Mystery Shirt
| Mystery Shirt | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Clothing |
| Location | Mystery Boxes; Golden Mystery Boxes |
The Mystery Shirt is a prize rather than a product. It comes out of Mr. Qi's Mystery Boxes and out of nothing else, which puts it in an odd corner of the wardrobe: no shop sells it, no Sewing Machine makes it, and the random clothing that falls out of trees and crates never includes it. It takes no dye either, so the shirt that comes out of the box is the shirt for good. The odds of any one box holding it sit below a single percent, so the usual way to own one is to have opened a great many boxes for other reasons and found this at the bottom of one of them.
Location
Mystery Boxes have to be unlocked before any of this begins. Mr. Qi starts sending them out either once a farmer has spent fifty days in the valley or once the second Prize Ticket has been collected from the billboard, and a short cutscene with him makes the announcement. From that day on the boxes turn up all over the place.
Fishing is the most generous source, with regular and golden treasure chests both producing them at a rate that climbs with the day's luck. Panning a river, shaking a seed-bearing tree and swinging an axe at a trunk all have their own small chances. Monsters drop them, as do the containers smashed in the Mines, the Skull Cavern and the Volcano Dungeon, and in both of those cases the day's fortune and any luck buff raise the figure. Artifact spots hold them. The Calico Egg Merchant sells a batch cheaply at the Desert Festival, the Trout Derby and SquidFest hand them out as prizes, and the Bookseller will take a Book of Mysteries in trade for one.
Reading the Book of Mysteries is the single best investment for anyone hunting the shirt. The book permanently improves the chance that an attempted box actually appears, which lifts every source at once rather than just one of them.
Opening is Clint's job. Twenty-five gold a box at the Blacksmith cracks them open, and unlike geodes they cannot be fed through a Geode Crusher. A farmer with a chest full of boxes has a slow morning ahead.
Golden Mystery Boxes carry noticeably better odds. They replace ordinary boxes once Foraging Mastery has been claimed, which makes that pillar the biggest single improvement available to anyone hunting the shirt. Three ordinary boxes traded at the Giant Stump also become one golden box, so a backlog can be upgraded rather than opened.
There is one more wrinkle worth knowing. Once more than ten boxes have been opened, ordinary boxes begin to include almost everything a golden box can hold, so a long-running collection gradually improves on its own.
Notes
The Mystery Hat comes out of the same boxes at almost exactly the same rate, so the two tend to arrive within a few boxes of each other and are usually worn as a set. Anyone chasing one may as well plan on the other.
Because the shirt cannot be dyed and cannot be tailored into anything, it is the one piece of an outfit that has to be designed around. Matching trousers can be taken to the dye pots at Emily's and tuned to it, which is the only real way to build a look that includes it.
The boxes themselves are worth nothing in the shipping bin, so every spare is best opened. Everything in a box is pure upside, and the shirt is the kind of thing a farmer keeps for the story of how it turned up rather than for how it looks.
All Clothing
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
| Name | Image | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Dyeing | - | - |
| Emily's Magic Shirt | 
|
- |
| Luau Skirt | 
|
- |
| Mystery Shirt | 
|
- |
| Tailoring | - | - |
| Tight Pants | 
|
- |