Snake Skull
| Snake Skull | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Ginger Island |
| Sell Price | 100g |
Professor Snail sets up his Field Office on the north side of Ginger Island and asks for fossils, and the Snake Skull is the head of the snake he is trying to reassemble. It comes out of artifact spots on the west side of the island and at the dig site, and it occasionally arrives on a fishing line in the western waters, which is an odd way to land a skull. Handing it in along with the two vertebrae completes the specimen and pays out a handful of Golden Walnuts and a Mango Sapling. Any spare skulls are useful rather than clutter, since they sell for a tidy sum, feed a Bone Mill and dye up the Skeleton Shirt at a Sewing Machine.
The in-game description reads: A preserved skull that once belonged to a snake.
Overview
Getting to Snail at all takes two steps. The parrot by the broken bridge wants ten Golden Walnuts to put the crossing back, and the boulder blocking the cave at the top of the dig site has to be blown apart with a bomb, which is what frees the professor. He then stands at his desk and accepts fossils one at a time, and his wall carries the island surveys that pay walnuts of their own.
The skull is the easier half of the snake. Any Artifact Spot on Ginger Island West can produce one, as can the artifact spots scattered across the dig site, so a morning spent walking the west with a hoe tends to turn one up. Fishing the west coast is the slower route but it does work, and it costs nothing extra on a day already spent at the water.
The specimen needs the skull once and the vertebrae twice, and completing it brings three Golden Walnuts and a Mango Sapling. The sapling is the quiet prize here, because a fruit tree handed over free is worth more over the years than three walnuts spent once.
Duplicates are worth keeping rather than tossing. Each one sells for a sum that adds up over a season of digging, and the Bone Mill turns bone items into fertiliser: Quality Fertilizer, Speed-Gro, Deluxe Speed-Gro or Tree Fertilizer, picked at random, with an occasional double batch. The mill's recipe is Gunther's doing rather than Snail's. He posts a special order called Fragments of the Past that asks for a hundred bone items inside a week, and the recipe arrives in the post the day after it is finished along with a solid payment. Island fossils count towards that order, so a thorough dig on the west side serves both men at once.
At the Sewing Machine the skull goes onto the spool with cloth in the feed and comes out as the Skeleton Shirt, which is as close as the valley gets to a costume. At the dye pots it registers as a yellow, which is a surprising colour to get out of a skull.
Notes
As a present it is a disaster. Every single villager hates being handed a fossil skull, which is fair, and the gift log will remember it.
Nobody should hunt the skull in isolation. The west side of the island is thick with artifact spots and mussel nodes, and a single circuit with a hoe and a pickaxe usually produces several fossil pieces at once, so the sensible plan is to clear the whole area and sort the pile at the Field Office afterwards.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
