Qi's Crop
| Qi's Crop | |
|---|---|
| Type | Special Order |
| Board | Mr. Qi |
| Giver | Mr. Qi |
| Time Limit | 28 days |
| Repeatable | Yes |
Mr. Qi scatters strange blue beans across the world and asks for five hundred melons grown from them, shipped before the month is out. It is a farming problem dressed up as a treasure hunt: the beans have to be found by swinging tools at ordinary scenery, and every one found can be turned into more beans rather than fruit. The fruit itself is worth almost nothing in gold, so the whole run is paid for by the hundred Qi Gems at the end, the largest single purse his board offers. A farm with sprinklers over a wide field and a Seed Maker in a shed will finish it with time to spare. A farm that waits a week before planting will not.
The board reads: I've hidden Qi Beans throughout the world. Find them, grow them, propagate them, and ship 500 Qi Fruit within the time limit.
Requirements
Beans only exist while the order runs, and they turn up in the places a farmer already breaks open. Smashing rocks, chopping trees, cutting grass, rummaging in the town's bins and digging artifact spots all have a chance of yielding a handful, and the beach's artifact spots are unusually generous, chests in the Volcano Dungeon hold them, and monsters drop them as well. None of this needs the island, despite where the order is posted.
Each bean takes four days in the ground, in any season, and wants watering every day of it. Fertiliser cannot raise the fruit's quality, but a growth accelerator shortens the cycle and matters a great deal when seven cycles have to fit inside the month.
Propagation is the part the board's wording hints at and most farms miss. A Qi Fruit put into a Seed Maker comes back as beans, which means the first small handful found in a bin becomes a planted row, that row becomes a larger handful of beans, and the planting roughly doubles each time. Searching for more beans is only worth doing in the first few days; after that the Seed Maker is the faster supplier.
Only the shipping bin counts. Carrying armfuls of fruit to a shop counter earns gold but leaves the tally where it was. The progress bar is also a liar on the final day: it shows what was shipped on previous nights, so a last-day haul of two hundred looks ignored right up until the morning the order completes.
The order asks for every item in this table.
| Item | Image | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Qi Fruit | 
|
500 |
Rewards
A hundred gems is the heaviest payment on the walnut room's board, and the shop in the same room is where they are worth having. A Junimo Chest links every chest on the farm to one shared stash, the Horse Flute calls the horse anywhere outdoors, a Deconstructor breaks crafted things back into their best material, the Key To The Town lets a farmer wander into any building whenever it suits, and a Galaxy Soul starts a galaxy weapon on its last upgrade. Recipes for Hyper Speed-Gro, Deluxe Fertilizer, the Heavy Tapper and Magic Bait sit on the same shelf.
Gems also convert to gold at a fixed rate for anyone who would rather have money. Qi Seasoning sells for a steady two hundred each, and hoppers broken down in a Deconstructor yield radioactive bars worth considerably more than that, which makes a hundred gems a respectable cash prize as well as a shopping budget.
The order repeats, so a farm that has built the field and the machinery once can take it again whenever it appears.
Strategy
Accept it on the Monday and spend that same day finding beans rather than planning. Break every rock on the farm, empty the town's bins, swing the axe at the backwoods and dig the beach. A dozen beans on day one is enough to start the engine.
Plant everything immediately and keep the whole field watered, which in practice means a grid of iridium sprinklers rather than a watering can. On the fourth day, send the first harvest to the Seed Maker instead of the bin, and plant what comes back. Repeat until the field is full, then start shipping. Four days a cycle and twenty-eight days on the clock allow seven plantings if the first goes in on day one, and the number of plants roughly doubles each round, so the five hundred arrives in the last third of the month rather than evenly across it.
Watch the end carefully. Everything to do with the order vanishes the day after it closes: beans, fruit, plants still growing, the contents of every kind of chest, anything loaded into kegs or preserves jars, and the recovery service's list of lost goods. Shipping late is safe, but leaving fruit in a chest overnight after the order ends loses it.
The usual way this fails is a slow start. The month looks generous until the doubling is traced backwards, and a field that only begins growing in the second week cannot reach five hundred. The second way is selling the fruit at a counter for gold and discovering the tally never moved.
Notes
The month starts ticking the moment the paper appears in the walnut room, whether or not it has been taken down, so an order left on the board until the second week is a fortnight short before the first bean is planted. Reading the board every Monday is worth more here than on any other notice, because the shortfall compounds through every cycle that is lost.
Qi Fruit can grow into a giant crop, and a giant one survives the order's end. Left standing, it can be chopped during a later run of the same order for an armful of fruit. Chopped while no order is running, it gives up a Mystery Box instead, and Qi sends a mocking note the first time that happens.
Wine and jelly made from the fruit also survive, which is the one way to keep anything from the month after the order closes.
The fruit is a liked gift for a good number of residents, so a surplus is better handed out than shipped. Cloth and a Qi Fruit in a Sewing Machine make the Qi Mask, and the fruit drops into the blue pot for dyeing.
All Special Orders
Every special order from both boards, with who posts it and how long it runs.