The carpenter starts to build a new structure. You can water it using a new item: the watering can. Of course, when its raining then the ground is already wet and you won't have to water it. If you don't then your plants won't grow. Every part of the 3x3 area needs to be watered, every day. Now comes the tricky part: watering the area. You'll need a 3x3 area in which you can plant 1 seed for the whole area. Forget what you know about crop farming in Minecraft, because this will be something completely new! The only thing you'll recognize is using a hoe to create farmland. Once you found her upstairs you can right click to start a dialog and she'll introduce you to planting, maintaining and harvesting crops. This may all sound a bit daunting at first but fortunately for you the carpenters sister has also moved in and she's more than willing to help you out. Monday to Saturday from 9:00am to 17:00pm. His shop, because that's what it is, is only open on specific times. It looks amazing, but it will take him quite some time to build. And when the first layer is done the next will start to appear, once again one row at a time and our carpenter will walk around as if he were actually building. The carpenter will walk up to the building and you'll notice that blocks start to appear, one row at a time. Placing a preview by holding a blueprint (which is a new specific item). Ironic, huh? That world has everything you need: trees (you're going to need tons of wood), water with clay (you'll need a flower pot) and plenty of flowers (which you'll need later on in the game). Fun fact: I find to get the best results when using "harvestmoon" as the seed for this new world. So if you're using an existing world where you're already within an autumn or winter period then the tutorial won't work. However, turnips can only grow during the spring. In the tutorial you're asked to grow turnips (yes, they added new items such as vegetables to the game). It is compatible with existing worlds, but because this mod adds seasons to your game you could end up with an unusable tutorial. In order to fully enjoy this mod I suggest that you start a new world.
If you'd like to know more about how to set up Forge (and optionally Liteloader) so that you can use mods as well, then please see this my previous guide about this. A new game & a new environment! Harvest Festival is a mod to be used with Forge a customized version of Minecraft which allows you to to use plugins and such. If you guys are interested then I'll share some more 'review gameplay' in a future post. Therefor I'm keeping the amount of pictures a bit minimal in order to prevent spoilers. There are some caveats which I will address later, but in the overall this is something you might want to try yourself.
Note: I've been playing this game for several hours and I am honestly impressed. This is my review of the Harvest Festival mod. And although this isn't perfect I think they did an amazing job. Well, that got a few smart people to work and they decided to create a mod for Minecraft in order to bring this same style of gameplay within the world of Minecraft. For that to work you had to plant crops, tend to your animals and interact with NPC's.
Your job: to repair the farm, and get everything going again.
Have you ever heard of Harvest Moon? Or maybe you'll recognize the Japanese name: 牧場物語 Harvest Moon was a game for the Nintento gaming systems in which you played the role of a young boy who inherited a disfunctional farm.