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Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town water pump guide

Get rid of those muddy pond eyesores on your farm

A farmer stands next to several water pumps that are sucking dirty water out of a pond Image: Marvelous/Xseed Games via Polygon
Julia Lee (she/her) is a guides producer, writing guides for games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Genshin Impact. She helped launch the Rift Herald in 2016.

Your farm in Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town will have large, muddy ponds as you expand it. To drain these ponds, you need a water pump, which you can set at the edge of the pond. While the game will tell you this when you first see one of the dirty ponds, it won’t tell you how to get one.

In this Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town guide, we’ll teach you the requirements for making a water pump, as well as how to find the materials you’ll need, like coal. You’ll need water pumps to clean out dirty ponds, get treasure, and make your farm look pristine.

To get a water pump, you need your draining to be at least level 5, and then you can craft it using 10 bricks and five silver ingots. Once it’s built, you can place it on the square spots at the edge of the ponds. It costs one refined coal per day to fuel it, and it can store up to five refined coal.

You can find coal in mines, and then craft it into refined coal. We found a few coal from the mineral deposits in the wall, but it seems to be a scarce resource. After selling one coal using the shipping container, the General Store began selling them for 80 gold each. If you’re really lacking coal to fuel your water pumps, you can score some there.

A farmer stands with a hammer in her hand, looking at shining ore pouring out of a mine wall
Coal can be found in mineral deposits like this
Image: Marvelous/Xseed Games via Polygon

Based on our testing, it took about eight days for one water pump to drain the pond in the second area of the farm. It goes much faster with more water pumps, but silver ingots are a bit scarce early in Pioneers of Olive Town, so it’s worth just staying patient and letting it drain out over time.

The ponds do unfortunately get dirty again after several days, so get ready to make several water pumps and leave them at your various ponds.

After draining the ponds, you’ll receive some treasure. Take it to the Museum to be examined. The pond will also fill back up with clean, blue water before getting dirty again a few days later. You can keep draining and collecting more treasure.

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