Your relationships are based on your interactions with villagers, sprites, and animals. There are two gauges that will rank your relationships:

• Friendship Points (FP) are how friendly you are with the villagers. Every person has a friendship level they can have with you. Your current friendship with someone is documented by the number of filled-in music note icons next to their portrait in the Villager Relationship menu. Each friendship music note represents 25 points of FP, with 10 friendship notes indicating 250 FP. There is a maximum of 255 FP you can have with a person.
• Love Points (LP) are how lovie-dovie you are. This is noted by heart markers below the music notes on the Villager Relationship menu. Marriage candidates have love point hearts, though some candidates have invisible hearts meant to add to the challenge of wooing them. Each colored heart represents 10,000 LP, with a maximum of 65,535 LP per potential marriage candidate. Your farm animals and pets also have love points, with their heart markers displayed in the Livestock Relationship or Pet Relationship menu. Each animal heart marker is 25 LP, with a maximum of 255 LP per animal.

To see your current relationship status, open the main menu by using the X Button and then tab over to the Friend/Love Menu using the shoulder buttons on your Nintendo Switch. You can see your relationship with the villagers, the Nature Sprites, the animals on your farm, and your pets.

Increasing FP and LP

There are several ways to increase your friendship points and love points. The easiest is to simply talk to the person. You'll earn +1 FP and, if applicable, +200 LP with the person. For Kai, you'll earn +2 FP and +200 LP.

Giving gifts is another easy way to increase your relationships. Marriage candidates have gifts that will increase both friendship and love points, while non-candidates have gifts that will simply increase friendship:

• Favorite gifts (marriage candidates only): +800 LP, +9 FP
• Loved gifts: +500 LP, +9 FP
• Liked gifts: +300 LP, +3 FP
• Neutral gifts: +100 LP, +1 FP

Giving a gift to a person on their birthday will multiply the amount of FP and LP you earn by a factor of 5. For example, giving a loved-quality gift to a marriage candidate on their birthday will earn you +2500 LP and +45 FP! Try to give a gift to a villager or marriage candidate on their birthday. Remember that a marriage candidate's birthday will move to their alternative date if you happen to select your own birthday as their default birthday date.

You can further increase your birthday boost by adding wrapping paper to your gift. Head to Jeff's grocery store and press the A Button when standing to the right-side of his shopkeeper's counter, next to the wrapped gift. Each item you wrap costs 100 G, and will boost the LP and FP you receive by 25%.

Another way to increase your relationships is by participating in town festivals. These events will be marked on your calendar and announced on the news channel of your TV. Some of these festivals are gatherings in Rose Plaza, while others are smaller gatherings; the pre-marriage Valentines Day and White Day festivals do not have a gathering at all!

For contest-based festivals, typically you'll earn +5 FP with the villagers who are attending the festival, and then another +20 FP for claiming victory in the contest. For romantic-type festivals, you can receive +1000 LP or +2000 LP depending on the festival. Competition events don't earn love points, but you can earn some friendship points during romantic festivals.

Besides festivals there are romantic heart events and random villager events that can increase affection. During a romantic event you're oftentimes given a response to choose to a question or situation. Picking the positive choice will earn you +2000 LP. With random villager events you can earn friendship in some of the events, but not every random events awards you with a friendship boost with the event participants.

For animal and pet affection, you'll earn love points by interacting with the animals, brushing them, and letting them stay outside for 5 hours. With pets you can feed them Pet Treats too.

Decreasing FP and LP

Ideally you want to increase a person's friendship or love, but there are some actions that can negatively impact your relationships. There's not much in the game that would require you to intentionally decrease your point totals. Only the rival events require a low level of friendship/love to trigger, but you'll most likely trigger all those events early in your game.

• Giving a poor gift will decrease affection, either disliked (-3 FP/-500 LP) or hated (-9 FP/-800 LP). Even if this was by accident, it's just a matter of giving a better gift the following day to restore your point levels. The birthday multiplier works for bad gifts too, so be careful!
• Every day there is a 10% chance that you will lose 1 FP and 200 LP with a villager if you do NOT talk to the person on that day. This becomes apparent for Kappa if you run out of cucumbers, but this doesn't impact Kai while he is out of town. It will affect Kai when he is around and accessible to you during the summer.
• Participating in romantic or random events can cause a loss of FP/LP if you choose a poor response during the event, typically -10 FP and/or -2000 LP. Again, it's easy enough to recover by giving positive FP/LP gifts.

Unlike the GBA game, there isn't a way to throw anything onto the ground to decrease FP/LP. Littering isn't possible in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town.

Locked Access

Trying to go upstairs or beyond locked doors may trigger a response that blocks your access to those areas. Many of the villagers have areas that they don't feel comfortable allowing you to go into until you have raised your friendship with them. After all, a villager need to be assured that you don't plan to go snooping through their underwear drawer.

• Forge, locked room: Saibara has 8 friendship notes or more
• PoPoultry, second floor: Lillia has 8 friendship notes or more
• Yodel Ranch, second floor: Mugi has 4 friendship notes or more
• Inn, backroom door: Dudley has 8 friendship notes or more or you are married to Ran
• Inn, Ran's room: Ran has 8 friendship notes or more
• Inn, Dudley's room: Dudley has 8 friendship notes or more
• Adge Winery, second floor: Manna has 8 friendship notes or more
• Basil's house, second floor: Basil has 8 friendship notes or more
• General store, locked door: Sasha has 4 friendship notes or more
• Clinic, second floor: Doctor has 4 friendship notes or more
• Clinic, second floor, Doc's room: Doctor has 8 friendship notes or more
• Clinic, second floor, Elly's room: Elly has 3000 love points or more or if you are married to anyone else, Elly has 8 friendship notes or more

Front Doors

The front doors to villagers' houses will unlock earlier in the day as your relationships improve. They will also keep their front doors unlocked later in the evening too:

• 3 friendship notes or less: 10:00 am to 7:00 pm
• 4 to 7 friendship notes: 8:00 am to 8:00 pm
• 8 or more friendship notes: 6:00 am to 10:00 pm

There are exceptions when dealing with a few shopkeeper villagers:

• Doctor: His clinic doors are unlocked between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm when he had 7 or fewer friendship notes. At 8 or more notes, he'll keep his front door unlocked from 9:00 am until 7:00 pm. The clinic is still closed on Wednesdays, but you can visit him inside the clinic from 11:30 am until 1:00 pm, and then again from 4:30 pm until 10:00 pm.
• Jeff: At 3 or fewer notes, the front door of Jeff's general store is unlocked from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. Once you reach 4 music notes, his front door is unlocked from 8:00 am until 6:00 pm, though his shop is still 9-to-5. His shop is still closed on Tuesdays and Sundays.
• Lillia: PoPoultry can be accessed at 6:00 am until 7:00 am, but then she locks the door once Popuri leaves until 11:00 am. She will then lock her door at 8:00 pm.
• Manna: At 8 friendship notes or more, Manna will unlock the front door of the winery at 7:00 am, but her shop hours remain 10:00 am until Noon. Her front door remains unlocked until 10:00 pm.

The villagers whose friendship levels control the keys to their front doors are:

• Forge: Saibara
• PoPoultry: Popuri (Mondays through Saturdays) and Rick (Sundays)
• Inn: Dudley
• Adge Winery: Manna
• Basil's house: Anna
• Ellen's house: Ellen
• Mayor's house: Thomas
• General Store: Jeff
• Clinic: Doctor
• Church: Carter
• Zack's house: Zack

Gotts and Mugi don't appear to unlock their front doors at an earlier time based on your relationship status with them.