Although, this being a Japanese game…
Yeah, yeah, I know I said I’d play it again next year. But I don’t have anything else exciting going on now, plus I really, really like Shepherd’s Crossing 2
Playing a game 4 times qualifies me as an expert, so I’ll do the right thing and share tips that will make for a faster and smoother experience. As always, I recommend playing FAQ-free at least the first time, but if you want my advice, here it is.
1. To warp around your fields, press R+Select. Useful when you get stuck behind something or don’t want to disturb feeding animals. Press R+Start to just look around.
2. Focus all your energy on making 4000 sal at the beginning. With this you can expand your land, gaining access to more trees, more feed and of course, more fields to plant on. Everything from that point onwards is easy mode.
3. Important: You can plant crops for the next season from the 16th day of the previous season. For example, you can start planting spring crops on Winter 16th. This gives you stuff to do during the rather dull winters.
4. If you sow seed wrongly, put the whole bag down, pick up the seed and throw it back in the bag. If you can’t find the bag, buy a Husk Bin from the store and use it as a seed bag.
5. Daikon and wheat will grow through winter as long as they have sprouted before the season changes. All other crops will die.
6. Don’t skimp on dogs unless you enjoy seeing your hard work vanish down a thieving rat’s throat. If nothing else you must get a Sheltie to keep your sheep from escaping.
7. After meat scraps from the store, cavies are the best food source for your little carnivores. They’re cheap, grow quickly, and each one gives a surprising amount of meat. Rabbits are a good second choice. They grow more slowly, but they breed like crazy and their pelts give good money.
9. Keep an eye on your main dish and firewood bins. Even for a veteran player it was all too easy to look up suddenly and realize it was down to the 50s or less. You have a bit of leeway playing as a boy, but as a girl you have to stay on the ball. Remember that your bins go down faster once you marry.
10. If you cook a lot, you can ignore the side dish bin. Most dishes you make and share or eat by yourself will fill up the bin quite nicely.
11. Definitely sell your logs to the main store when you start out, but keep two or three to make firewood from. Unless you marry Kai, that bin will never refill itself.
12. Buy potatoes and turnips and use them to supplement your food stores if necessary. They’re relatively cheap at 640sal each for a 20 refill, and allow you to sell your more lucrative grains for moolah.
13. The store restocks once a year. If you have money to spare on Winter 25, consider buying the following: rocks, grain and produce bags (no other place to get them), butter, flour (until you get milk and wheat), straw, branches, fertilizer and meat scraps.
14. Need fertilizer? A castrated donkey goes on sale pretty early. One piece of donkey dung will fill your fertilizer box by 40, and they poop at least twice a season.
15. There is no point growing low-value crops once you’ve made all the recipes they’re used in. Even with a 70% yield, a field of sorghum will still net you way more than a field of buckwheat for the same amount of work.
16. Speaking of yield, most crops will only meet one weather-related disaster per season. This comes in handy when several crops ripen at the same time and you need to decide what to prioritize. For example, if half your cabbages have been eaten but your tomatoes are fine, pick the tomatoes first. Unharvested crops will be fine for at least 10 days or so (but see tip #5).
17. And speaking of disasters, reloading from the day before will not help you avoid problems. I think disasters are set at least a month before, so just go with the flow. That said, a reload can help with the number of crops affected. If 90% of your carrots are gone, a reload can help bring that down to 50%.
18.Foods in produce bags (eggplant, daikon, etc.) and foods left lying around will go bad after 10-12 days. Items in jars, barrels, grain bags and baskets will never go bad. Neither will herbs or processed items like dried plums, cheese and butter. Stockpile at least 10 onions if you like to cook.
19. Let goat kids and calves grow before milking the mother. The baby will die otherwise. You can still milk the mother for several days after the baby is weaned. If you want lots of milk, get several female goats and have them all give birth around the same time.
20. Speaking of which, apparently the baby animal will not die as long as there is at least one mother still producing milk. This means you can have 3 milk goats, cordon one off with all the kids and milk the other two as much as you like. I haven’t tried it myself but it makes sense.
