Harvestella Closeness And Romance Explained

Improving closeness in Harvestella is key not just to unlocking new jobs for your character, but for unlocking the hearts of your friends and neighbors. Maxing out closeness creates an opportunity to establish romance and then a life partnership - Harvestella's take on marriage - with a handful of Harvestella’s characters, though the farm-RPG isn’t too keen on telling you how to actually make it happen.

How closeness and romance work in Harvestella

Harvestella has eight characters you can potentially strike up a romantic relationship and, later a partnership with. These are:

• Istina
• Aria
• Brakka
• Emo
• Heina
• Shrika
• Istina
• Asyl

Once you max out a character’s intimacy level, complete all their character stories, and complete the main story, you can view their Partnership event, aka their marriage event, and invite them to live on your farm at Bird’s Eye Brae. Establishing a partnership unlocks new dialogue options, but you can’t have children and, as far as we can tell, can’t have multiple partners.

After meeting the requirements, the mayor visits and gives you a crafting recipe for a ring. Give the ring to your intended partner as a proposal. You can only make this ring once--again, as far as we can tell--and can’t change your choice after starting the process, so think carefully before giving the ring away.

You can choose your Harvestella partner from any of the eight available choices, regardless of gender. Other characters, such as Cres the doctor, have closeness meters as well. You can’t romance them, but you can deepen your relationships, learn more about these characters, and get some handy items in return for completing their quests.

How to improve closeness

The only way to raise closeness in Harvestella is completing character story quests. These are separate from regular side quests and show up as you progress the story. Some characters, including Aria, will also have their closeness increase during key story moments, such as when you clear Chapter 3 and reach certain milestones.

Even if you aren’t interested in starting a romantic relationship with any of the candidates, you should work on improving closeness anyway, as it’s the only way to unlock your party members’ jobs for your character.

You can cook and share meals with party members. Each character has preferred meals, but after a fair bit of testing, it seems like finding their favorite meals only unlocks new dialogue. There were no discernible changes to closeness, but we’ll update if that changes.

The same applies to taking characters along with you. There may be some slight improvement in closeness when you bring certain party members along, but if so, it seems negligible compared to completing character quests.

If you're just getting started in Square Enix's new farm game, check out our Harvestella beginner's tips to make the journey a bit smoother.