I Beat the Main Story, Put the Game Down, Then Picked It Right Back Up — A Full Endgame Guide

The credits rolled, I felt done, I was wrong

So here's the embarrassing truth: I beat Adora's final commission, watched the credits, closed my laptop, and went to bed thinking "yeah, that's a complete game." I even posted a screenshot of the 5-star Crowning Glory on my group chat like some kind of smug little champion. 👑

Two days later, a friend of mine — the kind of person who reads patch notes for fun — casually mentioned he was grinding Hard mode commissions for the Sucker for Punishment achievement. I blinked. Hard mode? There's a Hard mode? I had somehow missed an entire layer of the game while I was busy patting myself on the back.

I reinstalled the game that evening. That was 40 hours ago. My partner now refers to my screen time as "the second job." I have no regrets.

If you're in the same boat — finished the main story, wondering whether there's anything left — the answer is yes, a lot. Let me walk you through what's actually there so you don't have to discover it the dumb way I did.

Hard mode commissions: how to unlock and not cry

Here's the deal: once you've cleared the main story, a bunch of your old commissions get a Hard mode version. They're not new commissions, they're the same NPCs asking for the same garments, but with cranked-up requirements — higher quality minimums, tighter budgets, stricter style tag demands, the works.

Unlocking them was easier than I expected:

• Finish the main story. That's it. That's the gate. Once the credits roll, go back to your commission board and you'll see a little ⚙️ Hard badge on a chunk of previously-completed commissions.
• Not every commission has a Hard version. I spent way too long looking for one on the tutorial commission before realizing the early ones just don't have it. Look for the badge — if it's not there, it's not there.
• They pay better. Roughly 1.5x the gold of the normal version, which matters a lot when you're trying to finish buying out the shop upgrades.

The first Hard commission I tried was First Fitting Hard, because it was the first one I saw and I figured, "it's the tutorial commission's hard version, how bad can it be?" Reader, it was bad.

First Fitting Hard — the actual first boss of the endgame

Don't let the name fool you. "First Fitting" sounds cute and gentle. "First Fitting Hard" sounds like a joke. It is not a joke.

The normal First Fitting is the commission where the game teaches you how to sew a basic bodice. Quality minimum is like 60. Budget is generous. Style requirements are basically "wear clothes." Easy.

First Fitting Hard asks you for a quality of 88, on a budget that's been cut to 420 gold (down from 700 in normal), with three style tags required simultaneously — Practical, Cozy, and Refined, if I remember right. On a bodice. A single bodice. With three tags. For 88 quality. On a budget that won't even cover two units of mid-tier fabric.

My first attempt scored a 79. I stared at the screen for a solid minute. The tutorial commission had grown teeth.

The trick that finally clicked for me: don't try to max all three tags. You only need to hit the minimum threshold on each. Linen Natural covers Practical by itself. Cotton Sage gets Cozy up with one unit. Then a tiny sliver of Silk Cream — like, the smallest amount the game will let you allocate — pushes Refined just past the line. Save your money on the other two fabrics.

I finished that commission in 90 quality and 395 gold spent. I actually fist-pumped at my desk. For a bodice. The tutorial bodice. The endgame has officially broken me.

The 12 achievements, ranked by pain

Once Hard mode was on my radar, I started poking around the achievements list and realized I'd only unlocked maybe 5 of the 12 on my main story playthrough. The other 7 were all hiding behind post-game content I hadn't touched.

Here's my honest pain-ranking of all 12, from "you'll get this by accident" to "this one made me question my hobby":

Sucker for Punishment, Master Designer, Legendary Tailor — the big three

Sucker for Punishment — complete every Hard commission

Name is accurate. I cannot stress enough how much this achievement lives up to its name. There are 14 Hard mode commissions in total, and they do not get easier as you go — if anything, the late ones are nastier than the early ones because the budgets get meaner while the quality minimums climb past 90.

Took me roughly 22 hours of dedicated grinding, spread over three weeks. I kept a spreadsheet. Yes, I'm that person now. The two that almost broke me were Midnight Gala Hard (quality 96, four style tags, 580 gold budget — brutal) and Royal Wedding Hard (quality 94, two color requirements, budget so tight I had to use the absolute cheapest fabrics and pray).

My advice: do them in order of difficulty, not in order of appearance. The commission board doesn't sort them by pain level. I made the mistake of going top-to-bottom and hit Royal Wedding Hard third, which demolished my confidence for a week. Do the ones that look doable first, build your fabric stockpile, then tackle the monsters.

Legendary Tailor — 5-star a Hard commission

This one's sneakier than it sounds. "5-star a Hard commission" doesn't specify which one, so you'd think you could pick an easy one. The catch: the easiest Hard commissions still want quality in the high 80s, and 5-starring means hitting something like 95+ on a commission with stripped-down budget and stricter tags.

I got mine on Garden Party Gown Hard after maybe four attempts. Quality 96, three style tags, budget was 510 gold. Took me about 90 minutes of tweaking proportions. Compared to Sucker for Punishment, this one's a cakewalk — but it's the gateway drug. Once you 5-star your first Hard commission, you start wondering if you can 5-star all of them. That way lies Master Designer.