21. I have confirmed that you cannot get married before the beginning of Year 6, even if you meet the necessary requirements. Nevertheless you should start buying, breeding and sheering sheep as soon as possible.
22. If you don’t want to waste a field on animals, buy Beast Guards and block your doors, then keep them in your house. This will also save you the frustration of fences. When your house gets crowded, you can move the benches and bins outside, since they work just as well outdoors. On that note, be aware that the first house upgrade will make your house longer, but narrower, resulting in less space for maneuvering.
23. A dirty washbasin will clean wool just fine. Don’t waste soap on cleaning washbasins between wool jobs. IIRC the only problem with dirty washbasins is that they break easily, but the carpenter replaces them for free.
24. A maximum of 2 days will pass when you’re working at your workbench. No more than that, even for the most time-intensive tasks. If you place all your tools on the bench (or just have them touch it) ahead of time, you can easily shear 5 sheep, wash the wool, card it, spin it, knit up to Woolen Cloth 5 and wash the basin, all in just 2 days. Similarly you can butcher and tan 5 rabbits/ferrets in no time at all.
25. You only get 20 pieces of salt a year, so it’s a waste to toss 10 in a pickle/meat barrel. Luckily those barrels work just as well with 1 bit of salt as with 10, so wait until the salt is almost used up then throw it in.
Bonus tip: The grey space in the upper left corner of your farm is the selling space. Items placed there can be sold even if you’re not holding them, which saves a lot of time when you’re trying to sell produce. When you buy more than you can hold, the excess will be sent to that corner, making it a handy storage space as well.
Aaaand… that’s all I’ve got in the “Stuff I wish I’d known when I first played” category. It may say “25 tips” in the title, but if I think of anything else I’ll toss it in. If you have a tip of your own, please add it in the comments section, thanks! I am temporarily shepherded out, so that’s it on this topic for a while.
I have been reading your blog for awhile and figured it would be a good time to pop in and say that not only are your reviews very nicely written, but very helpful as well cx Keep gaming and writing. You’re a pleasure to the world.
Thank you very much! 😀
Gotten into this game thanks to your blog. Its strangely addicting; it could be a real powerhouse if they fixed some issues with the game (grid farming, relationships, an inventory & chests).
One thing to add about the donkey; you can speed up its pooping by making it plow fields. 1-2 fields and it’ll get hungry, so you’ll have dung the next day. Can get a lot of fertilizer this way.
Yay, another convert!
The fact that there’s so much room for improvement is one of the things that excites me about Shepherd’s Crossing. It’s not like Harvest Moon, which has pretty much perfected its formula and has to grasp for new things to add in every installment. Unfortunately it looks like the developer is focusing on mobile and browser games at the moment, so we might never get another game. Fingers crossed.
Thanks for the tip about the donkey!
I love this game I am married to Gile the Butcher and have a child thank you for these tips!!.I have tried playing Harvest Moon but I didn’t like it at first thank you so much.
Glad the tips helped! I love Shepherd’s Crossing too. Harvest Moon is hit-or-miss depending on which version you play. HM: Friends of Mineral Town on the GBA is the one I enjoyed most. I’m also partial to the Rune Factory games. Give them a try if you haven’t already.
Rune factory games are masterpiece, but i like this game too because somehow it’s an incredibly fresh game with a distinct gameplay. For HM series, i like tale of two towns and the original one, i like the 3DS version too
Exactly, Shepherd’s Crossing is a different, grittier take on the farming genre. I wish they would make more. Shepherd’s Crossing and Rune Factory have spoiled me so much I have a very hard time going back to regular Harvest Moon now. I think I’m done with HM, to be honest.
Thanks there are many harvest moons and my dad went and deleted my Shepard’s Crossing Game by accident so started a boy instead of a girl XD.
After playing as a girl, playing as a boy feels kind of easy. Girl-mode is best-mode!
Thank you so much for this excellent information (and for all of your other reviews of this game–information about Shepherd’s Crossing 2 is so difficult to come by)! 😀
I know! It totally needs more fans! And a sequel!
Thanks for stopping by!
