In a bid to drive me to insanity my daughter bought me this game and insisted that I spend at least 20 hours playing it (the least I could do given her utter generosity). We found this game in the "survival" section while looking for something reasonably spooky to play.

This was of course far worse than I could have imagined.

After a very short period in the game I realised I was going to need to have a better goal than playing game if I wanted to fulfill my obligation to her and thus this guide was born. Interestingly a lot of the information the game gives you is immediately contradicted by the game itself, which annoyed me as I had to poke it with a stick just to find out which version was accurate.

I apologise if this guide doesn't contain the information you were looking for. I'll be honest... I wasn't terribly invested in doing a good job, it's just that noting stats kept me sane as I clocked up my hours...

The initial launch screen lets you pick a resolution, graphics quality and whether or not you want to run the game windowed. You can still hit alt-enter to move between windowed and full screen but the other options are not available from within the game.

Once in game you can use the settings to adjust the volume of sounds and music, change the GUI colour from pink (default) to blue or purple, and switch between english and polish language options.

Obviously though, by this point you are champing at the bit wanting some pony survival madness so go ahead and click play.

The default pony is usually a horrible mess of pastels and pink. You can fix this a little, but not much. You can choose between having a girl or boy pony - your pony will only be able to marry ponies of the opposite gender, so this may be important to you. You can also pick a default trade choosing between trader, hairdresser and waiter (although the icon shows chef, this is actually wrong).

Clicking the icon under the pony will take you to the customisation screen where you can be dazzled by the endless options. Well okay the six options. For skin, mane and tail you can select a colour from the slider bar, whilst for saddle, tattoo and glasses you can pick between two awful designs or skip using them altogether. I have made mine green. This is because my daughter likes green. Also I had been hoping for more zombies.

You can alter your appearance in game later, for a price, as well as being able to train for all the professions. In both cases more options are available than are available during character creation.

There are six scenarios to choose from, each of the first five have a set of goals for you to achieve. The Sixth is free play. When you have completed all the goals for a given scenario a screen will pop up congratulating you and offering you the choice between continuing to play
(effectively free play) and quitting. There is no way to move your pony to a different scenario without starting a new profile and the game doesn't prompt you to complete your goals or explain how to do anything so they are largely completely pointless except for two factors - the Tutorial Scenario restricts you to only being able to use the "Forest" farm area, whereas all the others allow you to choose between Forest, Lake and River, and the Couple Scenario means you start the game with two ponies instead of one (rather than having to acquire a second pony later as you can in all the other scenarios).

To see the difference between the various Farms, skip down to the Farm section.

There's actually a fair amount of information available from the GUI in this game.

Pressing Escape, or clicking the MENU button at any time will pause the game and offer you the chance to change your setting, save or quit your game and the help button brings up a list of shortcut keys.

On the top bar next to the menu button is a Weather indicator, followed by the date and time. Next you have the time settings which affect how fast time moves in the game. Playing at normal speed is recommended but if you are waiting for something to open or grow then you can always
bump it up to double or even triple speed. The trophy icon (shortcut A) shows you the trophies you have won from playing minigames. The bar graph icon (shortcut S) shows you statistics about your pony (more on that later) and the bullet points icon (shortcut P) shows you your current objectives, if you have any.



On the bottom you have a large circular pad in the bottom left corner divided into four quarters.

The top left is the map icon. Clicking this (or typing M) will show you a map of the area with enterable buildings marked by their icons and your position marked by a yellow dot. When you are on your farm this icon is replaced with the build icon (shortcut C) which gives you access to the many buildings and decorations that you can use to build your pony farm.

The top right is your backpack (shortcut B). This shows you all the things you are carrying divided into the categories food, toys, gifts and hygiene.

The bottom left is the Newspaper (shortcut N). This tells you about what's going on in the world today as well as theatre and cinema listings.

The bottom right is a Compass (shortcut Q). This allows you to quickly travel between the game's locations.

