The Danger of Jumping to Conclusions in Harvest Moon games

As a veteran Harvest Moon/Rune Factory player, when I first begin to play any new game in the series, I often have some advantages over players who never played Harvest Moon or Rune Factory games before. On the other hand, it is easy for me to jump to conclusions and that can be dangerous.

There are two ways to approach the task of writing strategy guides for players. The best method obviously would be to write the guide and perfect it before publication. If one has advance access to the games, one can do this to some extent, although test versions tend to be a little different from the ultimate retail version. Furthermore, where Harvest Moon or Rune Factory games are concerned, there are so many details that one needs months to work on any guides, irrespective of being able to PLAY the game for months.

The second way to write guides, especially on the internet, is to publish as quickly as possible in order to give players some point of reference and then update constantly until the guides are completed. Players have urged me to follow this course again and again.

Unfortunately, in the interest of making some information available to players as quickly as possible, my preliminary Guides for most games require constant updates for a few months after they first are published on the internet. This method of writing guides can be a little humiliating for the writer sometimes when she discovers that she has made some errors. I do apologise for any errors that appear in them, but I do try to correct these as quickly as possible.

I made some fundamental errors where Grand Bazaar was concerned based on past Harvest Moon games in terms of upgrades. This was an example of 'jumping to conclusions'. In the case of the Fishing Rod upgrades, I should have read the description at the Windmill more carefully. I paid the price personally for my carelessness when, after upgrading my Short Fishing Rod five times to the maximum 5 Star Quality and obtaining all ingredients for the Medium Fishing Rod upgrade, I was unable to transform the Short Fishing Rod into a basic Medium Fishing Rod. Serves me right! The error has been corrected in my Guides. It is not a bad idea to upgrade the Short Fishing Rod to Five Stars as it does improve fishing results but it will not become a different Tool.

Another similar error I made was in my initial descriptions of the ingredients required to make a few items at the 1st Windmill. What appeared to be the icons of Medium and Larg Milk in fact are icons for Jersey Milk and Golden Milk.

I would urge players always to refer to the latest versions of my Grand Bazaar Guides at this point in time. They remain 'works in progress' and I try to update them constantly with new information as well as corrected information whenever necessary.