Little Dragons Café beginner’s guide: Getting started in this colorful, creative world

Little Dragons Café, the latest hybrid of cute farming mechanics and adventuring, is finally available on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. Luckily, it’s just as adorable as you’ve been hoping. The premise is simple: A pair of twins who work under their mother at the family cafe must end up fending for themselves when their mother falls ill.

Little Dragons Café, the latest hybrid of cute farming mechanics and adventuring, is finally available on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. Luckily, it’s just as adorable as you’ve been hoping. The premise is simple: A pair of twins who work under their mother at the family cafe must end up fending for themselves when their mother falls ill.

When a curious old man comes to them with a special delivery and informs them that they must raise a dragon to ensure her life is saved, you have to help them get the cafe in tip-top shape, all while working to figure out how to save their mom.

It’s a fairly simple game to get the hang of, but there are definitely a few things you should know before diving into it. Take some time to commit these tips to memory before setting out on a journey to bring the twins’ mom back to the land of the living, so to speak.

Always keep an eye out for new ingredients, resources, and recipes

While you’re still getting your bearings at the beginning of the game, make sure you take full advantage out of every ingredient and resource you can find in your surroundings. There’s a wide variety of different items, namely items that will help you craft various recipes, that you can find simply by exiting the cafe and looking around your immediate location.

Keep an eye out for any ingredients you can, go fishing whenever possible, and work to expand your repertoire of recipes. These are the basic building blocks you need to keep your customers happy and are tied to various missions. Be resourceful, collect what you can, and keep at it.

Take good care of your dragon

The egg that hatches into your baby dragon is the crux of how you’re going to help the twins’ mother wake up, after all. Don’t neglect it and get too far into the game’s various other mechanics. It’ll continue to grow as you play through sections of the game, and it’ll need your help to do that.

Keep in mind that you need to feed it delicious food items to help it change color and grow even stronger. You can check out the menu to see what particular item will turn it which color if you don’t just want to be surprised, but keep this important mechanic in mind.

Take cooking seriously

Your café is an extremely important part of the overall game, and you’ll have to tend to various activities while completing other objectives. Much of the time, this includes whipping up dishes on your own. When you go to make one from the ingredients on hand, you’ll be taken into a quick mini-game. You can’t just phone this in, because the worse you perform, the worse your dish will be.

You’ll have to approach cooking with the same kind of panache as you do everything else in the game, including playing along to the beat. The cooking mini-game is integral to perfecting this, so make sure you spend some time spiffing up your rhythm and understanding how things work. Each dish has a special song that plays while you press directional buttons along to the beat, and if you do poorly, you’ll end up creating subpar dishes. That certainly isn’t going to fast-track you to success, so don’t treat cooking as just a hassle that you have to deal with.

Always seek out the best ingredients possible

If you want to make the most out of the recipes you find during your travels, you need to get the freshest and best ingredients to create them. Each ingredient has its own rarity, which you can refer to when cooking up something new and delicious.

You can find potential caches of items out in the world by looking for small areas denoted by butterflies or other flying creatures. You can gather them by heading over and pressing the corresponding button. Keep on the lookout for rocks, alcoves, bushes, and various other areas.

You can also fish at different fishing spots, or head to the Garden. Much of your harvesting will be done here, and you can use this strategy to continue to harvest items you’ve used in the past. The rarer your ingredients, the better your recipe. The better your recipe, the higher your customers’ satisfaction level. You’ll also ensure your restaurant remains the talk of the town, which is certainly something you want to shoot for. 

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