10 beginner tips and tricks for Roots of Pacha!

Please note: I have since become aware you can place farm buildings in the other fields by selecting the field at the top! If you have any other useful tips please share them below 👇👇

Apologies for the wall-of-text, but here's a bunch of things I figured out myself, but wish I knew earlier.

If you trigger a cutscene with a character, it'll often change their daily routine somewhat. For example, with Ata, her first cutscene discusses a spider in her bed, and she'll both stay outside her house more and avoid going to bed until everyone else in her family is asleep. After another cutscene, however, she'll actually stay inside more than usual and spend more time with Garrek at the southeast river crossing. After Touk's first cutscene, he'll spend less time hunting with Grob and Gin, and after his second, you can find him playing with a new pet of his in the Savanna.

The penalty for being out of bed at 2AM is about -20 stamina. Your base stamina is 120, but it's extendable via Accessories and Food, so the penalty is actually pretty small. There are no other penalties to being out late, and there doesn't seem to be any long-term penalties to missing bed repeatedly. If you're in an action that requires a minigame or takes a prolonged period of time, you'll be allowed to complete your current action before you pass out. This can be helpful if you're trying to catch a difficult fish that's keeping you up past 2AM.

If a character has an active quest or Idea that needs to be discussed and developed there will be a notice in your Smoke Signal messages about it. Viewing that will have a prompt that will take you straight to the person's current location. Characters move around a lot, so you may need to check a couple times. It's a lot easier - and faster - than trying to catch up with them through the map manually.

Also on ideas, interact with EVERYTHING! Sometimes interacting with things, like unfamiliar objects, obtaining unfamiliar resources, or the like, will unlock new ideas back in the village. For instance, interacting with a trapping spot out in the savanna will prompt Okka to teach you how to trap for meat and give you the blueprints to build various traps.

The bucket isn't the only tool that can be charged by holding the button to increase its area of effect. The hoe and scythe can be charged, too. In addition, the further you upgrade these tools, the longer you can charge and the wider the area of effect becomes (up to a 3x3 tile area centered in front of you). Heavier charges use a bit more stamina, but in the case of the bucket, do not use more water.

Speaking of water, Garrek can later figure out how to set up irrigation for your fields. Filled irrigation trenches automatically water any plowed field tiles next to them, but they will also water an additional tile if it's between two trenches. So if you build your fields 3 tiles wide and however long you want, you can run trenches along the length of the field on either side, and still water the center tiles of your field.

So, with accessories, there's often some confusion here because the game uses the terms "bind", "bond", "bound", and "bonded" which sound like synonyms but actually have different meanings here. Just equipping an accessory is enough to get its bonus. When you equip an accessory, it binds to you - this means you can't remove the bound accessory until 6AM the following day. If you wear an accessory for multiple days, a bond will develop between you and the accessory, which over time increases its power. You can unequip a bonded accessory without losing the bond progress, which is useful if you want to move it to a different slot (like moving a fully-bonded accessory to the 3rd slot so you can gain bond with two others).

Accessories can also be upgraded. This does reset the bond progress, but vastly increases the base level of buff. You can then re-equip it, and gain bond again until you've reached max bond, and enjoy a much more powerful accessory. Most accessories can be upgraded twice, and upgrading typically requires gold, silver, and/or gemstones from the caves. The shaman, Vuak handles all accessory creation and upgrading processes. An important thing to note is that, unlike tools, an accessory cannot be used while Vuak is upgrading it.

Speaking of the caves, explore them! They're not just for stone and metal resources. There's lots of other neat things in there, including bonuses that can permanently increase your max stamina, grant a boost of Prosperity to the village, award you unique clothing items, and unlock pets and farm animals that can be found nowhere else.

Having stamina problems? Make food. Once your hut is built, inside your hut is a stone countertop that you can use to cook dishes. The library of dishes is pretty sparse at first, but as you upgrade your house and purchase kitchen tools from the chieftain's wife, Tare, the list of recipes will expand. Befriending characters can also earn you recipes for cooking. Even the most basic of dishes, made with the poorest quality of ingredients, restores at least 30+ stamina, so it only takes four dishes to refill a base-level stamina bar in the worst-case scenario. Higher-end food, even of middling quality, can restore anywhere from 120-180 stamina, or possibly more.

If you want to make your stamina even more efficient, equip the Earring of the Will and Cave Lioness Ring accessories. The former will add anywhere from +15 to +80 max stamina, while the latter will discount the stamina costs of all actions by anywhere from 5 to 20. The amounts vary based on bond and upgrade level. The Earring of the Will is from completing the One with the Wild prophecy, which will probably be your first prophecy completed, meanwhile the Cave Lioness Ring is from completing the Protected by the Spirits prophecy.

