Let's Play A Game
| Let's Play A Game | |
|---|---|
| Type | Special Order |
| Board | Mr. Qi |
| Giver | Mr. Qi |
| Time Limit | 7 days |
| Repeatable | Yes |
Mr. Qi sets a score rather than a shopping list: fifty thousand points in the endless mode of the arcade cabinet in the Stardrop Saloon. No farming, mining or fishing enters into it, which makes this the one notice on his board that cannot be solved with money or machinery. Endless mode gives a single life, so the run ends the first time the cart leaves the rail, and the score has to be built in one unbroken go. The payment is small by his standards, and the real reason to take it is that it is the fastest twenty gems available to anyone who has already learned the game. For anyone who has not, it is the hardest thing on either board.
The board reads: Think you can score 50,000 points in Junimo Kart endless mode? Prove it.
Requirements
The cabinet is locked until the Skull Key has been found in the chest on the lowest floor of The Mines, the same key that opens the Skull Cavern. Until then the machine in the saloon simply refuses to start, which makes this notice impossible for a farm that has not yet reached the bottom of the shaft.
Beating the six stages of the progress mode brings a Junimo Kart Arcade System through the post the next day. That matters here, because the saloon shuts in the evening and practice time is otherwise rationed by Gus's opening hours. Once the machine stands indoors at home, practice fits into a rainy evening or the small hours after a mining trip.
Scoring is worth understanding before the first attempt, because distance alone will never reach the target. Every tile travelled adds ten points, each coin adds forty, each of the three fruits on a stage adds a thousand, finishing a stage adds five thousand, and finishing it having collected all three fruits adds another five thousand on top. A clean stage with its full fruit set is therefore worth well over ten thousand before distance and coins are counted, which puts the target at roughly four clean stages. A careless run that finishes six stages without fruit falls short.
Endless mode plays the stages in a fixed order: Crumble Cavern, Slippery Slopes, The Gem Sea Giant, Ghastly Galleon, Slomp's Stomp, Glowshroom Grotto, Red Hot Rollercoaster and Sunset Speedway, then back to the beginning. The order never varies, so the first four can be learned by heart.
Rewards
Twenty gems is a modest sum against the hundred that a month of farming earns, but it costs no materials at all. It buys a Junimo Chest outright, or a Hopper with change, or most of a Deconstructor. For a farm saving towards a Galaxy Soul or the Mini-Shipping Bin, it is a useful top-up that asks for nothing from the land.
The order repeats, so a player who has learned the first four stages can take it again every time it appears and treat the arcade as a small weekly income.
Strategy
Practise in progress mode first, where three spare lives make the early stages survivable and the fruit positions can be memorised without ending the run. The aim of practice is to reach the mushroom stage or the lava stage comfortably; a player who can do that in progress mode has the reflexes for fifty thousand in endless.
Jump height follows how long the button is held, so a tap clears a narrow gap and a held press clears a long one. Learning that difference is most of the skill, and judging gaps by eye comes after it.
The first two stages are where the fruit should always be collected, since both are forgiving and each full set is worth two stages' worth of distance. The whale stage is the opposite: its fruit tends to sit in awkward places, and the bubbles the whale spits can be landed on for a bounce, so the sensible plan there is to survive rather than to collect. Slippery slopes add speed to a jump, which takes some getting used to, and the galleon runs faster than everything before it with circling ghosts that cannot be bounced off.
The pause key is worth remembering. A long endless run can be stopped to steady the nerves before a bad stretch, which costs nothing.
The common way this fails is treating it as a farming task. Only skill at the arcade game helps, and a week is not long enough to learn it from scratch. Taking it in a week when the arcade machine is already in the farmhouse and the first stages are familiar is the only reliable plan. Failing it is also cheap: the week passes, nothing is lost, and the notice returns.
Notes
The seven days begin on the Monday the paper appears rather than the day it is taken down, which for this notice simply means fewer evenings of practice. Nothing else about it changes with the date.
A hundred coins collected in progress mode grants an extra life, and so does finishing a stage with all three fruits, which is why coin-chasing is good practice even though coins are worth little in points.
One of the stages is hidden. Clearing the opening cavern without losing a life and taking every coin and fruit leads to an unmarked stage behind the wooden bridge, a quiet cave with no hazards and a great many coins. It appears in progress mode only, so it helps with practice rather than with the score.
The same key that unlocks the cabinet opens the Skull Cavern, so the two are usually reached in the same week of a run. A farm that owns one almost always owns the other.
All Special Orders
Every special order from both boards, with who posts it and how long it runs.