If you are subscribed to my Youtube channel, you’ve likely already seen at least one of my Sunshine Days videos since I started playing at the end of June. It’s easily been one of the games I’ve most frequented been asked about so I wanted to list some of my top general tips when playing the game.
Keep in mind the game is in Early Access and thus, ALL of these tips are subject to change or no longer be applicable. Also as changes have happened, things have changed since I originally did them, but these are at least the tips I’ve personally followed as I play.
- If you plan to do any of Noor’s Gossip (aka, the Daily Quests) that day, before you do anything else, you should head there to pick them up. – Generally, my first thought is often gardening or maybe wanting to hurry to harvest things so I can work on quests during the 1-2 hours of respawn time, but MANY of the dailies require harvesting items, some literally will be all you can find per respawn session (like one of Bilet’s quests asks for 6 lemons and there’s only 6 lemons available at a time). While you may occasionally run into a situation where you just don’t get lucky with spawn rates (I had a quest where I needed 5 Mushrooms, but only 3 were available to harvest at a time), I’ve found this generally is the best way to do it so I can kill two birds with one stone instead of having to wait around for things to respawn or possibly multiple hours for plants to grow.
- Don’t be afraid to just leave some crops growing in the Greenhouse until you HAVE to harvest them. You may only be able to buy 5 seeds per crop a day, but there’s no limit to how many you can have. You can also earn more from Percival’s Mystery Boxes and Bilet’s Crane Game, in addition to through the current Season Pass. The main reason I suggest this is that some items that frequently come up for harvesting are Pumpkins, Aloe, and certain flowers so I always keep some onhand just to finish quickly before immediately replanting them.
- Always get the Premium Pass on the Season Pass during Early Access. – During Early Access, it’s completely free! So there’s no reason to not grab it for the extra rewards.
- If you’re focused more on leveling the season pass and don’t care too much about getting more Stone, save your Acorns for Rubberwood Grove (the one with Iron). – Iron and Stone are currently only forageable through their respective Hiking Trips. You essentially spend 500 Coins for an Acorn which can be used to go Hiking on Ace’s Balloon. It’s definitely worth the price as you get more than if you bought and honestly, you do need a lot of Stone if you want to make all the different exterior customization options (which will take over 1,000 Stone to craft enough Cement and Brick or if you want to buy it, over 20K– the glue alone would be over 20,000…), but over twice as much forageables are available through Rubberwood Grove so it’s more bang for your Acorns if leveling is your biggest objective. Keep in mind you can just stay on a hiking trip until things respawn as well. That said, if you’re feeling impatient and have the money and acorns to burn, leaving a hiking trip and going back will immediately re-spawn everything.
- If you don’t have time to play much, but can at least find time to stop in briefly, I’d recommend picking up a 5 Coin Ticket from Bilet and a Honey Jar from Jamal each day you can. – The reason I suggest these two specifically is every day, Bilet has a Carnival Ticket for 10% of the usual price. Bilet’s Crane Game is not just great for getting generally coins and gems, but actually contains old Season Pass items if you missed out on some. Also you’re pretty much guaranteed to always get more back than what you paid for if you just stick to those cheaper tickets. As for the Honey Jar, you can actually get Honey up to 3 times a day for one, but you also will get level up experience for each Honey Jar you fill. Once you’ve finished, stocking up on these jars helps get you a bonus start when the next season arrives.
- If you don’t always have a lot of time to level or find yourself cutting it close, I strongly recommend getting the Water Pump from Byron’s shop ASAP. Putting one near your greenhouse saves you A LOT of time from going back and forth from there to the center of Town Square and back to fill up your Watering Can. As it can only hold 10 at a time and with a maximum of 48 slots (and even more than 10 from the get-go), you will be doing that… a lot. That said, watering your plants is completely optional— they do not die if you don’t water them, it doesn’t even speed up growth.
The pros for watering are that watering will give you experience per water, even if that plant is already wateredThis has been changed in a recent patch and now you can only water a plant if it is unwatered. This is still recommended though as you can only hold 10 and the fully upgraded plot has 48 spots so it still saves time. Keep in mind that planting does not give you any leveling experience– only watering! - If you haven’t finished Jamal’s Garden Quest, you can actually keep picking weeds to gather up more flowers beyond what he asks for. It’s a good way to stock up for future or to have some to sell too.
- You can tell if you have a new quest either by opening your map and looking on the right side or if an NPC has something to say to you if they start waving when you get close. That said, characters like Rowan and Emile should be spoken to each day until they run out of crafting recipes for you. Rowan will just give you them while Emile has some in his shop.
- If a quest says to wait or come back later, it always means the next day— either after the day rolls over or 24 hours after you finished. If it doesn’t update after 24 hours, send in a Bug Report!
- I often get a lot of questions on earning coins, so offhand, a quick list of suggestions:
- Flowers bought from Jamal give the best average for earning Coins– you will always earn twice what you paid. Every crop from Sada, minus Grapes which cost Gems instead of Coins, will not earn as much unless you get the silver rank of them which you can’t guarantee. Unless you have tons of Gems to spare, I would not recommend Grapes beyond completing quests as they only give you Coins.
- There are 4 chests you can find every day (3 in Shuggle Woods, 1 in Primavera Forest in Jamal’s Garden) that will give you coins. Similarly, Daily Quests also give you coins and most don’t require you to spend anything to finish them.
- Fishing costs nothing to do so it’s essentially a free source of revenue.
- Percival’s Mystery Boxes will often give you items you can sell for a good amount while also giving you a decent amount of coins for the items as well so if you’re someone who has TONS of forageables and is really great at keeping those counts up, this is highly encouraged. * The small knock you may get for giving Percival the items instead of selling directly is more than worth a lot of what you can pull for his boxes. That said always go for the 5 Item exchanges over the 10 if possible as you only get one ticket either way.
- If there’s nothing you’re really saving for from Bilet’s Crane Game, playing that with the 5 Coin ticket is always guaranteed to get you something worth more.
- Near the fishing spot is a cute yellow computer you can use daily to answer a small poll about how you’re enjoying playing the game! It’ll give you 20 Coins just for answering.
- And of course, there’s the Computer at the Cafe you can put codes into. You can put one in every hour so you can even try finding new codes out yourself as well.
* This is unfortunately very much not me and is something I struggle with a lot. I yearn for the day we can just buy tickets or literally get them any other way because I only have so much time I can earn a bunch of things and my mystery box luck is terrible ;~;
I hope these tips help make the game more enjoyable for you! If you haven’t heard of Sunshine Days, you can play the game on Android or iOS or on PC through their Discord :) And if you want to add me, my friend code is 710942523939 !