Kynseed – Useful Tips and Tricks

An incomplete collection of things I only found out through a lot of experimentation and several useful wikis. Contains all the spoilers. It is a rough guide, seeing as I barely know what I’m doing, so please forgive me for my lack of polish.

A Long List of Tips

All credit goes to Jiuy!

Introduction

I just got annoyed that there wasn’t much information on steam about this game despite the good amount of content it already has, and decided to keep a running list of what I found/wished I had known earlier. I’ll try to keep updating this, but whether or not I do depends on if I’m currently playing it, which I may not be.

I am currently in Year 4 in Winter, own Jeremies Irons, and plan on owning everything. I hope to eventually have an army of kitty companions following me everywhere, as well as a cat to keep. I am on PC, and will be keeping this guide to the PC format of the game.

Starting Off

This section is for noobs who just got this wonderful game and have not finished the Prologue yet.

Alright, you just finished downloading the game, you realize its in Early Release, and you’re ready to get going and have fun.

What can you do?

For starters, do what they tell you to. Doing your tasks everyday is a good way to get a feel for what the game is about, and what the start of most of your days will be about. Plus, its a good way to start building up your money.

Explore the entire map

Find the mapstones that let you see the map, preferably in all areas, so in case you get lost, you’re not aimlessly wandering around. Pick up everything that you can, since there’s no inventory limit yet, you can get away with it for now. M button is for the map, Q will take you to big view of all the areas once you’re in the map.

Talk to everyone

People with exclamation points or question marks over their heads have something important to say to you, or have yet to be introduced.

Pig riding

The best way to get around normally, and you can do it from the start of the game. All you need to do is go up to the pig, click, and then click the riding button on the left. You can interact with everything while riding the pig as well. You can dismount with the tab button. Riding your animals around (assuming they’ll let you) will slowly raise their ‘like’ meter for you. If you get stuck somewhere, you can either click the unstick button in the menu (escape key) which will take you to the point you entered the area from, or find some way to cleverly escape by dismounting and then remounting.

You can summon your animals to you from wherever you are by pressing tab while not mounted, then, using your mouse scroll wheel to select the animal, pressing the buttons they show you on the right side of the screen to give commands to your animals and pets.

When you mount your animal, it won’t automatically follow you around. You’ll need to click while next to it and then click the button on the right side of the menu. It will be a hand in either a beckoning gesture or in a stopping gesture. The stop feature will send your animal back home, and the only way to get it to stay still is to go into the tab menu and tell it to stay.

There’s a good variety of tools you can get at the start of the game:

• Wooden Bucket: next to the pig pen (currently has no use).
• Lantern: on the table inside the house.
• Watering Can: sitting in the middle of the crop field.
• Fishing Rod: from Twig, check your mailbox to see his letter, then go to the uppermost path out of the farm.
• Pickaxe: Next to the Blacksmiths house at the top left of the map in Candlewych village.
• Tin Bucket: Told to buy it from the general store on the second day.
• Tin Sickle: Crafted after completing the blacksmith tutorial.

Brounies

If you don’t offer them something in the brown dish sitting in front of your house, the apples on the trees will turn rotten. So far that is the only consequence.

Offering to the Goddesses

At this point in the game, most of what you have access too they won’t appreciate. My advice is to skip giving them things for now, in favor of offering things they’ll like later on, which I will try to provide information about further into this guide. Another option would be to give them random things, mark down what each one likes and then make a big list for yourself to follow. You can also use the Goddess statues to teleport, but it requires regular apples. If you build up a stockpile, its a good way to get everywhere. You can only teleport if you’ve activated the statue though, so no traveling to unknown places this way.

Taskboard

This is the place for people to ask other people (meaning you) to get things for them in exchange for money or friendship, whichever they’d rather part with. There are four types of requests for you to take. You’ll also notice events posted here. If you click on the event, you can add it to your calendar, and will then be able to see when the event is for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Types of Requests

Big Request

Asks for a lot of stuff, and usually will have money as a reward.

I lost something

(NPC) lost something somewhere, and if you take the request, you can go find it for them. It will have the picture of the item the NPC is looking for underneath the text. It is really hard to find the items, so I typically just ignore them.

