necessarily a matter of just pressing buttons faster, but rather planning tasks and objectives more efficiently. In these games, viewers can't necessarily see the seconds being shaved in real time, but there is rich depth of routing going on underneath the hood. One such series that's near and dear to my heart is Harvest Moon. For the past several years, a passionate group of fans have been hard at work improving our technical knowledge of these beloved farm simulation games and competing in a wide variety of speedrun categories that spans the series' now-25 year history. Through their creative cooperation, they have transformed Harvest Moon from a series most would never associate with speedrunning, into one with many active runners and biannual community marathons.

But how do speedrunners "farm fast"? This video aims to investigate that question. Here, we'll take a look at some of the core mechanics of Harvest Moon games and what sorts of challenges they pose for speedrunners, followed by common routing approaches to these challenges, as well as a selection of exploits and glitches the series has to offer. If you're interested in learning more and getting involved yourself, I've gone ahead and linked the Harvest Moon Speedrunning Discord server in the description. It's really an awesome and friendly community, and we welcome speedrunners and casual players alike. As a final note, I'll be using the name "Harvest Moon" or "HM" in this video, but this also includes "Story of Seasons" games, which is simply the name used for the series in the West since 2015.

COMMON MECHANICS
In this first section, we'll take a look at mechanics that most casual players will be familiar with, but we'll examine them in more depth and from the perspective of a speedrunner, considering their potential uses, and some challenges they might pose when attempting some of these speedruns.

- First off is affection. Many might think of HM as just a farming game, but at its core, the series is very much a social simulation. The player's farm is always situated in a larger town populated with various villagers to befriend and marriage candidates to court. The player's friendship with these NPCs is indicated by an internal value for each villager, which is typically called "affection", and this value can be increased or decreased by various means. The most basic way to increase a villager's affection is with gifts, and most games grant a small boost simply for talking to the villager as well, which we call a conversation boost. Villagers will have preferences for certain gifts that will raise their affection by a larger amount, and disliked or hated gifts may actually lower the villager's affection. A key limitation of gift and conversation boosts is that they are each typically limited to one per day, meaning that raising affection must be done gradually (but we'll discuss some exceptions to this rule later). Other ways to increase affection could include triggering certain event cutscenes or participating in certain festivals. Other things that could decrease affection include letting an animal die, littering (in certain games), or failing to interact with the villager for a period of one or more days. Raising the affection of various villagers is a key component of almost all HM speedruns. An obvious example would be marriage runs, which aim to increase a given marriage candidate's affection to a high threshold where they will accept the player's proposal. Another is HM64 All Photos, where many villagers must be befriended in order to obtain the elusive party photo at the end of the game.

One challenging aspect of the affection system is that in most older HM titles, the villagers' affection values are usually completely hidden. Marriage candidates might give an approximation of their current affection, indicated by a colored heart next to their character portrait, but this only represents a rough estimate. Therefore, in order to execute the run optimally, runners must either route out the affection in advance, calculating the number of gifts or interactions before the run, or they must track the affection on the fly mentally. This is so they don't waste time collecting and delivering excess gifts. Tracking these hidden values represents one of the important skills required in HM speedrunning.

- Next up is farming. I think many would agree that growing and harvesting crops makes up the core farm sim gameplay that casual players love so much about HM. Not only is it relaxing, but it provides the primary way that most players will go about making money in the game, at least early on. The problem for speedrunners is that farming is very time-intensive, and in the early game, the player usually has weaker tools and less stamina, meaning that it is often impossible to produce a large harvest in a short amount of time. Tilling and planting might be easy enough, but it's watering that is so slow, as it must be done every day until the crop is grown, in the absence of rain. Because of this, runners may choose to plant crops and simply hope for rain. This is especially useful for shorter categories, such as SNES marriage, where the runner can more easily reset bad runs until they get the right luck. In longer categories where frequent resets are impractical, runners may choose to manipulate the RNG if possible, effectively guaranteeing that they get the necessary rain and don't have to do any manual watering. Examples of this include Island of Happiness and Sunshine Islands speedruns, two DS titles where RNG manipulation is feasible. However, in general, HM speedrunners will tend to look for alternative sources of money if possible, and there are some high-risk, high-reward strategies that work well if successful. For example, some Friends of Mineral Town marriage runs will bet it all on the horse race to obtain medals they can trade in for a large quantity of broaches, which can be sold for a high price. This is needed to afford everything from the notorious "TV Shopping" necessary for obtaining all the marriage requirements.

