Cave Patrol
| Cave Patrol | |
|---|---|
| Type | Special Order |
| Board | Special Orders board |
| Giver | Clint |
| Time Limit | 7 days |
| Repeatable | Yes |
Clint takes a dim view of what lives in the caves and offers a bounty on one kind of it. The work is ordinary mining with a sword in hand, which makes this the friendliest notice on the town board for a farm that is already digging for ore. It pays a flat fee every time it runs, and the first run also brings the Geode Crusher recipe, which ends the daily queue at the blacksmith's counter. Which creature Clint names decides whether the week is a stroll or a slog, because the four live at very different depths. Accepted early in the week with a decent sword, it rarely needs more than two or three trips underground.
The board reads: The number of [Monster] in the local caves have made mining dangerous... for other people, not me! There's good money for anyone willing to slay 50 of them. -Clint
Requirements
Clint picks the quarry and the other three creatures do nothing for the tally. Grubs are the kindest draw by a wide margin, clustered on shallow floors that a first-year farm can reach before lunch. Bats hang in the floors below those and again much deeper, where the frozen band holds Frost Bats and the hot floors hold Lava Bats. Dust Sprites fill the frozen middle of The Mines in loose packs, which is why that stretch doubles as the valley's coal seam. Skeletons sit just above the bottom of the shaft, carry far more health than the rest and throw bones from across the room, so a skeleton bounty wants real armour, rings and cooked food behind it.
A grub bounty has a catch of its own. A grub that has been hurt but not finished turns a blue green colour, becomes immune to damage and emerges from its cocoon as a Cave Fly, which is no use to Clint at all. Pinning grubs against a wall or into a corner and killing them outright is the whole technique.
Walking out to the lift and back in rebuilds every floor, so one good floor can be mined again and again rather than hunting deeper and deeper for stragglers. Dust Sprites and bats respond especially well to that loop, since both appear in numbers rather than singly.
The order asks for one of these, and the board picks which.
| Item | Image | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Bat | - | 50 |
| Dust Sprite | 
|
50 |
| Skeleton | 
|
50 |
| Grub | 
|
50 |
Rewards
The flat fee is paid in full on every successful run, which makes this one of the few notices still worth a week of effort once the farm is comfortable. The letter that follows later runs carries bombs or a cooked meal, and the bombs are the more useful of the two for anyone heading back down.
The Geode Crusher is the real reason to finish it once. Geodes otherwise have to be carried to the blacksmith and opened one a day for a fee, which turns a bag of them into a fortnight of errands. A crusher on the farm works through the bag in an hour apiece and keeps the fee. It handles the ordinary geodes, the magma and frozen kinds and omni geodes, which covers almost everything the mines drop; artifact troves, mystery boxes and golden coconuts still want the blacksmith or a different machine. For a farm chasing the museum's collection, that machine quietly removes the slowest step in the whole project.
Finishing the order pays out all of this.
| Reward | Image |
|---|---|
| 6,000g (each time) | - |
| Geode Crusher recipe | 
|
| After the first time: Letter with 10 Cherry Bombs, 5 Bombs, or 3 Eggplant Parmesan | 
|
Strategy
The depth that Clint names should decide the week's route. For grubs, a shallow run with the lift at floor twenty and a quick exit each time is enough. For dust sprites or bats, the frozen floors with a weapon that swings wide, since both come in from several directions at once and a sword covers a broader arc than a club or a dagger. For skeletons, bring food, go down by lift to the deepest unlocked level and clear in short trips rather than one long one.
Monster Musk, the recipe the Wizard hands over for his prismatic order, draws extra creatures out of hiding for ten minutes at a time and turns a thin floor into a busy one. Bombs help on the frozen floors too, since a bomb that breaks a cluster of rocks often leaves a pack of dust sprites in the open.
The usual way this one fails is picking it up late. The days are counted from the Monday the notice appeared rather than the day it was taken, so a board read on Friday leaves a weekend to find fifty creatures. The second trap is bad luck with spawns: hunting the one named creature on a floor where it barely appears wastes the afternoon, and the lift and the exit loop are the cure for that.
Notes
Dust Sprites drop coal often enough that a bounty on them pays twice, once from Clint and once in the furnace fuel that comes back up the ladder. Skeletons drop Bone Fragments on the same principle, which makes a skeleton bounty a natural partner for the museum curator's own order if both happen to be live.
A crusher needs a diamond among its parts, so the recipe often sits unused for a while after it arrives. Diamonds come from the deeper floors and from gem nodes, and a Crystalarium loaded with one turns that single stone into a supply.
All Special Orders
Every special order from both boards, with who posts it and how long it runs.