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• General/
• HM DS Cute/
• Animals

In most previous Harvest Moons, your farm would come with barns. In HMDS, you have to ask Gotz to make barns, silos, and lumber sheds. They cost a lot of money. Ready the tips in #2 and #3 to get enough. You will save a lot of money if you chop and smash your own materials, but that takes time too. Chickens - To get chickens, you have to build a bird shed and then buy a chicken from Chicken Lil's. You can grow your own chickens by hatching the eggs they lay in the incubator in the bird shed. Chickens hatched from eggs will start out with more affection for you than bought chickens. Each shed holds 4 birds. Ducks - You have to build a pond on your farm before you can buy these from Chicken Lil's. Ducks lay eggs every other day. Other than that, everything is the same as chickens. Cows - Buy from Yodel Ranch. The ones you buy will take 14 days before they are old enough to be milked. You can also make them pregnant, and like chickens, cows born on your farm will start out with more affection. Baby cows take 21 days to mature to milking age. Sheep - Buy from Yodel Ranch. You can shear them right away. They aren't old enough to make pregnant yet, though. Their wool grows back after 7 days. They must have a full coat of wool before they can get pregnant. You can get 6 balls of small wool each time from shearing by using the touch glove and just rubbing off a little at a time, and repeating. Animals take a long time to get to like you. Don't expect fast results like in previous games. I worked hard on rescuing the yellow sprites, and I hire them constantly to love on my animals. I keep the animals outside in a fenced in area with grass in all seasons except winter. The yellow sprite team, once they get better at their job, will increase your animals' hearts slowly but surely, much faster than you can do yourself. Animals don't like to be out in the rain or snow, and definitely not in storms! (See the section about weather for avoiding that.) Chickens and ducks can feed off anything on the ground, but cows and sheep need full grown grass to eat. Make sure they are in a pen that is completely enclosed, and the duck pond needs to be inside that enclosure for ducks. Sometimes a wild dog will show up at night and bark at them, resulting a bad mood the next day. Supposedly, training your dog by playing with him with the ball will prevent this, but I worked on it for the longest time and it didn't make a difference, so I just take the occasional bad moods in stride. It's only resulted in sickness twice, and I keep plenty of medicine on hand. You can also reset to the night before the animal gets sick and try again, sometimes they won't be sick. The more hearts a chicken or duck has, the larger egg it will lay. With cows and sheep, milking and shearing without the touch glove always results in small product, no matter how much they like you. And I've been able to get a large bottle of milk and large wool by rubbing really fast using the touch gloves on animals with no hearts. The point of making livestock like you more is to get them to win their yearly contest, which will increase their level. You can then breed that animal to get a leveled up baby, who you can get the hearts up on and then have her win the contest, and she'll be Level 2. Repeat as desired. You can have an animal win the same contest over again, but you won't get anything for it. They can only go up one level in their life. Bummer.