Walkthrough: the order the year opens up
Follow the school year, not a checklist: enrol at the Etchery, learn the Song of Tilling in your first class, then let spring, summer, fall and winter bring the festivals and quest chains. Nothing in the opening act is timed, and the music mini-game is optional.
Songs of Glimmerwick opens up in a fixed order: one school year, four seasons, and a handful of systems that arrive with them. This page is that order — what unlocks, roughly when, and what the game never tells you out loud. There is no room-by-room route here, on purpose.
Quick answer
Follow the school year, not a checklist. You enrol at the Etchery, learn the Song of Tilling in your first class, and the plot then moves through spring, summer, fall and winter — each season bringing its own festivals and quest chains. The free demo is the first few hours of the same order, so everything here applies to it too.
How the year is ordered
The achievement list is the clearest map the game publishes, because every season has its own completion achievement and the launch-day unlock rates fall in a line: Spring 3.8%, then Summer 1.9%, Fall 1.6% and Winter 1.3%. Players who reached summer nearly all started in spring, so the seasons are sequential, and winter closes the story year.
What unlocks, and roughly when
| Milestone | When | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Enrol at the Etchery | Opening minutes | Achievement list |
| Song of Tilling | Your first class | Developer patch notes |
| Flute, map and pick-up controls | From the start | Store page, developer tips |
| Selling at the garden well, dorm storage | First week | Player reports |
| Seaflower Festival flower contest | Spring | Achievement list |
| Shop selling twigs and cut grass | Summer onward | Player reports |
| Exam day and the winter band concert | Winter | Patch 1.01 notes |
| "Trained Witch" — finish the year | Endgame | Achievement list |
Tools and side activities
| Unlock | What it opens | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Scythe | Cutting grass | The market stall that sells seeds — player reports |
| Axe | Felling trees for twigs | Player reports |
| Pickaxe | Mining cobblestone paths | Patch 1.01 (October 2) |
| Fishing rod | Fishing | Player reports — the fishing page has the loop |
| Band, shell diving, Green Sprites trips | The extra-curricular side of the year | Store description |
Where a tool is sold is the part the game keeps quiet about, and the developers have never published a vendor list — the Steam boards answer it thread by thread. We would rather leave a gap here than guess a shop.
What this page will not do
No treasure map of every room: the studio built Glimmerwick to be explored, and a step-by-step route through each interior would spoil the thing the game does best. Where one specific puzzle genuinely stops people — the ghost-treasure riddle is the current example — it is written up on the achievements page, with the player reports flagged as player reports.
If you are stuck right now
- A tool went missing. Press Spacebar to pick up whatever is nearest, the developers' own answer to a watering can that dropped behind the pond or the well. Update 1.03 (October 7, 2026) also made Kavita start selling replacement cans.
- A scene will not start. Save and reload. Patches 1.01 to 1.03 fixed a run of scene soft-locks, from the dorm to the bathhouse during Nessa's wake to a gem conflict with Amka's tall table.
- You want the basics first. The beginner tips page covers the scythe, twigs, blueberries and where to bake.
Where to go next
- Spells and songs — how the song system works and the order songs arrive
- Fishing — the rod, the timing and the minigame
- Achievements — the full list, and what the rates say about how long the year takes
