In Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, the player will need to continually improve their tools to meet the needs of their ever-expanding farm. A more improved water can will help you water entire plots of land with minimal effort, an improved sickle will help you clear more, and an improved hoe will help you till more. This gets the player through the tedious farming part, and tackle more, so that they have more to sell come the day of the Bazaar, while giving more freedom to explore or romance to your heart’s content. Leveling your tool features some marked improvements over other games in the series, but with these changes come a system that requires some getting used to.
The process to do so begins during the lengthy tutorial of people showing up at the character’s house unannounced to teach them the mechanics of the game. Isaac will arrive at the farmhouse to explain the Windmill on the property and then request basic materials to fix it. Previously to this, Lloyd will have gifted you a Hatchet that serves both as a hammer and axe, making collecting materials that much easier, as this allows you to collect both wood and stone with one tool, and later collect both with one move. After completing this, you will unlock the windmill, which acts kind of like a crafting station, and in here are several upgrades for your tools.
Upgrading tools works pretty traditionally; you need lumber, stone, the tool, and ore. Ore can be found all over the place, and for a more comprehensive guide to mining, you can check our guide here, but once you find everything listed in the windmill for any given tool, you can place the tool into the windmill, where it will upgrade. Since wind plays a pivotal role in all aspects of the game, windmills work faster on windy days. This being said, completing the tasks you need it for, then placing it in, will usually see it ready to claim by the next morning, rather than needing to time chores around a lengthy absence of any given tool. One element to note is that each upgrade requires the tool in the upgrade chain that comes before, meaning you do need to upgrade them in a specific order, rather than gathering materials for the silver upgrade before you have completed copper.
It is fairly noticeable that the Red Windmill, the one located on your farm, only allows you to upgrade the tools to the silver rank, but in the case of ore, your silver hatchet will not be able to break half of them. Isaac has a series of quests he will give you as you progress that will unlock two additional windmills in town: a blue windmill and a yellow windmill, which feature the rest of the upgrades in them, with the blue windmill having the direct follow-up upgrades to that of the red one, and the yellow being the last of the upgrades.
Using your upgrades is slightly different than traditional Story of Seasons, where you hold the button to power up and use it. Here, you have to hit the jump button, and while in the air, you will see a wider radius of effect for your tool that you can now use while in the air to get that effect. The mayor sells a double jump upgrade at his stall during the Bazaar on Saturdays that gives you a double jump for 10,000g. This upgrade can be used to get a further effect, such as an even wider effect when watering or tilling soil, but you need the tool upgrade that gives that improvement to trigger the effect.
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