Next you will see three bars. These indicate your status in three attributes - Hunger, Energy and Look. If any of these bars fall to zero at any point your pony will become inflicted with a status, such as "hungry." If more than one fall to zero this will shift to "unhappy." While your pony has any status active it will not able to work or play mini games. Hunger can be refilled by eating food items such as crops and fruit, or eating out at the cafe and restaurant. Energy can be refilled by sleeping in your house. Look can be refilled by using the shower at your farm or any hygiene item (purchasable from the shop).

Next to the large picture of your pony you will see a smaller pink pony. This is the status indicator and it will change if your pony gains a status such as hungry or sick. Below that, if you are at your farm and own more than one pony will be a button allowing you to select which pony you want to control.

This section shows you a considerable amount of information about your pony. It also highlights some of the game's failings. *sigh*

The bars show your pony's stats. Many jobs have minimum stat requirements and these can be increased by participating in various activities around Pony World. All stats start at 100.

The pony tab tracks your basic information and can be handy to see more information about an inflicted status (such as "Headache"). The "contests" referenced on this tab are actually the minigames.

The work tab is decidedly less informative than it should be. Occupation lists all careers you are qualified to hold. Money per hour, time worked and work place refer only to the most recent job you have taken. Number of promotions is an overall number (2 are available per job).

The friends tab shows information about ponies you have talked to. Clicking on the names of the ponies will allow you to see their likes, dislikes and friendship levels towards you as well as other information such as their jobs or relationship status.

In every scenario other than the Tutorial you have a choice of three farms: Forest, Lake and River


The water features in the latter two are not customisable in any way.

This area represents your base of operations. There are a very small number of useful items and a large number of purely decorative ones. Presumably building your perfect pony farm is supposed to be a large amount of the charm of this game, but it really didn't interest me too much so the main points are as follows:

Items once placed CANNOT be moved although they can be destroyed recouping half their value.

Despite the helpful info screen talking about selecting colours by holding down your mouse button there is no sign of this feature - the different colours available appear to all be held individually in the build interface.

Useful Items:

Housing - Using a house/stable allows your pony to sleep, regaining energy.
Shower - Sending your pony to shower allows them to regain look.
Fields - These will grow a batch of edible crops every few days. They do not need to be replanted, watered or looked after in any way.
Fruit Trees - These produce a batch of edible fruit once a week.
Well - Increases the number of crops grown in each field by 2. This effect does not stack.
Compost Heap - This decreases the amount of time required for crops to grow. This effect does not stack (in fact I'm not entirely convinced it works at all).

In this area you can interact with other ponies (see socialising). That's it. Awesome, right?

In this section you can interact with other ponies (see socialising) and pick mushrooms.

Although there are many interesting looking mushrooms here you can only pick the boring brown ones. Whilst this may seem rather pointless it can be a life saver if you have no fields or fruit trees planted and you end up sick and broke as you can collect these and sell them off until you have enough money to heal your pony and get it earning again.

Zomg this area actually contains some content! Granted it's pretty awful content, but nevertheless it is the one time the game will not be attempting to make you proceed by staring at loading bars! There are five! Count 'em five whole mini games here!

Memo

This is basically pairs. You get a brief look at all the icons before you start and then it's up to you match up the pairs, sight unseen as fast as you can. The more time you have left at the end the greater the bonus to your score. You get 5 points per tile matched giving you 180 points for completing the board meaning you need to complete the board in 1 minute 50 seconds in order to get a gold trophy. If you fail to complete the board you get nothing.

Controls: Mouse

Trophies available:

• Bronze: 100-200 points
  
• Silver: 201-250 points
  
• Gold: 250+ points

Puzzle

This involves reforming a picture by swapping squares with the mouse. Due to the relatively low time limit on this combined with the slow swap speed and certain randomly difficult images it is probably the hardest of all the games to score a gold trophy in. The picture shown to the left on the intro screen will be the one you are rearranging, so it's worth taking a good look at where the various elements fit before you hit start. Whilst it explains that the scoring is one point per second remaining at the end you actually get the equivalent of 4 points per second meaning you have approximately 1:27 to complete it in order to get a gold trophy.

