A compilation of the best tips and tricks I’ve collected, as well as my own advice, and guidance in certain aspects of the game. Beginner friendly, but also helpful in the later parts of the game.
Bugs and Errors
Let’s start at the beginning; actually starting the game. A lot of people have been plagued by bugs and errors from the get-go. Things like error 7, that prohibit players in Easter countries like Australia and New Zealand from playing the game if it is shut down, or crashes while they have a surplus of energy.
So far the only work-around for this error is to set your device to a different timezone, sometime in the past (Your New Yorks and what have you). It is not recommended, and the developers have gone on record to state that any problems caused by time-skipping will not be prioritised, but it’s the only way for certain people to continue their games without losing all their progress, and while there’s reportedly a patch coming out to fix this, as of the time i’m writing this, it still has not been fixed, so it’s worth mentioning.
Other bugs and errors:
Missing Pack rewards: The team has resent rewards in order to help people who didn’t get them, get a chance to pick them up again, but there isn’t really a real workaround, so that’s something that’s going to have to be addressed in the upcoming hotfix.
Certain missions that require handing over objects to characters may break your game, so I recommend saving before handing in any quest items.
Also notably a few missions may spawn items that are inaccessible to players, and may therefore make it impossible to continue certain missions. The most reported are Merlin’s quest (the memory orb gets stuck by the telescope) and Wall-E’s house (the lightbulb spawns somewhere players can’t get it) as well as Scrooge’s quest. The hotfix is supposed to help with these.
Try saving before entering their houses or taking their quests in the meantime, and reloading the game. If you’ve already got stuck, you’re pretty much a sitting goose until the hotfix comes out, I’m afraid.
Cloud saves: Due to many people trying to access the cloud at the same time, cloud saves might be laggy, and you might need to try to save several times. The only thing you can really do is just keep trying.
Disappearing characters / creatures: Sometimes creatures and characters will just randomly despawn and not appear on your map. Several times I’ve tried to feed a certain creature only for it to despawn when I got too close and the game deigned the animal to be stuck and unspawned it. You can either reboot your game, or wait, as after some time things that have despawned, spawn back in. In Ursula’s case check out at sea too, because she may have just drifted too far to spot.
Oven and Hood broken/ hides UI: Not fixed yet, but if you open a chest, your UI should come back.
General Tips
Not only can you enter placement mode outside your house, but you can also move around a lot of things you didn’t put down yourself, including wells, certain resources (eg. sticks, stones and flowers) roads, and buildings. The only things you can’t move around are daily respawning resource nodes such as the thorns and things like cave entrances that are built into the world around them.
This enables the player to both access blocked off areas in the unlocked map sections by moving the wells, or just to move any resources they might need to gather, and bring them close enough for the player to grab, in instances for example where they last flower you need is beyond a blockage you can’t pass through.
This also enables the player to move Goofy’s market stalls closer to the player’s gardens, and makes for a smoother and quicker purchase/sell process.
But arguably the biggest advantage is in moving the fruit shrubs and trees. Unlike the wells and market stalls, these objects can pass through to different areas, enabling the player to create an orchard such as this, which cuts foraging time down by a LOT, and enables you to grind foraging really quickly:
There’s several things that are required in order to complete missions, and some of them are more time-consuming to gather, and so I recommend keeping in stock at least a few of everything. Due to the price of things like flowers, it’s not really worth it to pick them just to sell them, but sometimes they’re necessary for missions, so I recommend keeping at least one chest for every two areas you’ve unlocked, to stock your flowers in.
That said, it’s worth keeping chests with a stock for emergencies, aim for a stack of each:
- fruit
- vegetable
- seasoning (sugar/basil/lemon/etc)
- crafting resource (stone/wood/clay/sand/etc)
and at least ten of each
- fish
- gemstone
- flower (by type and colour)
to make missions easier to get through.
And while we’re on the missions, there’s some things you should generally try to avoid selling or using, like really rare fish, in case you need them later on, but here’s some things you should NEVER use up, because they’re a pain to grind, and when you do need them, you rarely just need one of them:
- dream shards
- gemstones
- seaweed
- flowers
- coal
- and all other crafting ingredients
Farming For Fun and Profit
There’s a tonne of videos telling you to farm carrots until you turn orange in order to make some cash, but unless you want to make yourself miserable min-maxing carrots to buy that cool ice throne from Scrooge, there’s easier ways to make money.
There’s also easier ways to get that ice throne…
Starting out, the first thing you need to farm is your relationships.
Each NPC (aside from the two swimmers in the valley) can be assigned a specialisation that gives you boosts when you hang out with them. You can choose between fishing, farming, foraging, digging and mining. And while all of these provide useful boosts, some skills are a tonne more useful than others I’m looking at you, digging).
What some people miss is that you can get a bit of a boost for EVERY character in a specific profession, and not just the one you’re hanging out with. Some people complained that they accidentally assigned multiple people to the same skill-set, but they don’t seem to realise that there’s actually a bonus for that, and stacking more people on one skill can actually be beneficial.
Again though, some of these skills are more useful than others, and out of all of them, the ones you really ought to prioritise are:
- Mining
- Farming
- Foraging
Coal is necessary for cooking and certain crafting recipes. It’s one of those super-versatile ingredients it’s good to have a tonne of, at all times, and mining helps with that, and with getting more gems. Foraging is also really important for missions. And farming is by far the most profitable and the easiest to grind as you can do it pretty much on demand, plus it’s easy to access your house to stock up energy while doing this activity.
Digging is honestly pretty useless, so I wouldn’t assign more than one person to it. And fishing, I wouldn’t put more than a couple of people on either, as even though you may get an extra fish here and there, it doesn’t usually count towards mission completion, and most fish are really not worth the sell price, and just better for cooking with.
