I sent a new mini-guide for Island of Happiness to IGN a few moments ago. It is a Calendar Guide and includes both a complete Calendar of all Birthdays and Festivals as well as a section that gives detailed information about all Festivals in the game.
Some players had emailed me asking for a Festival Guide. Although I have included much of this information now in my General Guide as well, I always find quick reference guides helpful in Harvest Moon.
The guide describes the requirements for winning each of the Contests as well as giving basic information about location and time. All the community festivals occur at the Meadow, so that information is not as useful as it might be in other Harvest Moon games, but there are a few Festivals that occur at night. As usual in Harvest Moon, the Cooking Festival is a festival in two parts. You need to go to the Meadow twice to experience both.
Meanwhile, I have been experimenting with the Wild Dog. I built a new improved Chicken Pen outside using Material Stone. In other Harvest Moon games, that and a trained dog would guarantee the safety of the Animals. Not in IoH. Furthermore, you don't witness any attack by the Wild Dog on a chicken or animal as you do in HM DS/Cute DS for example. The horrid creature slinks about silently and yet causes damage randomly.
He leaves the field always at 1.00 a.m. and yet that does not guarantee safety from stress either. My chickens were in the Coop while I was rebuilding the pen. None of them had suffered any stress. When I took them outside at 5.00 a.m. to place them in the new Pen, they were fine and the Wild Dog was nowhere to be found... (He never stays after 1.00 a.m.)
The next morning, 5 out of 8 chickens had suffered stress. It seems, therefore, that having them outside at any time between 8.00 p.m. and 6.00 a.m. places them at a chance of risk of stress, irrespective of the actual time frame in which they are outside.
I cannot see any other reason for the stress. They all had been fed and when I went to bed, none had suffered any stress...
A Website for all Harvest Moon fans providing Links to all Guides by Freyashawk: Actual Links on Right Side of Webpage
6 comments:
Thank you so much for all of your hard work and great guides!
Is it possible that in this case the chickens' stress has nothing to do with the wild dog but with food? If the food never disappears until you go to sleep, and chickens need food unless they have been outside for a certain number of hours, then if you put food in their bins and then put them outside just before you go to bed, wouldn't they still be hungry? Just a thought...
Thanks again for all the time you spend figuring this stuff out for everyone!
Actually, that is something I need to mention in my General Guide. All you have to do is access the Animals Page in your Farm Menu to see if every Animal has been fed. The chickens display the icon showing they have been fed outside almost immediately which is why you can send them outside the day before a typhoon and fill their dishes for the next day...
My first thought always is that the animal may have been hungry when stress results but that is NOT the case with the Chickens.
In fact, on the night that the Dog slept instead of protecting the Chickens, I made certain he had food as well.
Anon, speaking specifically about the night when I threw them outside at 5.00 a.m., only 5 out of 8 were stressed the next morning. As the dog and horse can eat the food in the Stable even when they are outside 24 hours, I assume the Chickens would have consumed the food in the trays if they hadn't eaten outside.
So it would probably be best to put animals back inside before 8pm? At least doing this would mean that you don't have to spend any in-game time on their daily care, just with taking them to and from their pens.
Have your chickens grazed outside earlier in the day for a number of hours before you dumped them outside at 4/5am? If they had not been grazing earlier in the day and there is no 'fodder icon' showing in their status bar, even though you put fodder in their tray they cannot access it unlike the dog and horse.
I experimented with putting my chickens outside and to my surprise a large number of nights I could find the wild dog near the pen. On another night. the wild dog wasn't near the pen but walking far away in the field. That got me worried because how am I to know if the wild dog is on my farm if it's nowhere near the pen? Anyway on all occassions my chicken did not suffer any stress the next day, after I hit the dog once .
Is there a need to hit the wild dog with your tool more than once?
Anon, it has been quite a while since I played IoH, but if you look at earlier comments, it can be FOOD that is the problem as you yourself remarked. I think I added this information to my Guides long ago... but yes, it is MOST vital to look at the food icon for every animal left outside. I don't see the point of leaving the chickens outside overnight to be entirely honest. It is easy enough to carry them back into their barn.
Hit the wild dog until it actually runs away from your property. It will not return once it has made its exit. Again, don't recall if I hit it ever more than once to force it to leave. Usually a direct hit will send it running away.
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