Pierre's Prime Produce
| Pierre's Prime Produce | |
|---|---|
| Type | Special Order |
| Board | Special Orders board |
| Giver | Pierre |
| Time Limit | 28 days |
| Repeatable | No |
Pierre wants twenty-five gold-star vegetables for a promotion at the General Store, dropped into a bin he sets out behind the counter. The posting looks like a quality test and is really a bookkeeping test, because it keeps two separate tallies and the pair of them behave quite differently. A month is a comfortable window for a farm that already grows vegetables in bulk, and an impossible one for a farm whose fields are all fruit. The gold is solid and the Mini-Shipping Bin that follows is the sort of furniture that quietly improves every day after it arrives. Read the rules before planting, because this posting refuses several things that look as though they ought to count.
The board reads: Hello there. For an upcoming promotion, I'm thinking of offering some high-quality vegetables at a slight premium...Know where a thrifty shopkeep might find 25 gold-star vegetables?
Requirements
The journal tracks a harvest tally and a deposit tally. The harvest tally only moves for gold-star vegetables pulled out of the ground after the posting was accepted. The deposit tally moves for gold-star vegetables dropped into Pierre's bin whenever they were grown. The two sets need not match in any way: not the same items, not the same kind of vegetable, not even vegetables from the same season. All Pierre checks is that both numbers reach twenty-five.
That has a pleasant consequence. A chest of gold-star produce saved from an earlier season can be emptied into the bin on day one, closing half the order immediately, while the field quietly fills the harvest side over the following weeks. It also removes the usual worry about accidentally selling or cooking the exact items the order is watching.
Only vegetables count. Fruit is turned away however golden it is, which catches out farms built on Blueberries, Grapes and Melons. Fiddlehead Fern is refused as well, despite being treated as a vegetable elsewhere in the game.
Iridium quality does not count. This is the trap that undoes well-equipped farms, and it runs the opposite way to every instinct the game has taught by then. Deluxe Fertilizer is the only thing that produces iridium crops at all, and it also removes normal quality from the table entirely, so a field dressed with it hands back a great many crops the bin will not accept. Quality Fertilizer and a high farming level are the better combination here, since they push the odds towards gold without opening the iridium door.
Produce gathered by Junimos from a Junimo Hut stays invisible to the tally while it sits in the hut's inventory, and registers the moment it is lifted out into the bag. Harvests from the greenhouse and from the farm on Ginger Island both count normally, which is what makes the order possible outside the main growing seasons.
The order asks for every item in this table.
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Gold-quality vegetables | 25 |
Rewards
The gold is a useful mid-game sum and arrives in one piece. The scene at the General Store plays once the bin is full, and the Mini-Shipping Bin follows by post the morning after that scene rather than on the day itself, which surprises farmers who check the mailbox too early.
The bin is the lasting reward. It behaves exactly like the one beside the farmhouse, holds a handful of stacks, and can be set down anywhere at all, indoors included. Dropping a second bin in the greenhouse, at the far end of a large field or next to the coops turns the end of a long day from a walk into a click, and anything put in by mistake can be lifted back out until the day ends. The same furniture can otherwise be bought with Qi Gems much later in a run, so collecting it here is a real saving.
There is a Prize Ticket to pick up from the board's collection box as well.
Finishing the order pays out all of this.
| Reward | Image |
|---|---|
| 2,500g | - |
| Cutscene at the General Store | - |
| Mini-Shipping Bin by mail the day after the cutscene | 
|
Strategy
Empty whatever gold-star vegetables the farm already owns into Pierre's bin on the first day. That settles the deposit side, leaves the harvest side as the only real work, and protects the order from a careless sale later on.
Then plant volume rather than value. Nothing about the payout scales with what the vegetables are worth, so the cheapest fast-growing vegetable in the season is the right choice. Wheat and Corn are popular for exactly this reason, and a large block of either under Quality Fertilizer produces gold stars steadily. A farm with the greenhouse running can keep a dedicated bed going regardless of the month.
Four weeks sounds generous and is, so long as the posting is taken early. Accepted on the opening Monday of a season, it allows a full planting and a second one behind it. Accepted a fortnight in, a slow vegetable may not deliver twenty-five gold stars in time.
The common failures are all misreadings. Growing fruit and expecting it to count is the first. Planting under Deluxe Fertilizer and watching most of the harvest come up iridium is the second. Leaving the Junimos to do the picking and never opening the hut is the third, and it is the quietest, since the crops are plainly in the hut and the tally plainly is not moving.
Notes
Those four weeks are counted from the posting's own appearance, so a board left unread for seven days offers only three. Withdrawing is not possible once the order sits in the journal. Produce already dropped in Pierre's bin survives a failure, because Lewis stores the contents of every lapsed order in his lost and found.
This posting appears once per farm, so it is the one chance at the furniture from Pierre. Lewis's own crop shipment rewards the same bin, which means a farm finishing both ends up with a pair to place.
All Special Orders
Every special order from both boards, with who posts it and how long it runs.