Gameplay Loop

The game involves a series of interlocking mechanics and goals.

### Goal: Restore the Town and its Faerie

This is the primary goal of the game. This is achieved through a variety of smaller goals.

- Find all the regional plants to refill the town's seed bank, which allows you trade miracle points for more seeds of the same kind. These plants can be found growing wildly around town and in the dungeons on the other side of mushroom warps.

- Catch all the regional fish to fill the town's fish log with information (maybe aquarium? hatchery?). Each new type of fish caught unlocks the ability to target that kind when fishing later.

- Collect as many food recipes and clothing patterns as possible.

- Grow and graft new variations of your multi-tool transformation staff.

- Solve the mystery of the town.

- Restore the mushroom network.

- Fight back the blight.

- Learn everything about everyone in town. Fill out the profile compendium, and learn what each villager's story is.

- Make the people in the town happy. How each NPC becomes happy is individual. Some do better when you have more requests for their shop. Others like unlocking new recipes and clothing patterns. Some need to repair relationships. Some just need a nice meal.

- Bring the lost children back and solve the mystery of the town.

The game will run on a day/night cycle, with the player choosing a wake-up time (that they can change later). The player needs to get to sleep more than three hours before their wake-up time or they will not wake up well-rested.

Upon waking: The player will farm for new tools to graft to their staff, and for crops to use in cooking and crafting. Daily farm work can include: tilling, planting, watering, weeding?, harvesting, and animal care.

The player can also talk to all the NPCs to grow closer to them and hear new dialogue every day, along with stumbling into scripted Town Stories, which can include romance events and other town gossip events. The game progresses the main story and side stories separately, tracking both.

The town may be holding a festival, which can include unique dialogue, competitions, and mini-games.

The player can check the wishing well and the noticeboard to see if there are any tasks that need doing around town - item deliveries, fetch quests, dungeon crawls and monster battles, and part-time help at the shops.

The player can go to the seed bank/shrine to get make donations or buy new seeds.

They can go to the haberdashery to style their different tool outfits or suggest styles to others.

They can go to the toolsmith to get new tools/weapons they have harvested grafted onto their staff.

They can go to the clinic to buy medicine, usually useful for preventing or controlling status effects in dungeons.

They can go to the carpenters, to plan out repairs for all the abandoned buildings in town (which need to be restored for certain characters to marry) and redesigns for your home and others. The designing is done, and in the process a list of needed materials/ingredients is generated. The plan can be saved, and when all the materials are gathered, the plan can be converted into a building kit, which is spawned in the appropriate area, and the planned changes are made over time (1 day to 3 days, maybe up to a week, depending on the scale of the project).

They can go to city hall to propose changes to the town's exterior.

They can go to the wildlife reserve to document local wildlife and help with the wildlife breeding program. I want it to kinda be like Neko Atsume. Like, you build the right stuff and get the right food and just check sometimes to see who has shown up. Animals you don't want to as a pet in your house or in the community barn can be donated to the wildlife reserve, and may entice similar but rarer animals to feel safe there. Random animal drops can sometimes be collected there. Taming is a fun way to get new animals, but breeding is more reliable. Gotta catch 'em all.

The community barn is where ranch animals can be looked after by the player and the community. Their drops are collected there in a bin every day, where they can either be retrieved by the player for free or will automatically be donated to the community storehouse the next morning.

They can go dungeon crawling to get rid of unwanted mushrooms, collect rare materials, mine, find new animals, and progress the story.

There is no money in the game. These people are communists. Excess crops and items can either be kept in personal storage or donated to the town's storehouse. The storehouse will keep an inventory list. Donating to the storehouse increases miracle power. Taking from it decreases it. NPCs will know what the player has donated and gain approval when the player keeps their favorite items stocked up.

Reaching certain goals with the storehouse inventory may help shops and artisans around town to try out new designs.