This guide is just for people starting out the game the first time, or people just feeling lost or frustrated on what to do. When I started Gleaner Heights I had all these expectations in my head and I feel that I played the game wrong. Here is what I would have done differently, and what you should do too if you simply don't want to waste time.

The default controls are as follows :

SHIFT to run
SPACE to select / gift items/ throw items
ESC for inventory/menu
Z for using tools/actions/talking
X for eating
C for canceling/putting away items

F and G for switching item slots
R and T for switching tool slot

CAPS LOCK to switch between automatically running and walking

Mouse and LEFT CLICK to interact with many things, like watering, moving things around in inventory.

When you begin the game you are met with this screen. You can choose anything you want for most of it, and it will affect your experience of the game very little except to your preference, but what is very important is the "Previous Job" selection!

You have 5 options:

Accountant - A good one, very recommended, ALL selling profits are increased by 5% for the entire game. Very useful as money is tight in the beginning.

Veterinary- Not recommended/super useless. Animals hardly ever get sick if you know how to take care of them.

Animals require one fodder (cows/sheep) or chicken feed (chickens only) each, per day. You can save a lot of money by planting grass, which NEVER needs to be watered, and planting lots of corn your first summer, which regrows and is later used to make chicken feed!

Cook- What I picked, but not too useful. Even if you pick cook you can't cook starting out right away, you STILL need to upgrade your house, which costs materials + 50,000g. If you want 10 cooking recipes you can get them later by leveling up anyway.

Wrestler- Also a very recommended one, you do slightly more damage with all melee tools. You fight with melee tools mostly in this game. I don't find combat in the game very hard, however. Only pick this one instead of accountant if you feel like you need that help.

Psychologist- Helps you lose less friendship when you give people items they hate. Not too useful either, because once you figure out what people like you lose the use of this. Only pick this for flavor, because you'll get a bit of different text in the game at the beginning, but the rest will be the same.

You start out with 500g. Find the general store in town, which should be to the right and a little down from your farm to buy seeds. I would recommend just planting turnips for your first crop, they grow quickly and you will have plenty of time to plant other seeds for the rest of the month.

When planting crops, after a certain stage you cannot walk over them, so always leave a gap between your crops. There are other farms you can look at in town that do this to hint at it, but the game doesn't directly tell you so you have to figure it out on your own.

To the left of your farm is a little pasture area and a lake with a few monsters to fight, it is easy to miss if you don't look for it.

Also easily missed is the workshop, which you can use for crafting later on. It will fill with recipes as you play the game and it is to the left of your barn/chicken coop.

Inside your house you can walk up to the bathtub to pass time, there is a TV to check the weather, a diary next to your bed to end the day and save the game, and a storage/tool box to store items in.

Later on when you have animals, you can take them out of the barn/chicken coop easily with the bell tool that you buy from the ranch south of your farm.

You can leave them out overnight on a day with no rain, snow, overheat or frost. Check the weather and make sure the next day isn't raining or snowing. If you forget and it is, bring them in quickly.

Chickens require no feed when left out overnight, but cows/sheep require fully grown grass to be on your field.

Don't fill the barn/coop with feed. Only fill the barn with enough feed for the night, because it will all disappear in the morning regardless of how many animals you have.

Chickens have to have chicken feed, but cows/sheep can take either grass you cut with the sickle or cow/sheep feed.

You have to build a fence to contain your chickens to protect them from wild animals/escaping. Animals go into their own area when you ring the bell. (TY to Starr)

If you want to get into the game's story, it is very important to befriend every villager initially. The wiki will get filled up with every villager's favorite items eventually, but when just starting out I would go with an extremely sure gift that almost nobody hates: nightflowers!

Those are the little blue flowers you see around town. At 75g there is very little reason to ship them except at the very beginning when you lack money. There are 6 of them to collect each night starting at 21:00. You can use the bathtub to the right of your bed in your house to skip till that time, and then run around, here is a map:


You WANT to collect these nightflowers to befriend villagers, and you also may run into some story related events especially around 19:00-23:00! Vary the way you collect nightflowers so you have a greater chance of running into them!

The first big purchase you should save up for is the fishing rod. It is an extremely useful money and gift gaining item and will help you get to all your other purchase goals quicker in the game. It is a must-have, first!

Later on you can have the option of fishing up treasure with it on the level up screen, but only after you level up your fishing skill to 6. So get that fishing rod ASAP.

Mining in this game is not as intimidating as it seems at first. Conserve your stamina, and just go up and down the ladder to reload the mine level. Reload until you get a clear path to the ladder to the next floor, then repeat for another floor.

You will find green herbs (which recover stamina) and black herbs (which recover health). There seems to be a limit on how many herbs you can find in the mines each day, so if you don't find more for a while you might not find any more that day.

Get to level 20 while avoiding the monsters, a shortcut will appear that lets you get back to that level every day. Truly valuable and useful ores will drop there, ship them at the beginning when you need money and then, after money is not a problem, start saving them all for crafting or gifts.

You have a limited amount of stamina. This can be recovered by green herbs, crops, and later on cooking items, so when you first start do not plant too many crops that you cannot water. Once you have saved some money, green herbs, or crops you can plant a lot more.

You can easily maintain a big farm later on in the game, just keep befriending those villagers and PAY attention to what they say when they have something different to say!

A lot of players I find go into Gleaner Heights expecting to discover all the secrets right away and they get disappointed. While there are a lot of secrets, mysteries to solve, and interesting things to find, you will not find them all right away. Just play it like a normal farming sim game, befriend all the villagers, and pay attention. The mysteries will come to you because they are not hard to find.