What to do With Your Free Time in Fire Emblem: Three Houses
By Andrew Lin
What to do with your free time in Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a common question for beginners.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses features a new management mechanic that seems rather daunting the first time you experience it. There are a menagerie of activities to take part in, and only a limited amount of time you can partake. Here's a quick primer on how to spend your free time in Three Houses.
Free Time in Fire Emblem
At the end of every calendar week in-game on Sunday, you'll have a day to yourself for some free time. There are four options to pick from: Explore, Seminar, Battle and Rest. Each one allows you to do different things that can increase your or your students' stats. Which one should you be doing? Like everything in life, balance is key.
Explore
Explore has you free roam the Monastery, and is the primary way for you to increase your Support with your students. Here, you can do quests, fish, garden, find lost items and take part in extra-curricular activities. Merchants will restock and new quests will open up so you should explore at least once a month.
The catch is, you can only do so many activities as you have Activity Points for. This will go up with your Professor Level, which you'll earn as you do various tasks.
The best way to up your Professor Level is to fish and garden as often as possible. These don't actually cost Activity Points, so be sure to get your hands on fishing bait and seeds as you see them appear in shops.
To really take advantage of fishing, you can wait to Explore on a day that has a fishing event. On the Fish Festival, one bait will be able to catch multiple fish and on Rare Fish events you can catch (appropriately) rare fish that fetch a high price when you sell them.
Returning lost items to their owner will increase your Support with that character, and giving characters Gifts will increase not only Support but also Motivation. When you teach during the weak, you can only give your students so many lessons as their motivation allows. It's important to keep this value up to maximize your teaching effectiveness.
The other activities will cost points, so be sure to do the ones that are free first so you can maximize on your time later.
Seminar
In our experience, Seminar is the worst of the four options. It increases your stats and the motivation of up to six other characters, but you could easily just do this faster by faculty or advanced training and giving gifts during Explore. You can't really choose which six characters partake in the seminar and you only get to do one, so this option is a little less useful than the rest.
Battle
Battle is where you'll partake in Paralogues, and has its own set of Activity Points. Some of the Paralogues won't require points, so be sure to do them first. When you deplete your Activity Points here, the day will end and you'll move on to the next week.
Battle is useful to leveling up your characters and their stats. You'll also get loot for completing them, so it's good to get some practical experience for your students in addition to their studies. At the end of a battle, there will be an MVP who will have increased Motivation for the week. If your player character is the MVP, all of your students will have increased motivation.
Rest
The value of Rest wasn't obvious the first time we went through the game. While Rest seems pretty bad, it will restore the durability of your Sword of the Creator by five points and raise motivation for all of your characters.
Controversially, I think this option is better than Seminar. It's really useful if you like to micromanage your characters, as you have more control over the motivation levels. If you're trying to keep your team balanced, then resting will be more reliable than seminars. Of course, resting gets better the more characters you have.
However, you should only really Rest if you've run out of quests for Explore and Paralogues in Battle, as those options will also increase Motivation.
How you choose to spend your free time will vary depending on your play style. Always be sure to take the free costed activities first to up your Professor Level so you can have enough time to do everything else you want.
Photo courtesy of INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS/Nintendo.