STORY OF SEASONS: Friends of Mineral Town Easy Mine Progression Guide

A guide allowing early-game mining progression whilst using minimal stamina. It’s a fairly tedious process, but will allow you to pick up those vital Stamina Berries in both the Lake Mine (level 19) and Spring Mine (level 100). This technique is fairly well-known throughout older Harvest Moon titles, but is quite tedious to do.

Depending on your goal, you’ll want to prepare a few things first. Mainly, you’ll want to make sure you have enough stamina restoring food ready to go, and ideally have multiple stamina berries already obtained. When I reached floor 100 in the Spring Mine following the below recommendation, I had 3 Stamina Berries.

To reach floor 100 in the Spring Mine, you will want to bring:
 Hammer
 Hoe
 350+ stamina recovery items (I used 36 oranges)
 A full stamina bar

However, if you’re wanting to travel all the way down to level 255, I would aim to fetch items that can recover roughly 1000 points of stamina. Note that I would advise waiting until year three to do this though, as the teleportation stone cannot be obtained until then!

Be warned that reaching the lowest floors of both mines is very, very time consuming. Expect to sink multiple real-time hours into this.

This strategy basically relies on saving at the start of each level, uncovering ladders and important items, and then reloading your save to navigate directly to the ladder. Ideally, you’ll be using 2 stamina points per floor, but rocks tend to get in the way and must be broken.

 Enter Level 0 of your desired mine
 Save your game in Slot 1
 Use your hoe to uncover the ladder to the next floor, and remember it’s location
 Reload save Slot 1

 Navigate to the tile of land with the ladder, and use the hoe
 Progress down to Level 1
 Save your game into Slot 2
 Use your hoe to uncover the ladder to the next floor, and remember it’s location
 Reload save Slot 2
 Navigate to the tile of land with the ladder, and use the hoe
 Progress down to Level 2
 Repeat until you reach the bottom!

Here are a few tips I recorded down whilst progressing through the mines.

 More often than not, I found that ladders progressing to lower levels tend to be near to the ladder from the level above. Start tilling ground close to the ladder to begin with.
 More often than not, I found that ladders were not under rocks – till all the available ground first, then resort to breaking rocks
 Avoid falling down holes where possible, as they drain a lot of stamina for minimal progression
 Ladders do not always spawn in the Lake mine, so ensure you use the two save slot strategy to allow you to return to the previous level. Using one save slot is fine in the Spring Mine.
 Aim to break as few rocks as possible – reload to the previous level if a rock-heavy floor is generated
 Time is almost halted when in the mines – it should take no longer than 5 in-game hours to progress through all 255 levels.