Item Wanted

These ones are the simplest to follow. (NPC) wants you to gift them something. Notice the word ‘gift’. When you take these requests, once you have the item, you go up to the NPC who requested it, then open up their action menu and click the up option, a big green gift box. If they’re actively selling something, you’ll have to talk to them by pressing the left option in the action menu, then choosing the gift option after greeting them.

Too busy to cook

These requests usually have some type of image underneath the text, and will ask the player to deliver something to them between certain times. They might detail exactly what kind of meal they want in the request, or might just say to give them something cooked and farm grown.

The Travelling Trader

This guy will show up in Candlewych on the 2nd and 8th of every month, and will be in Druida’s Cross on the 1st and 9th. He shows up consistently, and sells items.

Fishing, Blacksmithing, and Cooking

These three are the basic skills you can acquire.

Fishing

All you need to do for Fishing is go talk to Twig in the Dreamers Nook, and you’ll have a fishing rod and plenty of ability to fish. When you fish, you don’t have to just wait for the fish to bite at your rod. Instead, you can aim for the shadow of the fish here.

To get better skills, catch the fish Twig requests in the gift menu and give it to him. 

Blacksmithing

On the fourth day of the Prologue, Father will ask you to go get a tin sickle from the Blacksmith. The Blacksmith will tell you to go get some ore from the mine next to his house, and will give the Blue Mine Key. There’s also a pickaxe sitting in front of the mine for you to take.

The mine and what the ore looks like.

 
Cooking

Talk to Mother Hubbard at Candlewych Cottage and give her the things she requests to get recipes. You can cook at the ovens and at the stove. The stove and oven will give you a timing minigame.

Mr. Fairweather

It is at this point that the very long section for beginners must end, because Mr. Fairweather is at the ending of the Prologue. Mr. Fairweather is the faery creature that gives you the Kynseed and one of three gifts. You reach him at the end of the Prologue when Twig sends you a letter saying that Mr. Fairweather would like to meet you, which you will do regardless of if you read the letter. He will give you the Kynseed and will give you three options for a gift. There’s the Clockwork Clock, which is a handy device that replaces the dandelions you would otherwise have to tell time by. It shows you the exact hour of the day, the date, and the season (season hasn’t been implemented yet), and will never disappear. The Gluttons Trough is an auto feeder for your pigs. You put food in, and at a specific hour, it’ll send the food out. The Wooden Key allows you to take the fairy pathways. Some of the areas don’t have a pathway, and the entryways are a bit hard to find. Once you have the key, you can travel anywhere there’s another entryway, once you’ve gone through one.

Animals, Events, and Where to Find Them

There are four types of farm animals currently in the game. Sheep, chickens, cows, and pigs. There are auctions for the sheep, chickens, and pigs, but currently the only cow you can own in the game is Buttercup.

Besides farm animals, there are also dogs and cats. You can purchase a dog from one of the general stores, but so far, no cats can be kept. Sad. You can go to the Cuckoo Wood and ask them to follow you around though.

Auctions

Starting at 12 pm, a bunch of NPC’s and animals will show up here and the auctions will begin. The announcer standing behind the podium will tell you the sheep’s name, speed, quality, and mood. Speed, quality, and mood can either be good, bad or average. To bid, stand behind one of the empty boxes with a gavel over it and click. Once the announcer has said what the animals mood is, bidding will begin. I won’t tell you how I buy the animals because I make bad money choices, but basically, just raise the bid by one until you win, and don’t wait long to bid because sometimes it won’t give you a final warning before it ends.

Sheep auctions are in FineFayre, Mellowfields, on the 4th and the 12th. Chicken auctions are in FestField, Poppyhill, on the 1st and the 8th. Pig auctions are in the Festival Green below Candlewych, on the 6th and the 13th. You can only have 3 pigs at a time.

Animals

All animals will appreciate higher quality foods. Sheep will eat fruit, vegetables, dandelions, and wheat. Sheep don’t currently give you anything, and cannot be blown up and popped like the pigs, and they can be ridden. Cows will eat fruit, vegetables, dandelions, and wheat, and can be milked with either a bucket or a bottle. You can also pet them to gain friendship points. Chickens will eat fruit, vegetables, and wheat. You cannot ride them, and can pet them instead. Chickens can be fed Gassy apples and popped with your slingshot like pigs, and they drop drumsticks when you do so. They also give eggs. You can take the eggs that other peoples chickens drop as well. Pigs will eat anything, and can be popped and ridden. According to its quality, each animal will give you different amounts of whatever it drops.

