Apologies for my asking, but is there any wiggle room at all to get to this point naturally? It just feels like maybe there needs to be some tuning if I can permanently brick my run with multiple save files because I didn't know I had to be a certain level to progress. I cannot tell you how much that took the wind out of my sails when I basically found out I had to restart the ENTIRE GAME in order to play it "right".
Hello truestsciences, no worries in asking, I'm here to help
First, you don't have to play through the entire game, you can simply select new game, and then select the last option, which will send you to the end of the 2nd month at lvl 9. If it's your first time playing and you fail at the 3rd month at your first try, you can select this option to start the month from scratch, avoiding going through the entire game
And yes, there's wiggle room, in my previous screenshot I reached lvl 12 during the 3rd week. that leaves a week and a half to meet the quota, if you have full SELL stat then you'd meet the quota by going to sell twice, just 2 days. What you should do to get the best the result is to search and sell when your stats are full. I've added more tips here
If having to level up is not clear, then what I can do is add more dialogue which emphasizes that you have to but not in a hand-holding way, Senna mentions that you'd have to work more (the game over help corner mentions that as well) but I can make her remind you that more frequently
The issue with using the premade saves from New Game is that all of the Push into Corner events are already done, and that's something I wanted to experience because I'm a new player, not a returning one. Also (and I don't know if this is a mechanic I'm not understanding) the exp requirements between your saves and a fresh save seem completely different?
In your provided save from New Game, you need 61 total XP to get from lv9 to Lv10. In this screenshot of a game I played from scratch, I need double that amount of XP just to go from lv8 to lv9. It was essentially impossible to achieve the threshold needed to trigger the necessary event in Month 3.
Your save:
Fresh file:
So yeah, it's possible to beat Month 3 and I HAVE beaten it using the New Game save, but I wanted to do it from scratch. Since I can't find a way to skip dialogue on the android version, I don't even know if I wanna try a third time, either.