The newest entry in the Fire Emblem series, Three Houses, has Byleth teaching his/her students (the player's units) the ins and outs of battle in a huge and prestigious academy. Every Sunday, you get the chance to explore the monastery and engage in a variety of activities that can boost skills and relationships (and recruit cool Black Eagles members for all you hipsters who pretended they weren’t the best house to join).
Today, we’re going to be discussing ten different activities to use your activity points on in the monastery, some of which might come as a surprise to you. Let’s jump right into it.
10 Receive Faculty Training
While Byleth is in charge of training their students, who’s going to teach Byleth? That’s where the rest of the faculty comes in.
Depending on which faculty member you go to, they can each help Byleth grow in a certain stat, depending on how you’d like to develop the player character (pssst, Byleth has a budding faith talent).
9 Upgrade The Statues
One less noticeable activity in the monastery is actually upgrading religious statues in the monastery. You use renown to do this, and every single upgrade that you give the statues gives you some sort of a buff.
This could be a higher point yield during instruction, or a 5% increase in EXP during battle. No matter the buff, fixing up these statues will surely make your journey through Three Houses an easier one. Make sure you don't forget about these statues, tucked away in the top corner of the cathedral.
8 Get New Merchants
Early into the game, there is a side mission that actually allows you to gain two new merchants that can be interacted with in the marketplace. This mission isn't pointed out in any significant way, and thus, missing it means that you lose the ability to buy important items such as gifts, ingredients, seeds, tea and more.
All of these can be great ways to increase your relationships with students and faculty quickly, so don't miss out on grabbing these two extra merchants.
7 Cook Food
One fun way to spend your time is cooking with a student or faculty member of your choice... while literally not one of the two touches the pan at all. Master chefs over here.
While the cooking activity does use up some items as ingredients, it’s a good way to get some one-on-one time in and increase your support ranking with the character you choose to cook with. Depending on the dish you make, your units will gain a stat boost in a particular area for the rest of the month, too, which makes cooking a great use of your time.
6 Enter Competitions
Do you know what a good teacher does? Force their students to get stabbed repeatedly with a lance for money! Depending on the month, there will be a competition being hosted in the training grounds.
These competitions will be based on a random weapon type, and if your chosen student can manage to best everyone else in the tournament-style competition, you'll win a prize of both cash and an item. Heck, it's totally fine, they've got to be trained in combat somehow.
5 Garden
Gardening is a great use of your time on Sundays, specifically because it doesn’t use up any of your precious activity points! Every week you have the ability to go to the greenhouse and plant any of the seeds you have collected (which you can find incredibly easily), cultivate them and pick up the harvest next week.
These seeds grow into both ingredients to cook and flowers to gift to people that like them. Considering it takes up no activity points, it’s a waste to not garden every free week you have.
4 Choir Practice
Despite the fact that Byleth literally never speaks ever, they sure do love to sing their little heart out (apparently). After choosing two companions to sing with during choir practice, your faith stat increases, along with your support ranking with the two.
This can certainly be useful if you're trying to marry one of the healers, as you'll increase their important stat while growing closer to them. Even if you don't have any romantic intent in mind, taking the time to do this will pay dividends in later, tougher missions.
3 Tea Time
Having tea time with someone you’re trying to increase your support rank with (unless they decline because they don’t like having friends) is a good way to spend your time in the monastery. After completing the quest to unlock this feature, you can ask various characters to join you in tea time.
Make sure you know a good bit about their personality traits, though, as you’ll have to choose conversation topics that they would like to talk about during the tea time. If you choose wrong they just stare at each other for an uncomfortably long amount of time. It's super awkward.
2 View Support Conversations
One thing that can only be done while in the monastery is watching support conversations between your units. While this is obviously beneficial gameplay-wise, the conversations themselves are usually fun and interesting, allowing you to gain some insight into your units and how they think.
There’s also a handful of them who try to seduce literally everyone that they talk to ever, so that’s never a bad time to watch. Then there’s Bernadetta. A healthy mix of screaming and running away. Fun.
1 Use Amiibo
Those things you spent $200 on that take up far too much of your living space… remember those? You can scan those into Three Houses to receive a variety of different items that can benefit you in a few different ways.
Of course, you get better items if you use an amiibo featuring a Fire Emblem character. While this is literally the only way amiibo are ever used in games any more, the fact that the location you have to visit to scan them is called the Amiibo Gazebo is probably the best thing that has ever been a thing ever in all of ever. Yes.