Dogs

Because yes, they do have some nice mechanics. If you’ve already found all the books about dogs and read them, you probably don’t need this section, but for the people who haven’t, here it is! Dogs, when they follow you around, will say ‘Woof Woof’ and sit next to it when they’ve found a digging spot. Its a little hard to see, but basically its a little lump on the ground you can hit with your shovel to open up a numbers minigame. The game is a bit like a minesweeper one, where you have to click one of the tiles to see how many blocks away you were from the actual prize. You have three clicks, each of them revealing a number of blocks away that isn’t counted diagonally, to triangulate exactly where the prize is. Sometimes, there’ll just be another layer to do but I hope that means its a better prize, cause I haven’t won one of those yet. So far I’ve gotten bones and some brass for doing the minigame. Dogs will also help you fight, and will bark when enemies are near. They are also cute. Like every animal in this game.

Racing

For each type of farm animal (excluding cows) there is a racing event. In order to bet on the race, you need to click on the person behind the book table at the racing field. (racing field).

If you want to enter your own animal, ride up to the betting table and click to get a message asking you if you want to enter the animal you’re riding. If you click yes, you can then proceed to the regular betting menu and then bet on whichever animal you want. Depending on the animals happiness, love for its owner, and speed, it has a bigger or smaller chance to win. I don’t know how to enter chickens into the race, and I’m assuming you just need to have your chicken follow you, but I haven’t tested it out yet.

Events

As it stands now, I’ve already covered Racing and animal Markets. Other than those two, there are only two more events.

Market Day is exactly what it sounds like. A day where people go to the festival area and buy stuff. All of the NPC booths will sell different varieties of seeds, depending on what area you go to. Its a good day to sell your stuff too, since more NPCs will be wandering around. Other than that, in the Festival Green area you can play a tossing game. The prizes for it are a magic bean, a rainstick, and a lute. The magic bean you can plant near Twigs house, the rainstick will make it rain, and you can play the lute.

Druida Day. On this day, you celebrate Druida, in the hopes of good crops and plentiful orchards. Its also a day you can do the tossing minigame. And get blessings from the different Goddesses, depending on how much grace you generated over the week to spend.

Travelling Traders Notice the plural here. There are several, all popping around in each of the three areas in the major towns on certain days, which are marked on your calendar after you talk to each one.

Goddess Offerings

There’s a nifty little menu that makes offering stuff to the goddesses quite easy to do now, but the mechanics are still a little tricky to figure out.

We don’t have to guess what they want anymore! Now we’re told in the menu, and depending on quality, you get more blessings or less blessings.

We now know what they want, and what they don’t want in the next tab on the bottom of the menu. Giving one goddess something will make the other goddesses around that goddess jealous. If you give something undesireable to a goddess, the other goddess will reward you for it, resulting in something a little like this.

Using all this to your advantage is incredibly useful since it does affect gameplay and makes it much easier to achieve your goals.

Faery Areas

Did you know that by shining a black light onto one of the stone henge type areas while standing on the intricately designed rock center will open up a portal to a faery realm? Well, if you didn’t before, you do now!

In total, it looks like there’s four areas we will eventually be able to go into. The spiral, in the picture above, and the top right symbol are the ones that are currently accessible. Going into the spiral portal will take you to Mr. Fairweather, where you can trade more of your lifespan for faery gifts. There is also a fourth gift you can choose, called Home Sweet Home, which just takes you back to your home at any time, from any where. It’ll probably get nerfed soon.

In the right portal is Tir Na Nog, a faery town. Here, you can find Sugar Plums, Songstrells, Funflowers, and Gummy Mushrooms scattered about the area. There is also a mine that contains Luminum ore, a tinkers house, a game show, a cute shop, and the Tooth Fairy’s house. There are also mapstones to find, but no goddess statues.

Unfortunately, the only things that currently function are the mine and the shop. The game show house just shows you the dialogue and then kicks you out.

Making Some Brass

Heh heh, my favorite part so far. Mostly because its easy. Lets discuss how easy, shall we?