The runner may need to grow crops for other reasons in certain categories, maybe as a gift or to unlock something else, but strictly as a money-making strategy, they are a tricky thing to route into HM speedruns, so they are avoided when possible. But if they can be implemented correctly, they can prove fruitful and profitable.

- As our last mechanic, let's look at animals. Along with growing crops, raising cows and chickens is the other core pillar of HM gameplay that makes the series so sweet and easy-going. But like crops, farm animals pose many challenges that make them difficult to use in a speedrun setting. First of all, they cost a lot of both time and resources. And unlike crops, which can be left unattended while waiting for rain, animals typically require some daily investment to care for. This usually involves feeding and collecting the resource that they produce, for example, eggs from chickens, milk from cows, or wool from sheep. The feed itself must also be bought or produced in some way, for example, growing and cutting grass for fodder or corn for chickenfeed. In addition, animals, like villagers, have affection values, and this affection influences the size or quality of the item they produce, thus impacting its selling price. Raising the animal's affection to a level where it is profitable is a long process, so it's not very time-efficient.

An experienced HM player might point out that raising animals can be made easier by simply letting them outside, where they don't need to be fed. This is true, but in the event of bad weather, the animal must then be moved inside and fed manually, or else it will eventually get sick. Then it must be moved back outside when the weather is good again. In later HM titles, moving animals might be as simple as ringing a bell, but in many early games, animals had to be manually pushed or carried outside. If the animal gets sick, its affection will be hurt, which will hurt its profitability, and if it dies, it could hurt the affection of any villagers that the runner needs to befriend. This all makes raising animals a pretty impractical money-making strategy for any speedrun in which it is not already strictly required by the category definition itself.

Some later HM games, such as Pioneers of Olive Town, have sort of eased the burden on speedrunners by making it so animals won't get sick even if they're not cared for, and some early games are notable for glitches or exploits which can make the process easier. We'll discuss these examples later on.

ROUTING PRINCIPLES
In this section, we'll discuss some of the common situations that arise in HM speedruns and how runners go about approaching them to save time.

NOTE: ADD MENTION OF SIMPLY GIFTING AND TALKING INSTEAD OF JUST GIFTING AND USE A CLIP OF SORIN DOING BLUEBIRD

- Our first principle is what I like to call routing repetitions. HM is a series that's based on cycles--days, seasons, and years. Likewise, most objectives in HM speedruns are achieved through cyclic, repetitive actions, meaning that the time it takes to achieve an objective is the total sum of the repetitions. So when comparing different strategies for a certain goal, even if one strategy looks superficially faster, it may not be if its repetitions are slightly longer, or if it requires more repetitions than a competing strategy. For example, to complete Save the Homeland's "Cake Contest" ending, one of the five girls must reach 120 affection. Katie is readily available 6 days a week, and she must already be raised to 30 affection just to start the ending path, so she is an obvious first choice. Gina is readily available only on Wednesday and Saturday, but because her Wed/Sat location is so much closer to the farm than Katie, each repetition of gifting is significantly faster. The only timeloss for Gina is the extra sleeping, but since sleeping is so fast in StH, the travel time saved is more than enough to make her the superior choice. Another very simple example is from FoMT, where runners will make sure they are holding the dog before sleeping. For some reason we won't explain in detail here, sleeping is actually considerably faster if the player is holding the dog, so even though it takes time to bring him inside and pick him up everyday, it saves significant time over the entire run due to every sleep being just that much faster.

- Using downtime. There are various times in an HM speedrun where the runner has to wait for a certain time of day. Often this is to wait for a certain villager to be available, a certain shop to open, or a certain event to be triggerable. So speedrunners try and make use of this downtime by doing small tasks while they wait. In Save the Homeland's "Horse Race" ending, the player must befriend Bob, but on every day except Thursday, he isn't available until 8am when his shop opens. Thus, the time it would normally cost to collect gifts for him actually costs no time at all, since it can be done during the downtime from 6-8am. Another example would be games like HM64 or HMDS, where small bits of downtime can be spent spamming a certain tool in order to level it up. This principle is crucial to the routing of HM speedruns, as it illustrates the idea that time is a resource. Villagers each have their own schedules, covering different places at different times on different days, and optimizing an HM speedrun often involves figuring out the order of tasks that will minimize the amount of time spent standing around.

