Rusty Key
| Rusty Key | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Gunther; (60 Museum donations) |
Gunther keeps a running tally of everything handed in at the museum, and the morning after the sixtieth donation he walks out to the farm to thank the farmer in person and leave the Rusty Key. The key fits the grates that lead down into the Sewers, the flooded stretch of brick and pipework beneath Pelican Town. Krobus lives in there, and his shop is the only one in the valley that never closes. The key is filed straight into the Special Items And Powers tab, so it takes up no space and can never be mislaid. Sixty artifacts and minerals is a long collection, which makes the key one of the first real rewards for taking the museum seriously rather than treating it as a dumping ground.
Overview
Everything Gunther accepts counts towards the total, artifacts dug out of the ground and minerals cracked out of geodes alike, and each donation is credited as it is handed over. The milestones along the way pay out their own small rewards, so nothing about the work is wasted, but the key is the one that opens a new place on the map. Anyone who digs every Artifact Spot they walk past and keeps Clint busy with geodes tends to arrive there sooner than a farmer who only donates the obvious treasures.
Gunther's visit is a short scene at the farmhouse door rather than a letter, and it is one of the few times he leaves the museum at all. The key is in hand immediately afterwards.
The Sewers themselves are small, dim and quietly one of the most useful rooms in the game, because of who is standing in them. Krobus is a shadow person, the same kind as the Shadow Brutes that stalk the lower Mines, but he is the one friendly monster in the valley. He stays in the same spot day and night and keeps a shop that is open at every hour, festival days included, which makes him the fallback when every other shop in town has shut. His stock is partly fixed and partly a single item that changes each day, so the room is worth a look whenever a farmer happens to be passing.
Friendship with him opens the most unusual living arrangement in the game. Krobus cannot be married, but once the relationship is as deep as it will go, a Void Ghost Pendant bought from the Desert Trader will persuade him to move into the farmhouse as a roommate. He is wary of being found, since his own account is that the shadow people and the dwarves fought for a thousand years and he fears a dwarven assassin, which is why he hides underground in the first place.
That history surfaces in the Sewers in a scene. Krobus and the Dwarf end up in the same tunnel, the old war surfaces between them, and the Wizard steps in to cast a Seal of Promise that keeps the two apart. It explains why the valley's two non-human residents live at opposite ends of the map and never meet.
Notes
The Sewers open at both ends, from the cover in the south of Pelican Town and from the grate at the far south-eastern edge of Cindersap Forest, so once the key is in hand they also work as a shortcut between town and forest. For a farmer who lives in the south of the valley, that cut is worth a surprising number of minutes over a year.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
