Although you may have plenty of crops in your fields, you should not overlook fruit trees, which can also be grown in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life.
With five base fruits and dozens of hybrid trees, these space-consuming fruit trees take time to grow but can produce dozens of fruits from a single tree.
This guide covers all fruit tree growing seasons, as well as several tips for making the most of the space they require and using fertilizer to improve harvest quality.
Planting
There are five base tree seeds that you can purchase from Vesta Farm starting in Spring of Year 1.
Generation 2 trees are obtained by mixing base seeds or fruit with Vinnie, while Generation 3 trees are created by mixing Generation 2 fruits.
Trees are not sensitive to soil fertility. Even rare tree seeds can grow successfully in the least fertile soil next to your house.
To plant a bag of tree seeds, first till the soil using your Hoe, then plant the seeds. The soil tiles directly touching the planted tree will turn into pathways.
Trees require empty space around their trunks. In the original GameCube and PlayStation 2 versions of A Wonderful Life, you could accidentally stunt a tree’s growth by planting another tree or crop too close to its required space.
In this new version, the pathways surrounding the trunk prevent this from happening.
To maximize your farmland, it is a good idea to plant trees along the edges of the field. This allows the trees to be bordered by unusable land, while only part of the farmland is converted into paved pathways.
You can remove a planted tree by using the Hoe on its trunk. The pathways surrounding the tree will also turn back into soil.
Like crops, fruit trees grow faster during Summer and slower during Winter.
The number of days required for a tree to mature begins counting at midnight on the day after planting and accumulates every 12 hours.
For example, if you plant an Apple seed on Summer 2 and it requires 5 days to grow during that season, the Apple tree will mature on Summer 7 during the daytime.
Fertilizing
The color of a tree’s leaves reflects its quality grade. Grade B has light green leaves, Grade A has medium green leaves, while Grade S has dark green leaves.
You can increase a tree’s grade by using fertilizer from Vesta Farm and applying it to the base of the tree. The downside is that it takes a lot of fertilizer to improve its quality.
- Gen 1 (Base): 27 fertilizer applications to increase from Grade B to Grade A, and 18 fertilizer applications from Grade A to Grade S.
- Gen 2: 36 fertilizer applications to increase from Grade B to Grade A, and 27 fertilizer applications from Grade A to Grade S.
- Gen 3: 54 fertilizer applications to increase from Grade B to Grade A, and 45 fertilizer applications from Grade A to Grade S.
There are two easier ways to improve fruit tree quality. The easiest is to have Vinnie mix a higher-grade seed with the tree seed.
You can mix a higher-grade crop with fruit, but there is a chance that Vinnie will produce a higher-grade crop seed instead of the desired tree seed.
In my experience, this technique seems to work better when mixing seeds with seeds rather than mixing raw produce. However, Vinnie can still fail occasionally.
For example, you can mix an S-Rank Tomato seed with a B-Rank Banana seed and receive an S-Rank Banana seed from Vinnie.
This trick is much faster for reaching S-Rank than applying fertilizer one bag at a time.
Vinnie cannot mix a Winter Upseed Flower with a tree seed, but you can mix a sacrificial crop seed with an Upseed Flower to raise the crop seed to S-Rank. Then, mix the S-Rank crop seed with a tree seed to obtain an S-Rank tree seed.
The second way to increase a tree’s grade is by purchasing Fertilizer Spreaders.
These machines cost 60,000 G and can be installed in the three fields. Filling a spreader with fertilizer allows the device to distribute fertilizer into the air and onto all non-S-Rank crops in the field.
As long as fertilizer remains inside the machine, it will automatically spread fertilizer at 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM.
This method is slower but generally requires little intervention to bring trees up to S-Rank. Once a tree reaches S-Rank, no more fertilizer will fall onto that tree.
If you successfully improve a tree’s quality midway through a season, higher-rank fruit will appear the following year when the tree produces fruit.
Harvest Season
Trees will usually flower during the season before producing fruit.
Once the fruiting season begins, it takes approximately 2 days before you can harvest the fruit.
There are two ways to harvest fruit:
- Stand beside the tree and watch the field cursor color. When the square cursor turns yellow, shake the tree using the Shake command. Ripe fruit will fall from the tree and be automatically collected into your bag.
- Let ripe fruit naturally fall to the ground. You can then pick it up like any other item found on the ground.
In practice, you will use both methods. Fruit may not be ripe when you shake the tree, but it can ripen later and fall to the ground.
Each tree produces approximately 16 fruits over about 6 days during a season.
Although the tree will flower again after all of its fruit has fallen, it will not produce fruit again until the following year (for Chapters 1–6) or the following year (Chapter 7).
In the original version of A Wonderful Life, fruit trees produced approximately 24 fruits throughout the season. The tree had to flower during that season before it could produce fruit.
In the remake, fruit trees produce approximately 60% fewer fruits over half a season, but the fruit sells for around 450% to 500% more than in the original game.
Another advantage is that trees can begin producing fruit once they mature midway through a season without needing to flower first. Any fruit remaining on the tree when the season changes will disappear.
