Qi's Cuisine
| Qi's Cuisine | |
|---|---|
| Type | Special Order |
| Board | Mr. Qi |
| Giver | Mr. Qi |
| Time Limit | 14 days |
| Repeatable | Yes |
Mr. Qi wants a hundred thousand gold of home cooking shipped off the farm, and only dishes cooked after the notice is taken will count towards it. The order is unusual among his challenges in asking for nothing dangerous, nothing rare and no skill at all: it asks for a kitchen running flat out for a fortnight. Two weeks is generous, the ingredients can be bought over a counter, and the only thing that can really go wrong is running out of patience at the stove. Twenty-five Qi Gems is the payment, and it is the thinnest return on effort anywhere on the board, so this is the notice to take when the farm has money to burn and a quiet half-hour each evening.
The board reads: Ship 100,000g worth of freshly cooked items.
Requirements
Cooking has to happen after the order is in the journal. Everything prepared from that moment carries the word Fresh in front of its name while the order lasts, which is the game's own receipt: a dish without the word is a dish that will not register. A chest of food cooked last season is worthless here, and so is anything bought ready-made from the saloon.
The counter measures gold, not plates. What matters is the sale value of each dish, so a kitchen turning out one expensive item per action climbs faster than one turning out two cheap ones, and the number of times the cook button is pressed is the real currency of the order.
Only the shipping bin registers the sale. Carrying an armful of loaves to a shop counter earns the same gold and moves nothing. Progress also appears to stall near the end, because the bar counts what left the farm on earlier nights, so the whole remaining pile can be dropped in the bin on the final day and will still be credited.
A kitchen is required before any of this starts. Robin builds the first kitchen into the house, and a Cookout Kit pitched outdoors stands in for one while the farmhouse is still a single room.
Rewards
Twenty-five gems is worth weighing against what the fortnight costs. Pressure Nozzles come four to a purchase and widen a sprinkler's reach by a tile in every direction, and Enrichers come four to a purchase and fertilise the ground as seeds go in, so one payment kits out a decent field. The same sum is most of the recipe for Hyper Speed-Gro. Pierre's Missing Stocklist, which opens his seed racks to every crop all year, costs twice this order, so two runs of the notice buys the single most convenient thing in the room.
The gold side is a loss on almost every route, and that is the honest summary. The reason to take the order is the gems and the pile of cooked food that comes out of it, since anything not shipped is a stack of health restoratives for the mines.
Strategy
Bread is the cheapest route when the wheat is grown at home. Wheat is a fast summer and fall crop, a Mill turns any quantity of it into Wheat Flour overnight, and flour always comes out at basic quality, so it stacks neatly in one slot instead of splitting into four. One flour makes one loaf, and sixteen hundred odd loaves reach the target. Buying the flour from Pierre's General Store instead turns each loaf into a loss of forty gold, which still works and costs about two thirds of the target in cash.
Triple Shot Espresso is the route that saves clicks. Three Coffee make one, it sells for well over a loaf of bread, and a little over two hundred of them clears the order. That is a quarter of the cooking actions, so a farmer with coffee plants in garden pots and a Keg or two finishes in a handful of evenings rather than a fortnight of clicking.
Either way, spare ingredients should be swept in alongside. Eggs piling up in a coop become Chocolate Cake, which sells for more than three loaves, and a shed of jars and kegs is not the tool for this job: the Coal and the waiting time make preserves far too slow for a fortnight.
The order fails in one of two ways. The first is cooking before accepting, usually because a player stocks up in advance and only then reads the board. The second is sheer attrition: the bread route needs well over a thousand separate presses of the cook button, and plenty of farms simply stop halfway.
Notes
Qi Seasoning lifts a dish to gold quality, which lifts its sale price by half, so seasoned bread would cut the loaf count by a third. It is bought with the very gems the order pays, which makes it a poor trade for this notice and a good one later.
Fourteen days sounds like a fortnight, but the clock begins the Monday the notice appears rather than the day it is taken. A board read on Friday leaves ten days, and ten days is tight for the bread route.
Nothing about the order is wasted if it fails. The food stays in the bin or the chest, the Mill stays on the farm, and the notice comes back around in time.
All Special Orders
Every special order from both boards, with who posts it and how long it runs.