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Wanderstopputs you in the shoes of Alta, legendary warrior turned tea-maker and forces you to undergo that change of pace along with the character. From growing your own ingredients to intuiting the needs of customers, it’s a game about learning slowly.
The focus of the game is on the experience and the characters, and the mechanics are there to space those out and put you in the right headspace to enjoy them. If you want to jump right into the character drama and the confronting of personal demons, you’ll want to get proficient at managing farmland. Here’s a few tips to keep the game moving with pace.
Start With The Slowest Tasks
Tea balls are going to be the main thing you’re liable to run out of at any point in the game. They’re also theonly crop that isn’t ready to use the moment you harvest it, so you’ll want to start your tea drying before handling anything else. It’s a good way to start each season.
Yourhighlight vision will show you the status of any currently drying tea leaves, and you should try to keep space in your inventory for at least a couple tea balls before you fill up on other ingredients.
The second big consideration is cups. It takes a bit of time for them to come out of the dishwasher so it is best to have them loaded up ahead of time. If you don’t keep track of where they’re placed after drinking, check the tables around the store.
Clean Early And Often
One of the first things you may notice is thatyou only have two teacups to start the game with, and this is reset when the seasons change. Finding more will make management less hectic so you’ll want to explore a bit.
Sweeping leaf piles, trimming weeds and checking the pluffin roost will help youfind some missing teacups to fill out your supply.It’s also how you’ll find the more exotic mugs than the unadorned starting set.
you may alternatively make do with only the starting cups, as long as you’re diligent about cleaning them between uses.
Use Pots To Organise Your Plants
Most plants you can control the location of by planting the seeds where you want them. There are still benefits to using pots and moving them, as you’ll have better control over their positions and can space them more closely.
Larger plants can’t be placed in pots by themselves butusing three shrink shrooms will make them portable in sizewhile not reducing their yield. Tea leaves don’t give seeds but can still be moved with pots. The replanted tea leaves will disappear after harvesting, so its generallyeasier to just go out and forage for tea each time.
Don’t Worry About Stockpiling
Don’t panic too hard about organising everything or having an extended supply of ingredients. The clearing will change as you progress. When this happens the position of all items will be reset, except for framed photographs.Your stored ingredients will be reset, so you’re generally better offmaking or gathering things as you need them.
Finished teas are especially difficult to store since you’re able to’t put them in your pocket and pluffins will drink any left lying around on the ground or tables.
You’ll still want to gather all the ingredients for a recipe before you start making it: If you leave partway through it’seasy to forget which fruits you’ve already added to the mixture.
Make Tea In Batches
Pretty much every tea in the game you’ll want to craft more than once. At least one cup for a customer and one for Alta. A third cup for Boro if you want to get all of the bonus dialogue. When you’re using a new ingredient there’s no harm inusing the maximum amount of water to produce extra cups.
There are no time limits to meeting peoples requests, and excess tea isn’t wasted, so taking longer andmaking too much is better than not having enough.This is extra true when making tea with special ingredients. These aren’t recorded in your journal so you may struggle to recreate them.
Ingredient Order Matters
Lots of recipes will ask for multiple ingredients but only check that all of them are present.Most characters won’t mind if you add the fruit in a specific order,but for Alta and Boro they will only ruminate on the first ingredient you add. Keep this in mind when trying to both taste new drinks and match customer requests at the same time. Start with any ingredients you haven’t tasted before.
A couple ofend-game recipes will ask you to use ingredients in a specific order, but you’ll always be given specific instructions when this is the case.
Experiment With Different Hybrids
Your guidebook will tell you the core of each hybrid plant butthe surroundings you need to discover for yourself. you’re able to get a decent range of combinations with just two seeds and more will be added as you progress the seasons.
Mushroom circlesdon’t add new combinations but augment existing ones. Some mushroom combos give you nice lawn ornaments instead, while others make it easier to manage the plants by duplicating or replanting them.This makes mushrooms broadly optionalexcept for the rare recipe that asks for a modified version of a plant.
Don’t Fret Over Optional Objectives
Sometimes you’ll be given extra things you could do, such as altering a recipe or tending to certain chores. Boro will ask you to manage the picture frames or plant pots.
These truly are optional content.You won’t be given any quantifiable bonuses, just some extra dialogue related to your actions and the odd bonus decoration that might not even persist with the changing seasons.
There are similarlyhidden conversations and scenes not marked in your journal, like drinking the same brew as a customer or even just pouring a glass of water.
Pace Yourself
Odds are you aren’t currently attempting to speedrun the game.Optimise your setup to whatever extent you find most enjoyable,whether that’s focusing on the objectives or meandering along the way.
Something we did wasplant our seeds in different areas of the map whenever the seasons changed.It was still organised within those areas but the goal was to take in new scenary each time. If you instead want a faster pace you’re able to organise things close to the store to minimise time spent backtracking.
