Harvest Moon: Back to Nature mod v0.1.0-alpha

Version 0.1.0-alpha of my Harvest Moon: Back to Nature mod is out, for both the English (USA) and the Indonesian edition. It adds a Town Friendships page, lets you walk through your crops, stacks items in the rucksack, puts the speaker's name on dialogue boxes, and makes most GameShark codes work again. Everything from v0.0.2 is still included.

This version also comes as a second build with Harem: marry more than one bachelorette and choose which wife lives at the farmhouse. The Harem build is experimental.

It is an alpha because nobody has played the whole game through on it yet. Every feature passed its own tests, but please keep a backup of your memory card and tell me about anything strange. The screenshots below are from the English edition.

Which download do I pick?

There are four downloads: two editions, each with and without Harem.

• English edition or Indonesian edition: the regular mod. Pick this if you are not sure.
• + Harem (experimental): the regular mod plus marrying more than one bachelorette. Everything else is the same.

Pick the edition that matches your disc language. You can move a diary from the Harem build to the regular one later (see the Harem section below).

Town Friendships

Press START, then page Left or Right past the status pages to reach five Town Friendships pages. Every villager has a row with a small portrait, their name and up to 10 hearts, so you can see who you are close to without asking around. The bachelorettes' hearts use the same colour as the heart in their dialogue, so you can read your progress with each girl at a glance.

Walk through your crops

You can now walk and ride your horse straight through crops instead of hopping around them. That means the middle tile of a planting, where a sprinkler usually sits, is easy to reach. Stones, stumps, lumber, sprinklers, decorations, animals and villagers still block you as before.

When you stand in the middle of a crop tile, your tools act on that crop. To reach the tile next to it, take a step towards it first.

A rucksack that stacks

Identical items now stack in the rucksack, up to 9 per slot, with a small number on the slot. The item in your hand is always just one, so shipping, gifting and eating work exactly as before. Festivals and requests that ask for items count every item in a stack.

Small stones, branches, lumber and weeds stack too.

Speaker name tags

Whenever a dialogue shows a portrait, the speaker's name now sits in a small tab on top of the text box. No more guessing who is talking during busy festivals and events.

Birthdays on the calendar

The calendar keeps the birthday hearts from v0.0.2. Now when you press X on a day, the birthday names appear next to that day's description.

Markers behind people

The little action letters above villagers and animals are now hidden behind anything standing in front of them, such as your farmer, so they no longer float on top of everything.

GameShark codes work again

The game's main data is back at the original memory addresses, so most GameShark codes made for the original game work again: money, stamina, items, affection, the clock and similar.

Codes that change the game's instructions, and codes for minigames, the title screen or the memory card screens, may not work. Do not use codes that write to addresses 0x8012DDE8 to 0x8013A8F8: in this mod that range holds game code, and such a code can crash the game.

Fixes

• A foal from Barley walks around again (it stood still in v0.0.2).
• Putting a dish onto the same dish of another quality in the fridge or cabinet no longer merges them and loses one quality.
• Shop "Owned" counts include every stacked item in the rucksack, fridge and cabinet.
• Events that take items from the fridge no longer remove a whole stack.

Harem (experimental, separate download)

The Harem build is the regular mod plus the option to marry more than one of the five bachelorettes. Here is how it works.

1. Marry your first wife as usual. Raise a bachelorette to a red heart, upgrade your house and propose with the Blue Feather. Nothing changes here.
2. The Blue Feather comes back. After the first wedding, the shop sells the Blue Feather again. Propose to another bachelorette with a red heart, one proposal at a time.
3. Every girl keeps her own proposal and wedding. Each one plays her original proposal and wedding scene.
4. One wife lives at the farmhouse. The others stay at their own homes and still talk to you as your wife.
5. Choose who moves in. Talk to another wife at her home and choose to ask her to move in. She moves in the next morning, and the wife who was at home goes back to her family's house.
6. Your wives are safe from rivals. A wife who is not at home never marries her rival.
7. One child in total. Asking a wife to move in is refused while the wife at home is pregnant or has a request you have not finished. After the baby is born you can switch again, and the child stays at the farmhouse.

A few more things to know:

• Festivals and the ending use the wife who lives at the farmhouse.
• There is no divorce.
• A Harem diary can be loaded in the regular build. There, the wife at home stays your wife, and the other wives become single again.

Still included from v0.0.2

• Horse Freedom: ride your grown horse around ordinary outdoor areas.
• Bronze, Silver and Gold sprinklers at Saibara's shop.
• The clock at 70% speed and easier fishing.
• The experimental Herding Bell and the Bush and Flowering Bush decorations from Gotz.
• Daily action letters, birthday hearts, stamina and fatigue display, shop owned counts and shop hours on the town map.

Known limitations

• A full playthrough has not been done yet, which is why this is an alpha. Please back up your memory card.
• When standing in the middle of a crop tile, tools act on that crop.
• Small stones, branches, lumber and weeds stack in the rucksack too.
• Markers depend on distance, screen position and the graphics budget, so a letter can be hidden in a crowded scene.
• The Indonesian text added by the mod still awaits a native speaker's review.

Download

Each ZIP has the ready-to-play disc image and a CUE file, a BPS patch if you prefer to patch your own disc, and a README with the details. Open the CUE in your PS1 emulator, cold boot the game, and load your diary with Continue. Emulator save states from other versions will not work; use normal diary saves.