Finally, when it comes to animals, the largest animal shed upgrade will automatically shear and milk your animals, and collect any dropped materials from your animals for you, putting the products in a bin in the bottom-left of the animal shed, which is a huge time-saver. You can collect them from the bin just like you'd use a storage box. You should still check on your animals daily - you can interact with your barn animals every day to increase their friendship, and playing your flute for them will increase their friendship twice a week. Remember to clean any green piles of mess in the barn, otherwise your animals may get sick. The first time this happens, Ada will have a quest for you. Visiting her will give you the recipes to make medicine for your animals. This medicine requires any oil, and specific gatherable herbs based on the animal's symptoms. It's a good idea to collect medicinal herbs like datura flowers, milk thistle, citronella, and mint and save them in a box next to your animal shed along with some oil, so you can immediately make medicine for any sick animals. One dose is enough for a full recovery.

Some fishing tips:
You can catch fish easier if you realize you don't have to keep your pointer centered directly on the fish's shadow. Anywhere within the ring of ripples surrounding it will increase the fish's catch progress, with greater progress closer to the center. This can be useful if the fish tries to hide beneath the flowers or rocks - normally, pointing straight at the fish will halt the bar's progress, since the obstacle is between you and the fish, but if their ring is peeking out from under the obstacle, you can keep your cursor there and still make slow progress.

If the meter that shows you how fast you're making progress is yellow, that means the fish can see you moving around ahead of it and is suspicious; they'll attempt more 'attacks' to slow your progress and attempt to escape you. Keep your cursor behind the fish to keep them calmer - I like to put my cursor right on the tail of their shadow when I can.

Speaking of attacking fish, when a fish 'attacks' and you get the prompt to move away, you don't have to get across the pond; in fact, doing so may hurt or reset your progress. You just have to get your cursor out of their ring. The faster you get back into the ring once the fish is done, the more progress you'll preserve. You can even gain a little progress if you're fast enough. With difficult fish with 5-segment progress bars, keeping your cursor just inside the edge of their ring, slipping just outside of it to wait out their attacks, and then right back in can allow you to catch the fish slowly, but safely. 5-segment fish tend to gain knowledge really fast, so before you know it they'll be demoted to 4 bars and become much easier to snag. Don't be afraid to take it slow and steady.

Also, that's the effect of fish knowledge - at certain levels of fish knowledge, their progress gauges become shorter and they become slower, less aggressive, and generally easier to catch.

tell me how to remove an item from the inventory tiles, trees?

I bought a leather pot and can't find it for the life of me. Oh well. I guess I'll find it eventually.🤣

I've already found out most of these from playing BUT some i didnt know like with the fish (i havent really been fishing)

May I ask what hairstyle youre using? :)

i think you meant non-dateable characters have a yellow flower gauge. you said dateable twice. But i think we knew what you meant lol

you have a new sub please do a play through series :)

Lovely tips and tricks, quite pleasant video.

I do however have a question, how often do you go out in search for Wild Seeds? I have noticed on the video you had 5/5 eggplants up and ready for seed collection. This surprised me and now i am wondering, am i required to go out every day to hunt for those seeds or i can wait few days till they are all up? For example: they won't spoil will they?

how did you get the clock?!

Ugh, I hate friendship decay. Especially when there are so many NPC's.

Thank you very much!

Thanks for the tips! I love the look of this game but won't be getting it for a little while.

Can you make a video about the best use of each wild crops?

Glad I'm not the only one who got a little confused by the "any root" thing. Had to google it myself.

edit: And now I'm just learning from this video I can water three spots at once?! You're 100% right, game changer.

I have been playing for a hole year in the game and i still don't have that much space on my inventory how do you get more space?😭

Thank you for the root information

glad to know I'm not the only one who didn't water their plants LOL

Thanks for the info on "root".

Thank you for sharing these tips! I can’t wait for this to come out on the Switch. ❤

Enough with the gifting simulators... :/ Every farming game has that now.

For the fish knowledge, i just found out that the bar is decrease by 1 when you reach level 3 or 4 of that certain fish. Hope it help!

Does anyone know if you can move your house?

For the accessories .. they just need to be fully bonded ! Then you’ll be able to wear a third item!
For an accessory to be fully bonded you just have to wear it and the “bonded” meter will fill eventually

Love your video. As a person who has spent a lot of time in this game, a few things for people to know for the future, I refuse to go into detail; There is a form of fast travel you can unlock in the game now. There are also upgradeable watering buckets that water more then 3 plants and irrigation. I wanted to give this as a heads up for people on the fence. The game grows on ya :)

Just started Stardew… This looks so fun

Great tips, I also struggled to fulfill a request for "any pots" before finally realizing I can just buy some from the furniture seller.

So much useful information! I really need to get into this game 😍

love this video <3 💗