Living the Dream beginner’s tricks and tips to help you get started

If you’re playing Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, consider yourself blessed to be playing one of the most delightful games on the planet. While you are acting as a god for your Miis and the chaos they unleash upon your island isn’t 100% in your control, there are a few things you can do to make sure your ruling is efficient and fun.

Below, we list nine beginner’s tips for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream that’ll be useful for players of the 2014 Nintendo 3DS game and new folks looking to rule over the Miis on this lovely island.

Make sure you set up your Miis’ relationships properly

When making your Miis, you can set their sexualities, pronouns, and if they’re related to anyone else on the island. The latter is particularly useful if you’re trying to avoid any Miis getting together romantically. Setting your Miis as relatives will avoid this situation altogether, so make use of this feature to avoid any awkward situations.

Your custom phrases and items will appear everywhere

Your Miis will ask you to make new foods, pets, and conversation topics, but note that once you make something, it’ll start appearing around the island in various forms. The whacky items you designed will show up in quiz games and Miis will use learned phrases as conversation topics, even in ways you don’t expect. For example, the first custom food I made as part of the tutorial was a cake with a lobster and two Mii heads on it, titled “lobsta cake.” I made it pretty thoughtlessly, but now it won’t stop showing up in various situations. Oops.

You can always get rid of the stuff you added to the island by deleting it, either in Palette House or the “island lingo” section of the “island info” depending on what you’re trying to delete.

Buy what you want or else it’ll be gone

If you see food or clothes you like, you should buy it before the day changes, as the shop will rotate out daily. Once you get a clothing or food item, you’ll be able to buy it again whenever you want, so make sure to buy at least one of each item every day to unlock it all. (You can do this with clothes too, but this can get expensive, as outfits have color variations and can generally just be pricey.)

Make sure to really look at the food and treasures you get

Your Miis will frequently ask you to play games with them, presenting you with pixel images or silhouettes of food or treasure items you procure as you play. You’ll need to look at these shadows and pixels to guess what the items are, but early on, these quizzes are hard, simply because you have no idea what you could be looking at. Is that… a pixel dinosaur? Or a cabbage? What is that? As you unlock more items, really take a look at them and remember what they look like. These quizzes will get easier as you play the game more, just because you’ll be familiar with what the items in the game look like.

All the practice in the world still makes it hard to figure out what dishes are being shown in “shadow quizzes” since the silhouettes for food are nearly all… round plates.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

As you level up your fountain with warm fuzzies earned from pleasing your Miis, you’ll unlock more features. Each level up rewards you with one wish, but you don’t have to spend them immediately. You can hold on to wishes to spend them on features you’ll unlock later on, too.

Travel tickets are among the most valuable items, since they can cheer up depressed Miis instantly, and they can be bought repeatedly, so you may want to hold on to a spare wish or two to cheer up your Miis in a pinch.

Give your Miis items beyond their level-up rewards

Fans of the Nintendo 3DS Tomodachi Life game may remember the various gifts you can give your residents as level-up rewards. These varied from pets to sports equipment to technology they can interact with. While there are still gifts like this, you can also give your Miis treasure that you’ve won from mini-games — and they’ll interact with and use that treasure! Video games, movies, CDs, and pets have all been turned into “treasure” items you can also sell, rather than items you have to level-up your Miis to unlock. You can also still give them the other, more bizarre treasures and see them interact with those, too.

Keep an eye on your Miis, even if they don’t need help

You’ll spend a lot of your time tending to your Miis when they have issues. Some may want to play games with you, or others may just be hungry. When you’re not solving these problems, you should keep an eye on your Miis, as some fun interactions will happen randomly as they walk around the island and interact with other Miis.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Don’t forget to introduce your new Miis to other Miis

If you’re anything like me and you end up making a ton of new Miis in quick succession, don’t forget to actually introduce these Miis and get them acquainted with each other. After you make your army, you may realize there’s a Mii or two just wandering around the island, wistfully watching everyone else have fun… How sad!

Need inspiration? Take a look at other people’s Miis

If you’re trying to make a character, but they’re not coming out quite right, there’s a solution for this. X user trafficlunar has already made a website for people to share their Miis: TomodachiShare. You can search Miis and take a look at the settings other players used to make their masterpieces. There’s no way to directly import Miis, but you can copy them pretty closely using this website.