Craig Bowen 
My Time At Portia is a farm-life sim RPG that arrived in Early Access this week, and so for the beyond days, I’ve been harvesting, crafting, building, farming, exploring, and adventuring. And most importantly, mastering. While Portia may be a chunk of a grind, it is speedy, proving to be colorful and soaking up international to spend time in.
Below, I’ve given you some suggestions to make your early hours a bit easier to navigate whilst you deliver your very own workshop up to snuff. They’re all matters I want I’d known before I commenced gambling.
Keep a watch on the clock.
In Portia, the clock is constantly ticking and ticking right away. In plenty of sandbox crafting video games, we’re used to staying up all night time, hammering away at stone partitions, or hacking down cussed trees. No matter how overdue it’s gotten.
Not so inside the international of Portia: while it reaches 3:00 am, you will quite actually nod off wherever you’re and whatever you are doing. This is not difficult—you awaken absolutely rested at home, so in a few ways, it can sometimes be convenient—but in case you’re within the center of something, it is decidedly a nuisance to all of the sudden slip right into a coma. If you’re planning an excursion to a distant region, or have some precise dreams for the day, keep in mind that whilst the day ends, it virtually ends. Leave early in case you’ve were given something primary to do.
But do not go away too early. If you get out of bed and sprint into town to go to a shop, you’re going to find out the stores are nevertheless closed. They open at eight to provide the owners time to get out of their beds and get to paintings, or you will be standing around tapping your foot.
Mining fees money, so plan your spelunking.
Mining is not bested my least favorite hobby in Portia. However, it’s also something you have to pay to do. Using the starter mine charges you eighty gold in step with go to (the sport calls foreign money goals, which feels to me like a typo, so I’m just gonna name it gold), and with so many crafting gadgets requiring copper and tin, you will want to be spending a lot of time in the dull, gloomy mine smashing a pickaxe against the ground.
In your early hours, gold might not be the easiest element to return, though, and you’ll need to be saving it for positive expensive items like upgrade kits or, nicely, mine visits. Which manner your journeys to the mine ought to be as fruitful as viable. When you discover yourself wanting only a couple more units of copper for something, it is tempting to pop in and pop lower back out, but doing that too typically can be a drain in your price range. So, whilst you’re going to mine, make a complete day of it and get as a whole lot as you could on each ride. Free up room on your inventory and prepare to spend the whole day grinding for relics and assets.
Read your mail, even if you do not need to
Outside your workshop is a mailbox, and just about every day, there could be something new in it. I form of omitted it for a while, simply due to the fact I had my personal to-do listing I turned into working on (and who desires greater mail in their lifestyles?), but not only will you locate new jobs inside the mail, however also information approximately special events. For example, I turned into thinking why there was a bit icon that looked at a gift blinking on my display. It turns out there may be a holiday in Portia in which airships fly over the metropolis and drop gives.
I’d have acknowledged that if I’d examine my mail; however, I hadn’t, so I did not, and thus turned into overdue to the competition and needed to run around like a madman trying to clutch the final few gives earlier than all the youngsters did, which left me feeling like a few sort of a desperate, greedy jerk. Which, quite frankly, I am.
Workshop jobs get complex almost straight away
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To show me as a builder, first I had to make a hatchet of stone and wood. Then I had to craft a pickaxe. My 1/3 job turned into preparing an entire multi-section bridge product of copper pipe and hardwood, which required several new workbenches and assets (which include a special hatchet able to cut down the proper tree for the hardwood). My present-day gig is to construct an entire friggin’ car. So, there is a sudden bounce in complexity going from creating a hatchet to taking on a large construction job.
Luckily, there are plenty of smaller jobs you can nose around for even as you’re waiting for days to pass and your copper to melt into bars that you may then develop into pipes. If you take on a job that appears a touch too complex, do not experience like you have to get it accomplished instantly. You can still discover other, smaller commissions that you can address within the interim, on occasion something as simple as solving a person’s fence or crafting a fishing pole.
Spend money to boom your inventory
With the handiest sixteen slots in your stock and another 8 on your Hotbar, you’ll refill your pockets pretty quickly. I assumed there could be a way to release all the locked slots, perhaps by locating a backpack or, in all likelihood, through leveling up; however, it’s easier than that. Click on a locked row, and you may have the choice to spend gold to pay for extra slots. I had no idea it became that easy till I virtually did it.
Stamina is weird
I turned into going for walks around at top speed, jumping over fences, and gathering berries and sticks after I all at once noticed I couldn’t accumulate berries and sticks anymore. That’s because I became out of stamina which, oddly, doesn’t prevent you from running around at top speed and jumping over fences.
Think of stamina almost as unique motion factors, when you consider that you may nevertheless circulate and run like the active child you’re whilst at the same time you are so exhausted that you may be unable to, say, pick something up or kick a tree or swing a sword. You can’t even cross fishing whilst your stamina is drained. Something is irritating approximately having an object in the front of you that you’re really too worn out to select up, particularly if that object is an apple that would provide you with a few factors of stamina.
Nevertheless, simply standing won’t get your stamina better (though it’ll top off your sprint meter). Recovering stamina can be performed via consuming sure ingredients, so preserve something to munch on in your pocket always. But often, you will need to sleep in your bed to absolutely replenish your stamina meter.
You can win positive fights by walking away.
At one point, with a purpose to gain get entry to a particular mine, you have to find one of the different characters in a sparring contest. I had not had a lot of good fortune sparring at the time—in combat with a newspaper reporter, I punched her kind of a hundred times, and then on the quiet of the combat, she knocked me out bloodless with only a couple of jabs. So, I wasn’t too keen on getting my butt exceeded me once more.
So, when it came time to show myself worthy of coming into the mine, I clearly spent a minute running away from my opponent. I just ran in a large circle like a coward. And it worked! In an everyday sparring session, this will be considered a draw; however, here, it becomes a successful bout of survival. See, you don’t constantly have to placed fist-to-face to get what you need.