- Lastly, let's look at the very subtle distinction in HM speedruns, and that is the distinction between real time and calendar days. In a speedrun, it would seem naturally faster to set out straight to your objective. But the calendar is a powerful variable in HM, in the way that it makes certain events or resources available to the player depending on the day of the week or the time of year. What this means is that, especially in games where sleeping is fast, it can sometimes be faster to spend some time sleeping to a later date in order to access resources that make the route overall faster. Our Cake Contest case from earlier is a simple example of this, where the Gina strats take significantly more in-game days than Katie strats, but she is faster in terms of real time. Also in Save the Homeland, the Azure Swallowtail ending can be completed in either Spring or Summer, and the player must befriend Lyla. Early runs used a Spring route, but it was later realized that sleeping until Summer to access her preferred gift, the Pink-Cat Mint Flower, would allow for fewer gifting trips, and this turned out to be faster despite the time lost from sleeping a whole extra season. This principle really showcases the cyclic and nonlinear nature of HM speedruns and shows how important it is to remember that taking fewer in-game days does not automatically make a strategy faster.

EXPLOITS AND GLITCHES
Okay, let's finally get into some of the juicy stuff--exploits and glitches. Harvest Moon speedruns have plenty to offer in that department. There are some very unique glitches in specific games, but here first let's look at some of the common ones that come up across the series as a whole.

- One of the most important and well-known exploits, even among casual players, is the affection spam. As mentioned earlier, affection boosts from gifts or conversations are typically limited to one gift and one convo per day. Additional gifts will be refused or accepted with no boost, and conversations will yield nothing. A spam is an exploit where the game fails to prevent subsequent boosts from being applied, allowing the player to "spam" a gift or conversation to repeatedly increase the affection in a single day. One of the most notorious examples is the Karen dog spam in HM64, where the player can repeatedly show their dog to Karen to easily max out her affection. Magical Melody features a unique affection mechanic where the game applies the gift boost in two parts--an initial boost when villager is given the gift, and second boost when they put it in their "pocket", so to speak; the initial boost is correctly capped, but not the "pocket" boost, allowing for easy gift spams. In SNES, each of the girls gets an affection boost from a certain dialogue option they can randomly produce once per day. But in fact, by exiting and re-entering the area or building, the flag for this dialogue is reset, allowing them to give the dialogue again and creating a potential spam. Spams are useful in that they save on repetitions, not only the time it takes to travel to the villager, but also the time it takes to sleep to each new gifting day, and conversation spams can save the time that would have been spent having to collect gifts. Though they are rare, affection spams are a valuable tool in the speedrunner's arsenal whenever they can be found.

- Next is a big one, item dupes. Item duplication is kind of a "Holy Grail" in HM speedruns, as it has the potential to solve many routing problems, depending on the situation. A rather obvious application is to dupe and ship a large quantity of a valuable item to cover any necessary money for the run. This is possible in cases such as the phone dupe in HM3GBC. HMDS is well-known for its extremely easy duplication glitches, which are widely used to make obtaining money a trivial matter. One of the most powerful dupes in all of HMSR is that of Magical Melody, where by pressing B in a small window after sowing seeds, the player's whole inventory is corrupted, giving an infinite number of each item in the rucksack and a very large amount of money. In fact, this can even be repeated ad nauseum to eventually corrupt the memory value of the player's musical notes, making it possible to save the Harvest Goddess without ever collecting a single one. Now, despite their massive potential, some dupes have certain limitations. HM64 is well-known for its music box duplication glitch, where the player can dig up unlimited music boxes from the same spot in the field and keep getting them repaired by Rick. But the music box is a key item that only serves as a special, high-affection gift to the bachelorettes, so it can't be sold for money, but it's still extremely useful for affection purposes. Back to Nature has a powerful shipping dupe that requires the runner to stay up all night and pause exactly as the clock strikes 6am, when they are forcibly transported back to the house for the start of the next day. If performed successfully, the runner will be able to move around normally with the pause menu still open, and they can ship an infinite number of whatever's in their inventory. The glitch itself is not limited per se, but it is extremely punishing if the runner fails the trick, as they will have to spend another night waiting around until 6am in order to attempt it again.