Selling Items to the General Stores

Its a quick way to get the 25 brass it has to spend every morning. What it is good for, is finding out how much the bottom price is for things that you can sell at the market booths. Click on the item you’re thinking of selling, and then boom, whatever price it says is the bottom price. That being said, you can actually sell it for more at the market booth. If you’re not sure about an item, its always good to check!

Smithing Items and Then Selling Them

This can be fairly profitable if you have lots of copper ore and a sword mold. Simply craft some copper swords at Jeremies Irons, and then talk to Jeremie to get paid! Top quality copper swords get you about 14 brass each, and you can make them reasonably quickly. if you feel like it, you can purchase the ore from the general store in Mellowbrook.

Market Booth

I make most of my money here. What I do is I catch a lot of fish, then sell it for exorbitant prices at the Market. Really though, you can sell most anything at a market booth, at any time. Certain times of day will have an affect on how many people walk through, though. The best day to sell is a Goods Market day or a Druida Day. Read the things the NPCs say after they see your price, and then adjust it accordingly. You can adjust it by pressing Q, then picking the item you want to sell, once you’re selling in the booth. Obviously, what you’re selling can affect how much people would be willing to pay for it. Fish seems to have the most variety of prices. When you’re selling in the booth, its a 2 brass fine per hour to sell. However, you can avoid it by either getting out before the hour is over, or not selling at the beginning of a new hour. Its hard to tell on a dandelion clock, so I’d suggest a Clockwork Clock if you really want to avoid the 2 brass fine.

Betting on the Races

I haven’t tested this for all the animals, partially because I can’t get my sheep to love me and partially because I don’t remember which one is the one I wanted to race. But for the pigs, its a gold mine. Or brass, gold just sounds cooler.

You’ll want to go to the animal auctions and buy an animal with a fast speed, and preferably a average or better mood, so you don’t have to spend too much time making it love you. If you don’t have one with a good mood, oh well. You’ll just have to spend more time making it love you first. After that, ride it to the racing field on racing day, make sure its happy and fed, enter it, and reap your winnings. As with all betting, I wouldn’t suggest putting everything you have in, just a moderate amount that you won’t miss in the morning.

Experiences with Owning a Shop

So. My business sense isn’t as sharp as I’d like it to be, evidenced by my profit loss of about 200 brass when I finally sold it. It, being Jeremies Irons, which I was excited to finally own, only to realize its a lot harder to make a profit with than any other money making method I knew of. This is largely just due to the game being unfinished. It’ll get better, its just not quite there yet.

My main problem was that I couldn’t get quality ores, which brought down the quality of my tools until I was selling them for mere pennies. Even if I got five stars when crafting a scythe, it would still only end up with a overall quality of three, which brought down my price and made reputation garnering slow. So I tried hiring skilled workers. Who gave me one star products, because they didn’t have any work experience, even though they were the original owners of the shop.

If you were willing to do the grinding, you could eventually turn a profit from owning a blacksmiths shop. I’m not, so I sold it with the hope of repurchasing in the future.

Random Things

• Poo can be used as a fertilizer for anything, not just your own crops.
• If you do take another gift and then pay your year penalty, your animals and relationships won’t be effected.
• Remember that year taxes are paid at the end of the year.
• Once you offer something to the Brounies, the offering bowl will turn blue on the inside every new day you do it.
• Speaking of Brounies, one of them named Potts stands somewhere on your farm and can be befriended like most NPCs.
• There are chests inside some of the houses that have combination locks that change every time you guess wrong.
• While blacksmithing, if you own the shop, you can press y to shout ‘hang on!’ at a customer waiting for service. Depending on how well the customer likes you, you can get anywhere from an extra 1 to 10 seconds by doing so.
• Don’t forget you can sleep at any time to pass hours faster.
• Using a sickle to harvest a crop will give you more crops.
• If you become good enough friends with someone, they’ll allow you to steal take the crops from their private gardens.
• When you talk to a person you have to deliver something too, the item wanted will be at the top of the gifts menu and sparkles a little bit.
• You can go into the outhouses, although they have no current purpose for the players.
• Once you pass the prolouge, you no longer have a curfew, and can stay up for weeks without sleep.
• Noon is generally the busiest time of day.