Control: Mouse

Trophies available:

• Bronze: 100-200 points
  
• Silver: 201-250 points
  
• Gold: 250+ points

Runner

In this game you have to navigate your way from one end of a course to the other without bumping into any platforms or spiky plants and without falling down any holes. The more treasure you collect the higher your score. If you bump into something you lose a life, all your points and restart at the beginning of the course. If you lose all three lives it's game over and you get nothing. Winged shoes make you go faster (very very briefly) while buckets of tar slow you down (equally briefly). Pink mushrooms can be jumped on and used as trampolines to access higher platforms. If you do make it to the end you are awarded a trophy based on your score and an amount of dollars equal to your score.

Controls: Press the up arrow key to jump. Press the down arrow key to duck.

Trophies available:

• Bronze: 100-200 points
  
• Silver: 201-250 points
  
• Gold: 250+ points

Maze

You are in a maze filled with coins and you are trying to escape. No idea why you have a time limit. There are no dangerous monsters stalking the maze only coins and small clocks that give you a little more time. Use the arrow keys to navigate the maze. The exit is at the bottom right (always) and points are awarded for time remaining and coins collected meaning you will want to balance your collecting vs your running screaming for the exit. Regardless of how cool your pony looks, you are always given a pink one with a blonde perm to play with in this mini game.

Controls: Arrow keys

Trophies available

• Bronze: 100-200 points
  
• Silver: 201-250 points
  
• Gold: 250+ points

Jewels

This is match three as you've never played it before! You remember all that stuff that made those match three games you played in the past interesting? None of that stuff is here! Clicking a gem and dragging it to an adjacent spot (slowly, this is a bit clunky) will swap them as long as it makes a match of three or more gems. If you run out of matches the board will automatically reset to give you new matches. You gain one additional point for each gem matched, so a basic match of three gems is 1+2+3=6, a match of 5 would be 1+2+3+4+5=15 and this continues if you manage to chain matches making long chains potentially very high scoring.

Controls: Mouse - click and drag

Trophies available:

• Bronze: 100-200 points
  
• Silver: 201-250 points
  
• Gold: 250+ points

This area is probably the most annoying in the game due to a problem with the game's UI. For some reason the UI in this area has decided that sticking to the bottom of your screen is far too weak a ploy and like its circus friends it leaps into the air, rendering portions of the screen inaccessible and/or unreadable.

There are three areas of interest here:

Circus
Open: 10am-8pm
Job opportunities: Tamer


Skatepark
Open: 8am-10pm
Job Opportunities: Trainer

Playground
Open: 8am-8pm
Job Opportunities: none

This is the main are of the game. You can interact with other ponies here as well as access learning, work and entertainment and the ability to buy and sell items.

Hospital (red plus sign)
Open: 24/7
Job Opportunities: Doctor

Pharmacy (pills)
Open: 24/7
Job Opportunities: none

Shop (bowl of apples)
Open: 24/7
Job Opportunities: Trader
Here you can buy and sell goods in all the categories in your backpack.
See Inventory Items

Police (sherrif star)
Open: 24/7
Job Opportunities: Policeman

Fire Brigade (fireman's helmet)
Open: 24/7
Job opportunities: Fireman

Cafe (coffee cup)
Open: 8am-10pm
Job opportunities: Waiter
Sells drinks which are used immediately on purchase.

Restaurant (burger)
Open: 10am-8pm
Job opportunities: Chef
Food can be bought here but is consumed immediately on purchase.
Ship appears to be a mistranslation of steak

University (mortarboard)
Open: 8am-10pm
Job opportunities: none
Here you can train for various careers. Courses have an up front cost and then require you to progress by spending time learning. Typically this will take multiple days as the university is only open for 14 hours a day and the lowest course requirement is 30 hours.


Makeover Studio (eye)
Open: 8am-6pm
Job opportunities: none
This area allows you to customise the look of your pony much as you did in character creation but with more options and a price tag.

