A majority of Fire Emblem: Three Houses takes place in the Garreg Mach Monastery in which you can do fun things like sing, cook, and receive items from your omnipresent overseers and their $15 toys that they scan into existence0151fun things like that.

Your time in the monastery is limited, and every single action that you do can have an important effect on your game. Today we’ll be going over the best use of your time in the monastery. Things like gift-giving, fishing, amiibo scanning, and gardening won’t be mentioned, as they don’t cost activity points and should be done regularly. Let’s jump into it.

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6 Tournaments

There really aren’t any bad ways to spend your time in the monastery, but tournaments are still one of the less useful options available to use up an activity point on. Depending on the type of tournament being held, you can choose your best-prepared student to go into the ring and duke it out with… sometimes a named student but usually just random soldiers.

Upon winning, you will be greeted with a reward, usually a certification seal and money. If you participate in a second round in the same month, you’ll only win the money. Usually, these are pretty easy competitions, but the rewards aren’t too difficult to come across or buy in normal gameplay, so tournaments aren’t as necessary as some of the other items on this list. Still, it is hilarious to watch a mounted unit bring their entire dragon into the training grounds simply to lance someone in the face atop it.

5 Tea Time

Tea time allows you to invite any student or faculty member of your choice to have a cup of tea with you, increasing your relationship in the process. During this tea time, you have to pick different topics of conversation that the other person will like, so choosing someone that you’re knowledgeable about is important.

If you do well enough, your reward is to… stare at them from whatever angle you want. (Uh... thank you?) They’ll also comment on you doing it, and the whole thing is just not a good time. This was likely a watered-down replacement for the petting minigame from Fates. Or it could have just been implemented to make us all feel uncomfortable. If so, they certainly succeeded.

Please stop looking at Flayn like that; she’s probably seven. Regardless, tea time is vital in raising the charm stat of both Byleth and the lucky observation victim, so choosing who you will partake in tea time with is very important.

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4 Cooking

Cooking, similarly to tea time, is an activity in which you choose one other student to partake. The two will cook any meal of your choice while chatting about the process. While this obviously increases their relationship with one another, the meal that you make will actually increase a stat for every unit during the month.

This depends on which meal you choose to cook. Ingredients for cooking are gathered from gardening, fishing, and buying other food products from the merchants. As long as you are regularly doing those things, you should have a wide array of options to choose from.

The best part of this activity is the fact that no one touches any cooking equipment at all. Through the entire process. They just stare at a pot that just kind of lights itself on fire. Nice.

3 Choir Practice

Choir practice in Three Houses has you choosing two students to sing to the heavens with. Nevermind that Byleth doesn’t even speak; they’re going to sing. This activity increases the relationship between everyone involved, while also increasing their faith stat.

As such, it is important to choose healers that you’d like to increase your relationship with to attend choir practice. The one line of dialogue that everyone has when they’re chosen does get a bit tiresome to listen to after a while though. Except for Manuela. Girl’s just singing her heart out and making sure that we know we aren’t very good. We stan.

While choir practice is obviously very important, it is a bit lower on the list due to the fact that it really only benefits faith-driven characters, and isn’t really useful to every participant.

2 Faculty Training

Faculty training is one of the most important activities at the monastery to participate in. Speaking to any faculty member at the monastery gives you the option to train in any of your stats that they have some sort of knowledge in.

This is essentially the same thing that you do for your students. Thus, it is an important part of growing Byleth’s skills in whichever stats you think would suit them well. This can also allow you to improve your relationship with the faculty member you are learning from, so make sure to choose characters that you would like to possibly recruit later on.

While this is certainly an important activity to use your free time on, just one session takes away an entire activity point, so make sure that you are getting the most out of faculty training as you can.

1 Dining

Dining is by far one of the most important ways to spend your activity points. Selecting the option to dine allows you to choose two people to share a meal with. Everyone involved increases their bonds with one another, and some students have special dialogue. Plus, if they are in your class, their motivation gets maxed out as long as you choose a meal that they will enjoy.

Dining allows you to completely restore motivation, which is essential to training your students, while bonding with two characters at the cost of only one activity point. Due to the number of benefits you get for the small cost, dining is the most useful monastery task that there is.

Plus, hearing Sylvain say “Yeah, you just get it, professor!” for the 80th time is just as rewarding as the first time. Who doesn’t love that wonderful womanizing man? Probably women actually, when you think about it.

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