Echoes of the Plum Grove: Beginner Tips

So you’ve created an adorable character and they’ve been left clueless on a plot of land. Here are a few tips and tricks and some general information to help you get started.

Little tutorials will pop up as you start doing things, but there are also some helpful tutorial pages in the menu, on the rightmost tab.

If you need to use something on your toolbar that isn’t a tool, hit the spacebar. Space is how you refill your watering can, eat food, and read recipes/blueprints.

Don’t want to worry about food, sleeping or diseases? Turn those options off in the menu. I’d suggest trying with them on though, as it makes the game unique and fun.

Things you can interact with have a darker outline. If you don’t get anything from shaking a tree/bush, it might not be in season.

Always shake trees twice as you go past them. Not only is the wood useful for building things, it also makes you a reasonable amount of money – each piece is worth 10 gold, so a stack of 50 is worth 500. This is an easy and simple way to earn money at the beginning.

At the beginning of the game in spring, the easiest food to cook is survival salad, which you can make with plantains and violets you can forage from the ground.

The best way to continue feeding yourself (indefinitely) is to put fruit/vegetables/fish onto a drying rack or pickling barrel. In 24 hours this produces an item that will refill 10-20 hunger. And all you need are the fruits you can forage off bushes, some crops from your garden, or some spare fish. If you have 3 of any combination of drying racks and pickling barrels, this will more than fulfill your hunger needs and give you leftovers.

To cook, you need recipes that can be obtained through quests or levelling up your cooking skill. These are fun, but require a lot of ingredients and don’t satisfy that much more hunger. If you make food, or receive it as a quest reward, it’s probably worth selling it instead, as it’s worth more to you that way. Keep on the dried fruit diet, it will lead you to victory!

You need seeds, which you can buy from people working in the fields in the area left of your farm. You can also get a lot of starting seeds by doing the Mayor’s quest to meet people.

When you harvest them, crops are likely to spawn more seeds of that type.

You have to water each plant or tree individually – if you miss a day, the plant will go brown, but will still be alive. If you miss another day, it will die.

Ripe and dead crops are harvested with the sickle – you’ll see the selection square is yellow when you hover over them if they’re ready.

Fertiliser, obtained from putting rot in the compost bin, can help improve the quality of your crops. It does not make them grow faster.

Items gradually turn from gold to silver to bronze quality, and then they rot. Eat/sell your bronze quality food first. But rot is still useful, because you can add it to your compost bin.

Be aware that you are frequently offered quests that you cannot complete yet – they may require out of season items, crafting skills/equipment you don’t have, or things you would have to buy that wouldn’t be worth the reward. Don’t worry about not finishing a quest if it ends up too hard.

Prioritise quests that give blueprint or recipe rewards. Once you have a comfortable amount of money, take these quests even if you cannot produce the items needed but know you can buy them – it’s worth it to get blueprints.

When you have the items you need for a quest, that person’s icon will show up on your map.

Talk to everyone! You can talk to people 3 times per day (until their talk button is greyed out). Once people are friends with you, they will send you presents in the post – sometimes very expensive, helpful ones.

If you see a question mark above someone’s head, it might be that they are offering a quest, but they could also want to give you a gift, so it’s worth clicking on them.

Insulting people annoys them for that day, but if you were friends it will only put a minor dent in your relationship. Giving gifts can end up losing you friendship points too, as people can be very picky about what they like.

Sometimes you need to put several of an item into a crafter for it to work – ie. 3 wheat in the flour mill to get flour, 3 iron ore into the smelter to get an iron bar.

Don’t think that you have to craft everything! You are given a crafting station, and might therefore assume you will need to do a lot of crafting to obtain all the items you need – the way you do in other farming games. But one thing Echoes does really well is emphasize that your starting character is a farmer. You do not have the skills or the equipment to make your own iron nails, even though you need them for lots of things and your first thought might be that you should make them. But you first need to unlock the anvil (crafting skill 6 or a quest) and a furnace. That will take a while. So embrace the game. Be a farmer. Go to the blacksmith and buy your nails. At the start it might seem like a lot of money, but you’ll soon have plenty of that, and you’re not in a hurry. Build up your crafting empire gradually – your child can always do what you didn’t get around to.

Once you have a bit of money, ask the doctor for an inoculation. Smallpox can wipe out half the town, and you don’t want your character to be one of them.

Befriending the doctor means they will send you free medicine, which is great, and likewise quests for them will have medicine as a reward.

It’s nice to gradually build up a stockpile of medicine, because if you get sick, the doctor might diagnose you but not have what you need in stock on the day, or they might be closed.

When sick, ensure you eat regularly and spend most of your time sleeping, to enhance your chances of survival.

You don’t need to upgrade your house or bed to get married and have children.

Befriend a villager and give them the bunch of flowers bought from the lighthouse. This triggers what the game calls a ‘date’ but is actually your opportunity to propose. Make sure you have a ring ready for your date. Hopefully a nice one, as there is the possibility for them to refuse.

Once married, there is a ¼ chance to trigger a pregnancy each night when you go to sleep. You can take care of your baby by clicking on it.

Children will go to school by default, but you can also talk to the head of any profession to get them an apprenticeship there. You can modify what any of your family spend their days doing in the drop down menu in the family tab of the menu.

You can also adopt orphaned children with adoption papers, bought from the mayor.

You can modify the clothing/hair of your whole family at the tailor if you choose the tailoring option, where each of them will have a separate tab.

If playing with normal aging, your character will stay in the adult lifestage until the end of the first year, then become an elder. This gives you a bit of time to make life choices. But, on the other hand, you could die horribly of a disease, so don’t wait too long to have an heir!

Normal life stages = pregnancy 3 days, baby 3 days, child 2 seasons, adult 4 seasons, elder 2 seasons (not 100% sure on elder). If you alter the aging to short, it halves the time for most life stages.

Festivals: Most events don’t need any preparation, but for the Harvest Festival in autumn there is a grange display where you can place 9 of your best items to compete. Remember to save some in the days leading up to it and take them along!

Businesses: If you desperately want to build a house upgrade or buy fish, the responsible people will usefully still do these things for you even if it’s their day off – you just have to track them down.

Paint: To upgrade your house you’ll need paint, which you can buy from the ship captain at the docks at the weekends.

Winter: Assuming you have some drying racks/pickling barrels, you will be fine throughout the winter, as you can stock them with fish. Do a bit of mining, go to bed early, admire the snow.

Livestock: If you have any two of the same species, there is a chance for them to reproduce, which can get you free livestock! On release, all animals are labelled as male, but they will still reproduce.

The game has a very gentle pace, and there is no rush to get anywhere – you can always carry on as your child if your character runs out of time. Explore and tinker at your own pace. But based on my own experiences, here are my recommendations for the first year:

In the first weeks, prioritise farming and buying a fishing rod from the fisher. Along with your vigorous tree-shaking, this should start making you some money.

Particularly useful things to craft are: more Drying Racks, Pickling Barrel, Flour Mill, Composter, Furnace, Small and Large ice boxes (stops items from decreasing in quality/rotting. Remember to fill them with ice!).

Upgrading your house gives you more room to put more items, but is otherwise not urgently needed. Until you start making more crafting machines and need the space, you can prioritise other things. But it does look very cool!

Coop and Barn: Which do you prefer? Chickens or cows? By the time you can afford these, you probably won’t be using animal products as a revenue source so much as to get high quality items for cooking. Plus they look cute.