- Now, Harvest Moon is a huge and diverse series, so it's impossible to give an exhaustive treatment of glitches and exploits in this video, but to sum up, here's a few more noteworthy miscellaneous examples: egg dupe in HMGB, cutscene weather manip in StH, weed intro in StH, loading zone storage in FoMT, cooking dupe in IoH, Z-Cheat in AnWL, etc., etc. I will make special mention of a fairly well-known and fairly hilarious HM64 exploit that I hinted at earlier, the infamous "meat tenderizer strats". Casual players know that striking an animal with a tool is supposed to hurt its affection, but in HM64, doing so repeatedly to a cow will eventually put it in a special "mad" state, and luckily for speedrunning purposes, striking a cow when it's in this state actually raises its affection, rather than lowering it! So maxing out a cow's affection is as simple as hammering that beef nice and flat. Each game in the series has a little something different to offer, but there are plenty of these kinds of tricks all throughout HMSR. If you're interested in learning more about any of the tricks I mentioned, or maybe one I didn't mention, leave a comment about it down below.

SPEEDRUN EXAMPLES
To give a fuller picture of these concepts in action, let's look at a few different examples HM speedrun categories, from the more simple and straightforward, to the more intricate, full-game challenge runs.

- We'll start with the quintessential HM speedrun, the marriage run. Marriage categories are timed from game start to the successful proposal or wedding with the chosen candidate. On a basic level, this kind of run involves raising the bachelor or bachelorette's affection to the level where they will accept the player's proposal. So on the surface, it might seem to be as simple as daily gifting until the affection threshold is reached, but HM games typically have various other requirements before the player's proposal will be accepted. This may include upgrading the house, buying a bigger bed, expanding the town, or completing the main story. The game often also requires the player to trigger a series of "heart events", which are cutscenes with the chosen candidate that can be triggered as their affection increases. In addition, some marriage candidates are not available from the start of the game, and they may have certain other requirements before they'll appear. For example, in Island of Happiness, Sabrina won't be available until the player has shipped 20 minerals from the mine. In FoMT, the Harvest Goddess can be married, but she has a whole laundry list of extra requirements. Routing a marriage speedrun mostly involves finding the best gift for the chosen candidate and the best way to make money for the required purchases.

- Next, a fun way to try out a certain game or get started in HMSR is achievement runs. These are runs that aim to complete a smaller side objective of the game. Achievement runs could be compared to "individual level" speedruns in other games. The objective could be anything, so it allows for a lot of ideas and individual creativity, but it's often an objective that is otherwise not required in other categories of the game. A good example would be All Recipes in HM64, where the recipe book is completed, or 64's various individual photo categories, some of which only take a few minutes. In Animal Parade, the overall objective of the game is to collect the five different color bells--red, yellow, blue, green, and purple--each of which requires different tasks, such as farming, mining, or cooking. But the community also has categories for each individual bell, which makes for more compact challenge runs. The objective for such a run could even be as simple as just "win the cow festival". There may not be official leaderboards for some of these categories, but that shouldn't discourage anyone from getting creative for the purposes of a fun, collaborative routing exercise and a bit of friendly competition.

- And lastly is the more intense stuff, main story/completionist runs. It's a bit of a longstanding myth that there is no equivalent to traditional full-game categories like "any%" or "100%" in HMSR, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Even the earliest HM games have some kind of final objective or "good ending" to strive towards, and later games tended to include a proper "story campaign" that the player would complete alongside their general farming and social endeavors. The prime example would be HM64 All Photos, which started off as a pipe dream of a speedrun in the early days, but evolved over a decade later into a challenging and impressive display of approximately 6 hours, through the ingenuity and collaboration of HMSR's best researchers, glitch-hunters, and routers. Another full-game run with a storied history is Magical Melody any%, which likewise started off as a relatively glitchless slog, but transformed into an intricate technical showcase over the years. On the shorter side, Save the Homeland offers bite-sized, tightly optimized single-ending runs. No matter your preference, there is a run for everyone, with a lot of potential still remaining for the future. These categories are interesting in that they incorporate all the mechanics, strategies, and exploits that we've looked at throughout this video, and really provide a proper showcase of the full potential of HMSR at its best.

CONCLUSION/FUTURE OF HMSR
Hopefully this video can serve as a decent introduction to the world of Harvest Moon speedrunning. For those of you who would have thought it impossible to speedrun games like this, I hope you are pleasantly surprised to discover the depth that they really have to offer as speedgames, especially in terms of creative routing solutions. Though our community has been steadily growing over the past ten or so years and some of the games have had a lot of impressive research and work put into them, this is also a huge series with a lot of untapped potential and uncharted territory, and we hope to better document the deeper intricacies as well as flesh out some of our more empty leaderboards going forward. The community is fun and welcoming, we hold two marathons every year, in February and August, and we are hoping to do more community-oriented events in the near future. Discord linked below, yadayadayada