Journal Scraps
| Journal Scraps | |
|---|---|
| Type | Collection |
Journal Scraps are the surviving pages of a shipwrecked sailor's diary, scattered across Ginger Island for a later visitor to pick up. Read in the order they are found, they tell his story from the night the ship broke up to the day he threw two rings into the volcano's forge, and along the way they explain most of the island's oddities. Several pages are practical rather than wistful: one carries the table of what each gem does at the Forge, another lists every enchantment, and three are treasure maps that will not pay out until the page has been read. The rewards behind those maps include a Pearl, a Quality Bobber, Golden Walnuts and the Ostrich Egg, which is the only one of its kind in the valley.
Overview
The scraps turn up the way Secret Notes do, except that they only appear on Ginger Island. Killing monsters, breaking rocks, clearing debris, fishing and working the island farm can all produce one, and artifact spots are the one source that never does. No Magnifying Glass is needed to find or read them, which makes them the one collection a farmer can start without doing the winter mystery first.
Reading one takes a moment. The scrap has to sit in the top row of the backpack and be used as though it were food, which files it in the collections menu on the same page as the Secret Notes. Unlike those notes, the scraps always arrive in sequence, so the first one found is the first entry and the diary never gets ahead of itself.
The early pages are the sailor settling in. He loses his ship and his crew, builds a shelter, finds the water full of fish and mentions catching a stingray in the caves off the south-east shore. By the second week he has noticed the golden nuts lying about the island and the parrots that go mad for them, which is the game quietly explaining its own currency.
Then the clues start. One page remembers a nut sitting high in a tree near the volcano and wishing for a way to shoot it down, which is the hint to bring a slingshot. Another is a sketch of the sand north of Birdie's hut, where a hoe turns up a Quality Bobber and a walnut. A third marks ground to the south-east of the Island Farmhouse, hiding a Pearl and another walnut. The last of the maps points at the crook of a curved Palm Tree beside the volcano entrance, and that dig is where the Ostrich Egg is buried. None of those three spots gives anything at all before the matching page has been read.
Two pages are reference material. One is the forging table, matching each gem to the bonus it adds, noting that a weapon takes three gem forges and one enchantment from a Prismatic Shard, and that a Dragon Tooth re-rolls the innate powers a weapon came with. The next lists the enchantments themselves, from Vampiric and Crusader on weapons to Bottomless, Auto-Hook and Preserving on tools, which saves a great deal of guessing before any iridium is spent.
The strangest entry is the song. On a rainy day a mermaid sits on the big rock on the south-eastern shore, unable to sing a note, and the sailor copied down the pattern of stones he found on the bank the next morning. Placing a Flute Block beside each group of stones and tuning it to match their value, then running past them from left to right, plays her tune and earns a handful of walnuts. The puzzle works whether or not the page has ever been read; the scrap only explains it.
Notes
The last page is a small piece of magic that most farmers use for the rest of the save. The sailor dropped his Glow Ring and his Magnet Ring into the forge and got one ring that does both jobs, and combining rings that way is one of the Forge's best tricks.
The Ostrich Egg from the volcano dig is useless on its own until Professor Snail hands over the Ostrich Incubator recipe, so the fossil collection and the journal hunt tend to finish at about the same time.
The mermaid's melody is the same show tune played at the Night Market, so anyone who has sat through that performance can tune the blocks by ear.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