Sorry I am so so late to this but there is a Shepherd’s Crossing 3 for PSP. idk about 4 but I know for sure about 3
Hello Zoru, I would be so happy if that were true, but the Shepherd’s Crossing on the PSP is just a remake of the PS2 original. I checked the developer’s page just to be sure (https://www.success-corp.co.jp/developments/works/) but sadly there’s no SC3. The games in the series are:
– Shepherd’s Crossing (ようこそひつじ村) PS2, 2003 + 2006 reprint
– Shepherd’s Crossing 2 (箱庭生活ひつじ村DS) DS, 2008 + 2009 reprint
– Shepherd’s Crossing Portable (remake of first) (ようこそひつじ村ポータブル) PSP, 2009 + 2009 reprint
– Shepherd’s Crossing: Let’s all live together! (みんなで暮らそう！ひつじ村) – mixi browser game, 2009, unreleased in English (dead)
– Shepherd’s Crossing: A Rancher’s Life (まきば生活ひつじ村) – Yahoo/mixi browser games, 2010, unreleased in English (dead)
– Shepherd’s Crossing H&F (ひつじ村H&F) – Yahoo browser game, 2010, unreleased in English (dead?)
– Shepherd’s Crossing: The Sea of Adventure and the Blessings of the Land (楽園生活ひつじ村大地の恵みと冒険の海) – Yahoo, hangame, mixi, gesoten, my GameCity browser game, 2014, Japanese-only (currently running)
– Shepherd’s Crossing: Animal Raising Kit (ひつじ村アニマル育成キット) – Android, iOS, 2016, English version available
The titles of everything after the PSP remake are my own unofficial translations.
TL;DR while there are mobile game spinoffs, a proper Shepherd’s Crossing 3 game does not exist. Yet.
*reads comments too* Oh, but i loved the random fields! I don’t want grids always! This is much freer. 🙂
ne more tip about the castrated donkey: buy it in the winter (from leftover money) and sell it in the spring, it sells for much more money. Even if you buy it in spring and resell right away, it brings cash. I sometimes used it to harvest potatoes, after it was done i sold it.
I’d like a combination of random and gridded fields. A little more order in the chaos, but not as strictly regimented as Harvest Moon. There’s a Shepherd’s Crossing Online game now. I’ll check it out someday and see what they did with the farming.
I’ve been addicted to this game for the past four months…70% is the fault of this post! I’m sad most of the info from gamefaqs and fogu fan site are outdated… And that many of the tips are inaccurate. So this post is magic to my tired soul!
Also, is there anyway to get cheese other than through mika? And does the almanac info stay through multiple save files? (I’m ashamed it took me over one hundred hours of gameplay to discover how to make honey…)
I’ve never gotten cheese from Mika before. I usually make it myself using milk and rennet. You can get rennet from butchering pigs, IIRC. …Actually I don’t think I’ve ever made honey in Shepherd’s Crossing 2 before, so please tell me how.
As far as I know, almanac information doesn’t carry over. At least it hasn’t in all the games I’ve played, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.
It might have been maki then? Whoever it is that drops by with random gifts like dead rabbits after you give her food she likes. Well I made bee boxes with the carpenter tools and got bees in summer and fall. Honeycomb and jar makes honey…makes cakes and pies and sweets. I haven’t tried it with rennet yet, so I’ll give that a go?
Right. I think the combination is Milk + Rennet + Salt + Pot, then you leave the cheese on the ground for a while to mature. Keep it away from your animals.
And now I have to start the game again so I can get honey.
Just wanted to add that you can make a good amount of money if you build multiple bee boxes and line them up against your fences. The honey sells for a good amount of money, and it’s fairly easy to do! It helped me get through a couple rough winters my first play through lol
It’s so hard to find info like this for shepherd’s crossing 2. I’ve never even met someone else who’s played the game! Thanks for this post, it’s very helpful. 🙂
You’re welcome! Thanks for the extra tip!
I can’t believe that so many years after my first play through of this game I actually found a fairly comprehensive guide to this game! I love Shepherd’s Crossing 2 and even though I’m kinda late to the party, I just wanted to thank you for making such a great guide I can use now that I decided to pick it back up again!
Shepherd’s Crossing 2 is an evergreen game. I’ve returned to it many times before and it doesn’t get old. Enjoy!