Game:

Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland (2001)

Duration: 9:04:03

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4

notes: https://pastebin.com/QGiYydPp
harvest moon speedrun discord: https://discord.com/invite/7wtwtkW

my speedrun of all nine of save the homeland's alternate endings back to back to back.

once you complete an ending in StH (or get the bad ending), the game starts over at the beginning of the year (spring 2), but all items, money, animals, and upgrades are retained. however, all villager affection starts back at zero, and any progress made toward any endings is lost. so it's generally a waste of time to pursue multiple endings simultaneously, but money and useful items (such as high-value gifts) can be obtained early in the run for use in later endings.

the endings that require the most money are cake contest (4350G), fishy story (4500G), and goddess dress (3000). rather than growing a bunch of crops, which is quite slow, i opted to buy and sell three cows. they cost 2500G apiece, but they can be sold for 5000G when their affection is maxed out, and in StH, maxing out an animal's affection is as simple as leaving the animal outside, setting up a "morning farm cutscene", and sleeping repeatedly. most morning farm cutscenes force the weather to be sunny, and farm animals get an affection boost whenever they are left outside in sunny weather, and they also don't need to be fed when left outside. so by spamming sleep and never exiting the house, you get permanent sunny weather (even through the rainy season). since you need a cow for the cake contest ending anyway (to obtain the golden milk), i used this strat early in the run to make all the required money quite quickly.

the route is neat but probably not optimal. i suspect the horse may lose more time than it saves. i opted to do the horse race ending first so i would have the horse for most of the run to speed up movement, but it loses loads of time if you get unlucky with rain. the horse is perfect during the dry season when rain is impossible, but every ending starts in the mild season followed by the rainy season. of course, you can use the farm cutscene strat to sleep to the dry season, but it takes time to set up. i opted to use two of bob's farm cutscenes for this, but setting them up requires going out of your way to gift bob twice, and it also requires a special gift (i used honey) in order to get his affection to exactly 30 in two days (the more days it takes, the more days you are risking rain). you can cure the horse if it gets sick, rather than putting it in the barn and feeding it, but for some reason, in StH the animal medicine is treated as a tool, and you can only have one at a time, so you can't stock up on them in advance. all in all, the horse is just a bit of a mess, and i lost quite a lot of time just due to various mishaps. a reroute without the horse would be interesting. i ended up letting it die on purpose before the last two endings anyway (goddess dress and bluebird) because they are already very fast endings that would certainly lose time to messing around with the horse.

you may notice that i often show a weed to different villagers. in StH, there is an "introduction" boost that is unique from the normal conversation boost, and it always triggers on the first interaction. most villagers also have a separate "gift intro" boost that is triggered when the player is holding a gift on that first interaction, counting for an extra +2, but this also counts as the daily gift. for some reason, if you show a villager a disliked gift (like a weed) on the introduction, you receive the extra "gift intro" boost, but it doesn't count as the daily gift (because the villager doesn't accept the weed), so you can get both the "gift intro" AND give the daily gift (most gifts are +4). this is used in a few special cases where the little bit of extra affection will help barely cross a certain threshold.

i kind of botched the treasure hunt endings, but they are quite grueling. i intentionally over-gifted all the villagers just to make absolutely sure i met the requirements to enter the sacred land, because there's nothing more frustrating than just barely missing it and having no idea which villager is short. had another pretty costly mistake in fishy story, but the silver fish was nearly perfect.

lastly, you'll notice i reset the game during the credits to azure swallowtail. there is a glitch that causes the game to freeze at the end of the azure swallowtail credits without progressing to the post-credits cutscene, and you cannot save the game until after the post-credits cutscene, so you have to reset. i knew about this, but sadly i forgot to save right before triggering the ending, so i had to redo the last bit of the ending as well as rewatch the credits, losing over 15 minutes. i'm not sure what causes it, but it has only happened in all endings runs to my knowledge. you can tell the glitch has happened because the butterfly isn't flying above the blue mist flower in the final scene of the credits.

world record as of 8 february 2024.

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