Luau
| Luau | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Festival |
The Luau is a beach party with a pot of soup at the centre of it, and that pot is the whole festival. Every villager drops an ingredient in, the farmer adds one too, and then the Governor tastes the result in front of the entire valley. What goes in decides what comes out: the right offering wins 120 friendship points with everybody in town at once, and the wrong one costs 100 and leaves the Governor lying down. The soup is judged on three things the farmer controls, namely the item's quality, its selling price and how much it heals, which makes the Luau the only festival that can be reliably solved rather than merely attended. Dropping Mayor Lewis's Lucky Purple Shorts in the pot has its own ending, and it is the one most farmers remember.
Event
The Luau falls on the eleventh of every Summer and runs from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon on The Beach. The beach is shut before nine. Every home and shop in the valley is locked for the day, with one exception: the Oasis out in the Calico Desert keeps its normal hours, so a desert trip is still possible around the party.
The potluck pot stands in the middle of the sand. Adding an ingredient is optional, and the soup is tasted when Mayor Lewis is spoken to and the offer to start is accepted. Before the tasting Lewis makes a short speech about trusting everyone to have used high-quality ingredients, and by then the choice is locked in. The Governor tastes, reacts, and the festival ends automatically.
Only raw, edible items count. Cooked dishes are refused, and so are several things that feel raw but are classed as cooked, including Life Elixir, Oil of Garlic, Magic Rock Candy and Piña Colada. Field Snack and Bug Steak are accepted despite being crafted. None of this is explained beforehand, which catches out a great many first-year farmers who arrive with a Pizza.
There are seven possible outcomes. Adding nothing gets a polite complaint that the soup is missing someone's voice, and costs nothing either way. The best response needs a silver, gold or iridium item of real value, and no ordinary-quality item will reach it: wines, aged cheeses, Starfruit, Ostrich Eggs, the legendary fish and the smoked versions of the better fish all qualify. The good response, worth 60 points, covers a very wide spread of ordinary farm produce and most juices and preserves. The neutral response covers the everyday crops and common fish and changes nothing.
The two bad endings are worth avoiding deliberately. Anchovy, Carp, Herring, Sunfish, Blackberry, Salmonberry, Seaweed, the algaes, Crocus, Daffodil, Sweet Pea, Spring Onion, Joja Cola, Unmilled Rice and the Qi Fruit products all lose 50 friendship points across the village. Worse still are Pufferfish, Scorpion Carp, Goby, Sea Cucumber, Red Mushroom, Holly, Sap, Void Egg and Void Mayonnaise, along with their smoked versions, which cost 100 points and send the Governor to lie down.
In a multiplayer game everybody has to contribute or the soup comes out missing something, and the verdict is decided by the worst thing anyone put in, so one farmer with a Pufferfish ruins it for the whole farm.
Shop
Pierre sets up a booth on the sand, and the stock leans heavily tropical.
Starfruit at 3,000g is the item worth thinking hard about. It is expensive, but a single fruit is a seed-free route to the one crop that reaches the Governor's best response on its own, and it can be dropped straight into the pot by a farmer who has nothing better in the bag.
The rest is decoration. A Wall Palm costs 1,000g, a Jungle Decal 800g and Ceiling Leaves 400g, all for indoors. A Totem Pole at 1,000g and a Plain Torch at 700g can be placed outside as farm decoration.
Notes
The shorts are the best-known thing about the day. Adding Mayor Lewis's Lucky Purple Shorts to the pot gets a unique scene in which the Governor finds them in his bowl, declares himself insulted and starts to feel unwell, and Lewis has to live with it. No friendship is lost or gained. In a multiplayer game the shorts override everything, so if anybody adds them that is the result whatever else went in.
Professions do not help here. The Rancher, Angler and similar bonuses that raise an item's selling price are ignored by the soup's calculation, so a product that only clears the threshold because of a profession bonus will not be judged on the higher figure.
The practical approach is to arrive with one good bottle of wine or one gold-quality cheese set aside from the previous season. Either is cheap to produce by a second Summer, both land the best response every time, and 120 friendship points with the entire village in one afternoon is worth more than the bottle.
All Festivals
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
