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May 20, 2023

Most Valuable Foraging Items In Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life

There are tons of seasonal freebies laying about in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - here are some of the best foraging finds. You’ve likely got your eye focused more on your farm, but in Story of

There are tons of seasonal freebies laying about in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - here are some of the best foraging finds.

You’ve likely got your eye focused more on your farm, but in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, foraging is a great way to collect even more free ingredients around Forgotten Valley. With everything on offer from ingredients you can use in cooking to flowers that improve your hybrid crops, be sure you’re grabbing the wild plants around town.

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But with such a busy schedule, it may help to prioritize certain items over others, and that’s where we come in. We’ve ranked some of our favorite wild plants in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life in terms of their uses.

You'll find herbs during most of the seasons throughout Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, and stockpiling them may not be a bad idea, as you'll find several dishes that require them in cooking. Everything from Veggie Tempura to Bibimbap is on the menu with your foraged herbs!

You can collect Spiral Herbs during the Summer, Huddle Herbs in Autumn, and Budding Herbs throughout the Winter. There’s a seasonal herb for the Spring as well, but with its uses far more varied than its seasonal cousins, we’ve given it its own spot further down in our list.

Though this place in our list could have gone to any of the flowers you use as gifts in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, we gave it to the Toy Flower because you get the most mileage out of it with gifting. Since plenty of the townsfolk love flowers, they make for a great freebie when giving gifts to try to earn friends around town.

But the Toy Flower captures an additional heart, too: Rock, the lazy son of the Inn owners. While he’ll normally only comment on your flowers, he does actually take Toy Flowers as a present. That slight edge nudged the Toy Flower into our list over the other flowers - we love Rock.

There’s a variety of mushrooms growing around Forgotten Valley during the Autumn, popping up here, there, and everywhere largely in place of the seasonal selections of flowers. Wise foragers spend the season collecting these free ingredients, though, as you can make some really killer meals with them.

RELATED: Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - Recipes And Cooking Guide

With Mushroom Curry a pretty widely-loved dish, Mushroom Pasta being a rather filling meal for long days toiling in the fields, and several other recipes that feature these hearty, hand-picked goods, grab the mushrooms you see throughout the fall for year-round access to some of the best dishes in the game.

When you first begin playing Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, you start off in the Spring and with extremely limited tools, animals, and goods. Another thing you won’t have too many of to begin with is recipes, but thankfully, Herbal Soup is a very early-game recipe requiring just one ingredient – an Aromatic Herb.

You’ll find three of them growing on your farm each day, enough to make three portions of Herbal Soup. Not only can you eat it to regain energy, but Soup dishes are a favorite gift of many folks in town.

Though pretty tough to find, the Upseed Flower is somewhat invaluable if you’re trying to make the most money possible on selling your crops. Once you’ve begun having Vinnie make you hybrid crops, splicing any of your seeds with an Upseed Flower will instantly raise the grade of the seed by one rank.

RELATED: Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - Crop Grades, Explained

And though you may only find a few Upseed Flowers yourself throughout the Winter, if you’ve gotten married already, your spouse may surprise you with a few Upseed Flowers as gifts in the Deposit Box throughout the season.

Speaking of hybrids, you’ll have noticed early on into your hybrid-making process that hybrid seeds in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life can be finicky little things. While base crops are able to grow in any kind of soil, hybrid and custom seeds are much pickier, requiring the absolute best soil in the third field to grow.

That is, unless, you breed them with a Sagesoil Flower. Giving Vinnie any seed with a Sagesoil Flower will produce a new variant of said seed that can now be grown in any type of soil, expanding your planting options exponentially.

While the regular hybrid crops Vinnie can make you are definitely intriguing, you’d do well to consider giving him a few Trick Blue Flowers to mix with a base seed as well – Vinnie can make you shockingly blue variants of every crop in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life.

Trick Blue Flowers can be found for free throughout the entirety of Autumn down by Turtle Pond, but if you’ve run out between seasons, you can also grab some from Van when he visits for 100g per flower.

We’ve laid out an entire crop growth calendar for you in one of our Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life guide, but if you’ve got a favorite crop or have found the one that seems to be making you the most money, it sucks to be limited by seasonal growth patterns.

Thankfully, that’s where the Happy Lamp Flower comes in. These red tulip-looking blooms, when mixed into a hybrid, will produce a crop seed that can be grown in any season throughout the year. Spend the Summer collecting these over by the Riverside and keep your big-money crops growing year-round.

NEXT: Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life - 10 Biggest Changes From The Original

After writing for more than two decades and playing RPGs and simulation games since the N64's heyday, Gabrielle loves having married two of her passions here at TheGamer. Outside of work, she's also a big fan of baking, bass guitar, anime, and jokes so unfunny that they're sort of hilarious.