Craig Bowen 
My Time At Portia is a farm-life sim RPG that arrived in Early Access this week, so I’ve been harvesting, crafting, building, farming, exploring, and adventuring for the past few days. And most importantly, mastering. While Portia may be a chunk of a grind, it is speedy, proving colorful and soaking up international to spend time in.
Below, I’ve given you some suggestions to make your early hours easier to navigate while you deliver your 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, hammering away at stone partitions, or hacking down cussed trees. No matter how overdue it’s gotten.
Not so inside the international Portia: while it reaches 3:00 am, you will nod off wherever you’re and whatever you are doing. This is not difficult—you awaken rested at home, so in a few ways, it can sometimes be convenient—but if you’re within the center of something, it is decidedly a nuisance to all of a sudden slip right into a coma. If you’re planning an excursion to a distant region, or have some precise dreams for the day, remember that while the day ends, it virtually ends. Leave early in case you’ve been 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’ll find out the stores are closed. They open at eight to give the owners time to get out of their beds and get to paintings, or you will be tapping your foot.
Mining fees are 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 like a typo, so I’m just going to name it gold). With so many crafting gadgets requiring copper and tin, you will want to spend 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, and you’ll need to save it for positive expensive items like upgrade kits or my visits. In 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 lower back out, but doing that, too, typically can be a drain in your price range. So, while you’re going to mine, make a complete day of it and get as much as possible on each ride. Free up room on your inventory and prepare to grind for relics and assets the entire day.
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, but also information approximately special events. For example, I wondered why there was a bit icon that looked like a gift blinking on my display. There may be a Portia holiday where airships fly ovPortia holiday where gives.
I’d have acknowledged that if I’d examined 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 myself 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 involved preparing an entire multi-section bridge product of copper pipe and hardwood, which required several new workbenches and assets (including a special hatchet to cut down the proper tree for the hardwood). My present-day gig is to construct an entire friggin’ car. So, a sudden bounce in complexity goes from creating a hatchet to taking on a large construction job.
Luckily, you can nose around for plenty of smaller jobs even as you’re waiting for days to pass and for your copper to melt into bars that you may develop into pipes. If you take on a job that appears too complex, do not experience it like you must accomplish it 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.
You’ll quickly refill your pockets with the handiest sixteen slots in your stock and another eight on your Hotbar. 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 noticed I couldn’t accumulate berries and sticks anymore. That’s because I became out of stamina, which 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 circulate and run like the active child you’re, while simultaneously beinge so exhausted that you may be unable to pick something up, kick a tree, or swing a sword. You can’t even cross-fishing while your stamina is drained. Something is irritating approximately having an object in front of you that you’re 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 improve your stamina (though it’ll top off your sprint meter). Recovering stamina can be performed by certain ingredients, so always preserve something to munch on in your pocket. But often, you must sleep in your bed to replenish your stamina meter.
You can win positive fights by walking away.
At one point, to gain 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 in the quiet of the war, 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 ran away from my opponent for a minute. 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 place fist-to-face to get what you need.