What you need to focus on is whatever works best for you.
If you need a few hundred, and you need it asap, then your best bet is to go fishing in glowing spots along the map. Each rare fish is good for a few hundred $ and it’s a great way for some starting money.
If you have half an hour, there’s crops in the starting areas you can farm real quick and make 3-4 times your profit. Carrots in the meadow, tomatoes on the beach, etc.
You can make more if you bring a friend with the right speciality, and even more if you cook what you catch or farm, but this again takes time.
But if you have the time and starting money, you can really make a killing.
You can make a tonne of money further down the line, after you begin unlocking all the different areas. First thing you want to unlock however is the realms. Specifically Wall-E and Moana’s. When you’ve done so, you’ll gain access to the aforementioned characters, and after continuing your friendships with them and their friendship quests a bit too, you’ll unlock two passive streams of income; Wall-E’s garden and Moana’s fishing boat.
Moana catches fish for you every yey many minutes, and Wall-E grows crops you can harvest once a day for free. And while it’s not revolutionary or game-breaking, it allows you to access crops you may not have unlocked yet in the game, such as potatoes, in my case. And while Moana doesn’t fill you with thousand dollar fish, she does bring back invaluable seaweed, which is more than worth its weight in gold considering all the crafting recipes it’s needed in.
The other two realms unlock Remy and subsequently Chez Remy, where you can work to boost relationships and fill out your recipe book, and Elsa, who helps you power up your mining pick, enabling you to get around through some later-game areas.
The main perk of Remy however is his realm. In the realms there’s a few hidden features and stuff to pick up and figure out. Wall-E’s has a crafting bench, which enables you to craft on the go. Elsa, Anna and Moana’s realms have a few extra resources, like garlic or coconuts. But Remy’s?
You can teleport to other wells from the main map, yes, but you can also teleport directly to the realms, and from there, when you leave, you return right back where you were before you teleported. This makes Wall-E and Remy’s worlds invaluable as it gives you access to a crafting bench anywhere on the map, but also Remy’s kitchen. And while there is a detractor in that you cannot use your own ingredients, and you can’t bring any food out, you can still use the realm to fill your character’s energy up, and buff them with the overfeeding buff for FREE whenever you want. This enables you to walk faster, and have double the energy reserve when you run around town picking up daisies for Minnie and so on and so forth.
So it’s imperative that you prioritise the realms.
Just try not to think about that furry texture in all the food that comes out of this kitchen
Tip: Save your money!
You really don’t need to be buying everything you see. Most items will loop around eventually, and you’re not really going to spend much time in your house. But if there’s one thing I learned the hard way, it’s never give out gifts. Unless a mission requires it, there’s really no point as you can build up your relationships with people just by hanging out, and doing stuff with them. And while there’s a few characters that can’t follow you, by the time you finish everyone else’s missions, you’re bound to have gotten them up to a point where you can unlock theirs as well.
And as for crops, you really don’t need to be buying more than you’ll plant and clogging up your chests. The price never changes, and it’s not like buying in bulk helps any. Speaking of which, the most valuable crop works out to be Potato with 126 coins per crop, 35 minutes grow time, which works out at around 3.6 coins per minute for each seed you plant. And while it wont grow as fast, you can plant it wherever you want, and it will still grow. But if you wish to go local, here’s the highest coins per minute rate of each area:
- Peaceful Meadow: Carrot (2.93 cpm)
- Glade of Trust: Okra (2.85 cpm)
- Dazzle Beach: Sugarcane (2.7 cpm)
- Forest of Valour: Canola (3.11 cpm)
- Sunlit Plateau: Zucchini (2.6 cpm)
- Frosted Heights: Asparagus (2.95 cpm)
- Forgotten Lands: Potato (3.6 cpm)
Carrots are great for starting out, yeah, and even mid-game, but the constant plant-water-harvest cycle really takes away time you could be spending actually playing the game. Jump to the forest and start farming some Canola. Between gathering other resources and trying to do quests, it’s not worth it to plant something that you’ll have to keep going back to as often as carrots, at least for me. Even if you have to water the other stuff more, it’s less time consuming than harvesting and re-planting so I recommend you go for a slower crop where you can.
Star Paths and Other Ventures
Star Paths are a month long ‘season’ type event. The idea is that you accomplish these goals alongside your main missions. It’s hard to balance and impossible to complete without spending moonstones (the micro-transaction part of the game). Each day you have a chance to find 10 through a chest that spawns randomly in your world. But even if you find all of them, that’s still only about 300 a month so it’s really not worth using moonstones to unlock extra duties, as even with the ones you can unlock through the star path, you’ll still be short.
This is mostly due to the fact that you don’t get enough missions to claim all the rewards, even if you pay for the premium version of the event, which nets you double the missions, and should therefore be easier to claim, causing you to spend even more moonstones, in order to claim back rewards, and some moonstones.
And to add insult to injury the game is currently bugged for some people, and doesn’t even let them use their pixar tokens to buy some of the stuff available to buy right now.
Considering you need to buy everything in order to unlock the final reward, it really is impossible to complete this pixar star path at the moment.
No word on whether this will be fixed in the upcoming patch, but there’s hope that with enough time, or at least enough people complaining about it, they’ll do something about the star paths. Fingers crossed it wont be as predatory as other ftp games out there.
Anyway, this is the first version of my guide, while the game is still in super early access, and a lot might change even just a week from now, so I’ll keep updating this guide as we go.
This Disney Dreamlight Valley guide was originally published by mooglemania. All credits for the text and images goes to him!
