User blog:Eponymous/Things I Wish I'd Known When I Started My Time at Portia


 * 1) You have a rolling set of 10 saves. If you want to be able to load your game further back than about a week and a half, you need to manually back up that day before it disappears from the list. Backups appear at the bottom of the load list; while you have a limited number of them (30?), if you run out of backup slots, the backups will never be automatically deleted, but you'll instead be prompted to manually delete one or more to free up room before saving another.


 * 1) You can slow down the in-game time. Moving the Game Speed slider in the Options menu all the way down to 50 will give you a lot more time to get things done in a day. (There are also some scenarios where it will help you get ahead of NPCs.)


 * 1) Higgins always heads into the Commerce Guild right at 8 a.m. on weekdays. If you don't go in within a few minutes of when the building opens, too, he'll beat you to the commission board and take one before you can even see what's available. Even if you run straight to the board and interact with it, it won't stop him from strolling over and selecting a commission, but you'll have a short window of time to examine all four commissions and decide which one to accept. (Higgins will never select one you're actively looking at, so if you want to block him from taking another besides the one you've selected, you can look at it until you hear him walk away from the board—though his point gain seems to be independent of the actual commissions he "takes.")


 * 1) Custom alarms on the calendar are insanely useful. For example, I have a recurring one at 8 a.m. every day: Monday–Friday they remind me that the guild just opened (so I don't have to stare at the clock while standing at the door); Saturday & Sunday they remind me that inspection at the guild has started. And one-time alarms are great for things like reminding yourself to grab finished materials from crafting stations.


 * 1) There's no reason not to make more than one of any crafting station. Especially the ones where you're most often bottlenecked—the materials for Stone Furnaces, for example, are readily available, and assembling a half-dozen or more of them ASAP can get you quickly churning out the metal bars, glass, and bricks you'll need in order to hit early milestones. You can probably get away with one Grinder and one Basic Skiver, but having two or three Civil Cutters to start is also a good idea.


 * 1) You can slowly restore Stamina by sitting down. For example, you can sit on the bench in Peach Plaza. You'll see a little food icon in the status area that indicates the restoration effect. If you stick a seat (like a Stone Stool) by your crafting stations, you can get back a little Stamina while you keep an eye on in-progress materials.


 * 1) You can effectively earn infinite Stamina with the Roping minigame on McDonald's ranch. To play, interact with the sack inside the field just over the fence from his sale point. For the cost of only 5 Stamina and no clock time, you'll have 10 chances to rope random animals from his farm. At the end of each game, for each Cow or Calf you successfully roped, you'll earn 1 Milk, which gives +6 Stamina, meaning you come out ahead as long as you catch at least one. (You also get a bonus Milk for catching 4+ Cows—but not Calves.) If you target only those animals, you can net over 60 Stamina per game, and you can immediately play another game without exiting so long as you have at least 5 Stamina. (If you're out, you can drink some of the Milk you earned and go right back in before more than a minute or two has passed in-game.) The only limit is how much patience you have (I like to turn off the game audio and put on an audiobook or podcast) and how good you are at timing your throws. (You can use the center fencepost with the X-shaped rope on it as a center marker.) (This, btw, is why it's always best to put your first 5 Skill Points into Intensive Training—it doesn't matter how much Stamina you use when you can always earn more, and earning more Exp from those actions will help you earn more Skill Points faster so you can unlock those Stamina-cost-reducing Skills soon, anyway.)


 * 1) In the bottom left corner of the map, there's an Manage Map menu to toggle various markers. Not all of them will do anything at first, so it can be helpful to just turn everything on until you figure out what it does.


 * 1) Fishing is ludicrously lucrative. Out of the fishing spots you can access from the start of the game, Bassiano Falls gives the highest average Gols and Exp per bite—though this assumes you can successfully catch Goliaths, which can be tricky with the starting fishing pole. The next best is Portia Harbor, which has the easier-to-catch Bubblefish.


 * 1) Fish cannot break the line themselves. If it looks like they're going off the edge of the screen, they're not—they're just right at the border. It's better to be patient and take your time reeling them in than to try to do it as fast as possible and risk breaking the line if they make a sudden movement, especially when you're using the Beginner's Fishing Rod and getting used to the minigame mechanics.


 * 1) There's an early-ish achievement that you can easily miss if you don't time your progression of the main questline exactly right. [SPOILERS AHEAD] City Transporter requires you to make all five of the Dee-Dee Transports for the mission "Assemble Dee-Dee Transport," and unless you're very careful (or very tricky), Higgins will take at least one commission. (This can happen even if you show up the morning the commissions are posted with five Dee-Dees in your inventory, because you have to turn them in one by one, which usually gives Higgins enough time to take one.) The best way to get the achievement is to turn in "The Cave on Amber Island" on a Thursday (regardless of when you actually completed it). This will ensure that there is a Fireside about it on Friday and Presley comes to tell you about the Dee-Dee commissions posted in the Commerce Guild on Saturday, which gives you the weekend to turn in the five Dee-Dees without Higgins coming into the guild, because he never does on weekends. If you don't manage this timing, you can potentially still block Higgins from taking one or more commissions for as many days as necessary by interfering with him getting to the commission board until 9 a.m., at which point he leaves the building even if he hasn't taken a commission. Methods include talking to him, sparring with him, and walking into him.  [END SPOILERS]


 * 1) This is a later-game tip, but: When inviting slow walkers to parties (e.g., Ginger and Sophia), you can help them arrive in time. Wait until they start walking (typically two hours before the party starts) and then do something to pause time without pausing NPC action. For example, I'll interact with a mount while looking at the Banquet Table and just stay in that interaction selection menu while keeping an eye on who's arrived. (If you don't have a mount, you can do the same with any NPC, but they might not be conveniently placed in your line of sight of the table. If you can't see who's arrived, you can exit the interaction menu, open the map to see who's where, and then go back into the interaction menu if they need more time.) Note that this only works if the NPCs are already in the process of walking over—it won't help if you do it too soon or too late.