As in all Harvest Moon games, you aren’t only raising crops on your Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories farm. Animals are equally important. This time, bringing them into your virtual lives is a little different than in previous games.
For example, nothing’s given to you. In other entries, you’d have dogs, cats, horses, or even cows handed to you. Not so in Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories. The only one that doesn’t end up costing you any money is the bobcat. Every other creature is between 2,000 and 20,000 gold.
The animals you can acquire immediately are the chicken, cow, horse, and sheep. You can, at most, have five chickens, and they’re 2,000 gold each. The big barn can host seven cows, horses, and sheep after being upgraded. (You can only own one horse.) I personally recommend going with one cow, five sheep, and one horse. This is mainly due to the biggest house requiring at least 20 ordinary wool to acquire, and having five sheep makes it easier to meet that quota. As in The Lost Valley, lambs take about a week to become a full grown sheep, and a calf grows up in around two weeks. Chicken give eggs and cows milk every day, while sheep give wool every three days.
Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories’ bobcat and dog only become available after the first house upgrade. Even though a dog costs 2,000 gold, you need to make a prior 85,000 gold investment to have the home space for them to move in. Hunter will stock one immediately after you get a bigger home. As for the bobcat, it seems like affection levels don’t play any part in its decision to move in with the player. I had only seen the animal once, prior to the upgrade, but it was ready to become my pet the second time we met.
There’s one really neat feature concerning the dog and bobcat. Both help you out by providing their own food. Since they can’t provide products to sell, they offer up 10 delicious feed from time to time after being picked up. (Don’t ask where they got it.) All animal feed can be fed to any creature on your farm, so it’s quite a bonus.
As for money, animals aren’t Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories’ biggest moneymakers. Then again, neither are crops. Ore and precious stones are what you want to stock up on to make cash. Keep one of each animal, so you have their byproducts for cooking purposes. I recommend using ore to build a cash reserve, upgrade all your buildings, get all your animals, then go back to focusing on farming and animal raising.
Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories is immediately available for Apple iOS devices. It will eventually come to Android devices and the Nintendo Wii U.