Beauty Salon (Mirror)
Open: 10am-6pm
Job opportunities: Hairdresser

School (1+2)
Open: 8am-4pm
Job opportunities: Teacher

Newspaper (newspaper)
Open: 8am-6pm
Job Opportunities: none

Library (books) 9am-5pm
Job opportunities: none

Museum (building)
Open: 8am-2pm
Job opportunities: Custodian

Theatre (drama masks)
Open: 4pm-10pm
Job opportunities: Actor
Plays change every Tuesday.

Cinema (film strip)
Open: 10am-12pm
Job opportunities: none
Variety of films that change each monday.

Disco (notes)
Open: 8pm-5am
Job opportunities: none

Apparently there are limits to how much junk you can stuff in each section so this had to get a section on its own! This section covers items you can store in your inventory.

Food


Toys
Only the ball and fireworks have an animation, the others just appear as an icon in your pony's thought bubble when used. No stats are gained.

Gifts
Rings can only be given as a declaration of marriage.

Hygiene

This system is glitchy at best and downright broken at worst. As you work in a given career you will eventually earn a promotion due to your extensive experience in the job. At this point your pay goes up. However the game only stores this information on your current job so taking any other job will automatically reset your previous experience completely. On some occasions the game refuses to acknowledge your hours at all and it becomes impossible to be promoted. Nevertheless the following professions can be utilised:


You can learn new careers at the University in the City.

To begin with your friends roster will be blank, each time you talk to a pony and start a relationship with them they will be added to your friends tab (within statistics) so that you can see vital... well okay not so vital information about them and the state of your relationship.

When you click on a pony you will be offered the choice of "Talk" and "Don't Talk." Don't Talk simply exits the conversation. Talk brings you to the interaction menu that defaults to the talk section.

The talk section offers you a choice of topics on which to converse. As you gradually become more friendly with the other pony you will unlock the ability to interact with them, give them a gift and finally - if you are both single and of opposite genders - marry them.

Clicking on a friend's name in the statistics window brings up a new window showing what they look like, your friendship level and status and various information about them including their likes and dislikes. The base level for any friendship to start is 200. Positive actions will increase your friendship level, while negative ones will decrease this.

Talking gives you +/- 5-15 Friendship
Interacting gives you +/- 20-35 Friendship
Gifting an item gives you a + to friendship based on the value of the gift (See Inventory items) but you appear to only be able to do this once per pony.

How do I make money?

The easiest way to make money is to take a job at business than runs 24/7. Sleep and shower before you go and then eat something when you next to the portal. As long as none of your base stats are at 0% you will be able to start an eight hour shift. When it finishes, exit, eat another item and repeat. By the third time you will almost no energy left but you will still be able to get a third shift in before you go home, sleep, shower and start again. Because you are using a business that runs 24/7 it doesn't matter what time of day it is when you go to sleep, get up or start your shifts.

If the criteria to learn a decent job at university seem a bit expensive or time consuming you can always marry someone with a good job and then use them to work for your money. Every pony has a job which you can see in their stats window (Statistics -> Friends-> Their name), so simply find yourself a nice doctor and settle down!

24/7 jobs include Trader (good starter), Policeman, Fireman and Doctor.

How do I make babies?

...
Yes..
Well...
Although there definitely is a reference to this in the game, after extensive searching across all the versions of the games all I can work out is nobody knows and the game devs aren't telling.

Why do some places say I need to be an adult to go in?

No idea. Also, you don't need to be an adult. One of my test characters spawned at age 13 and had no problem getting in anywhere despite what the helpful pop ups said. Otoh Wikipedia reckons horses reach adulthood by age 5 so maybe that's it....

I'm broke and sick and I can't work to get money for a cure. Do I need to start over?

Nope. Simply head to the forest and you will be able to pick up mushrooms which you can sell at the shop until you have enough money for a cure. Once you are sorted, do yourself a favour and plant at least one field of stuff in your farm for future emergencies.

What's the cheapest way to raise my stats?

Knowledge - Go to the library and read books
Beauty - The best value is the lipsticks at $600 dollars each - pricey but they do do +30 each time
Sociability - Go to the theatre and watch plays costing $70
Condition - The best value for money are the Obstacle Course (Fire Brigade) and Self Defense (Police Station)