Master Designer — 5-star everything, including Hard mode

The achievement I'm proudest of and also the one that made my partner ask if I was okay. 😅

To be clear: this is 5-starring every single commission in the game, normal and Hard. That's somewhere around 40+ commissions at perfect rating. Some of them you'll already have from your main story run. The Hard ones, though... the Hard ones are the work.

I clocked roughly 35 hours on Master Designer alone, on top of the 22 for Sucker for Punishment. There's overlap — once you 5-star a Hard commission, it counts for both — but the rest of the normal commissions you skipped past at 4 stars during the story need to be revisited and perfected too. I'd rushed through a bunch of early ones at 4 stars just to progress, and going back to nail them all at 5 was its own little project.

If you're going for this, my honest advice is to start keeping notes on which commissions you've 5-starred the moment you start the post-game. I didn't. I wasted probably 3 hours just trying to remember which ones I still needed.

Challenge runs: all 5-star, speedrun, budget

Once the achievements are mostly done, the endgame kind of turns into a self-imposed challenge zone. The game stops giving you explicit goals and you start making your own. Here are the three I had the most fun with:

All 5-star run

Basically the Master Designer grind, but framed differently — instead of "I need this achievement," it becomes "I want every commission in my book to glow gold." Weirdly motivating. I recommend doing this one before Master Designer if you can, because it makes the achievement feel like a natural conclusion rather than a chore.

Speedrun challenge (Speed Tailor-adjacent)

Speed Tailor only asks for one commission in a single in-game day. The fun version is: how many can you do? My personal best is 4 commissions in one day, all 5-star. Required max shop efficiency upgrades, pre-bought fabric stockpiles, and knowing the combos cold. Felt like a cooking show. 10/10 would recommend.

Budget极限 (Budget Baron and beyond)

Budget Baron wants you to finish a commission under 60% of budget. The fun version is: how low can you go? I got Garden Party Gown down to 41% of budget using the absolute cheapest fabric combo that still hit minimum quality. It looked like garbage. The client loved it. I felt like a war criminal. 🤑

If you want help planning budget runs, seriously — use the fabric calculator. I stubbornly did my first budget run by hand and spent 20 minutes on math I could've done in 30 seconds.

Fabric Collector — every fabric in the game

This one's not hard, it's just expensive. There are 24 fabrics in the game, and several of them only unlock after specific milestones — finishing the main story, hitting certain shop upgrade tiers, or completing specific Hard commissions.

The expensive ones:

• Silk Gold — 320 gold per unit. You need it for Crowning Glory and half the Hard commissions. Budget accordingly.
• Velvet Black — 280 gold per unit. Looks gorgeous. Almost never the right call. Buy one for the achievement, never touch it again.
• Brocade Royal — 300 gold per unit. The late-game showpiece fabric. Worth it for the style tags it carries.

Total cost to buy at least one of every fabric for the achievement: roughly 3,400 gold, give or take. That's a lot of normal commissions, or a much smaller number of Hard ones. This is why I grinded Hard mode first — the 1.5x payout makes the fabric collection grind bearable.

Full shop upgrades and how much it costs

The shop has 5 upgrade tracks: Workspace (more concurrent commissions), Storage (bigger fabric stockpile), Display (better walk-in commissions), Efficiency (faster sewing), and Reputation (better client pool).

Each track has 5 tiers. Fully upgrading everything costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 gold. Yes, twelve thousand. I bought the last upgrade — Reputation tier 5 — at around the 38-hour mark of my post-game grind, and the gold stack in my inventory finally stopped being a source of stress.

My recommended priority order, in case you're wondering what to pour gold into first:

1. Workspace tier 2-3 — being able to juggle more commissions at once is the single biggest gold-per-hour boost in the game.
2. Efficiency tier 2-3 — faster sewing means more commissions per day, which means more gold per day. Compound interest, but for sewing.
3. Storage tier 2 — lets you bulk-buy fabric when you have spare gold, so you're not running to the shop mid-commission.
4. Display and Reputation — nice to have, not urgent. The walk-in commissions get better, but you'll be living off Hard mode payouts anyway.

My 40-hour post-credits grind (the honest version)

People keep asking me how long the endgame takes. The honest answer: about 40 hours, if you're going for all 12 achievements. Here's roughly how mine broke down:

• First Fitting Hard + first 3 Hard commissions: ~6 hours. Learning curve.
• Remaining Hard commissions (Sucker for Punishment): ~16 hours. The meat of it.
• Master Designer cleanup (5-starring everything): ~12 hours, partially overlapping with Sucker for Punishment.
• Fabric Collector + shop upgrades grind: ~5 hours of gold-farming.
• Miscellaneous achievements (Budget Baron, Speed Tailor, Thread Master, etc.): ~3 hours.

Was it worth it? Honestly, yes. The endgame of Dressmaker is where the actual tailoring skill gets tested. The main story teaches you the mechanics, but the Hard mode commissions are what make you good. By the time I 5-starred Royal Wedding Hard — quality 94, two color requirements, on a budget that felt like a personal insult — I understood fabrics and style tags in a way I never did during the story.

Also, there's something deeply satisfying about watching the achievement list fill in. I screenshotted the final Master Designer popup. Sent it to the same group chat where I'd smugly posted my Crowning Glory 5-star months earlier. The friend who'd told me about Hard mode replied with a single emoji: 🫡. Felt earned.

So if you're hovering over the uninstall button after the credits, maybe don't. The real game is just starting. 🧵✨