Snake Vertebrae
| Snake Vertebrae | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Artifact Spots in Ginger Island West (22.5%); Mussel Nodes (2.5%); Breaking Other Rocks (1%) |
| Sell Price | 100g |
The Snake Vertebrae is the piece of Professor Snail's snake that has to be found twice, which makes it the part most farmers end up waiting on. It has three ways of turning up on Ginger Island West: digging artifact spots, which is by far the most generous of them, cracking open the mussel nodes along the beach, and simply smashing ordinary rocks as they get in the way. Two of them plus a skull finish the specimen at the Field Office and pay out Golden Walnuts and a Mango Sapling. Everything after the second one is surplus, and surplus bones are still worth money, fertiliser or a shirt.
The in-game description reads: It appears this serpent may have been extremely flexible.
Overview
Digging is the method that works. Artifact spots on the west half of the island produce a vertebra roughly one time in four or five, so a steady walk with a hoe over every patch of worm-marked soil usually produces the pair inside a day or two. The island refreshes those spots generously, which is why the west side is the place to spend a hoe rather than the dig site or the south beach.
The other two routes are things that happen rather than things to plan. Mussel nodes along the island's shoreline sometimes give one up when broken, and they are being mined anyway for the walnuts and the stone. Ordinary rocks on the west side pay out rarely, which is far too thin to chase but a pleasant surprise during an afternoon of clearing ground.
At the Field Office the two bones slot into the snake alongside the skull. Snail hands back three Golden Walnuts and a Mango Sapling for the finished specimen, and his desk will drop a hint about where a missing piece is hiding if the snake is still short. His surveys on the wall are worth answering on the same visit, since they pay walnuts too and cost nothing but attention. Once every fossil in the office has been filled in, the recipe for the Ostrich Incubator follows, which is the real end of the fossil project.
Extra vertebrae have three honest uses. They sell for the same flat sum as any island bone, so a pocketful is a decent return on an afternoon's digging. They are accepted by a Bone Mill, which grinds bones into one of four fertilisers at random and occasionally doubles the batch, and that is a far better fate for a bone than the shipping bin if the farm is short of Deluxe Speed-Gro. They also count towards Gunther's Fragments of the Past order, which asks for a large pile of bone items in a single week, so an island dig is the fastest way to fill a request that would otherwise mean grinding away at skeletons in the Mines.
Clothing is the last option. Cloth in the feed of a Sewing Machine with a vertebra on the spool produces the Skeleton Shirt, and the bones register as a yellow at the dye pots, so a stack of surplus spine can recolour a wardrobe.
Notes
The trap is selling too early. Bones all look much the same in a chest, and a farmer who ships the afternoon's haul before visiting the Field Office can easily post both vertebrae and have to go digging again. Donating first and selling afterwards avoids a wasted trip across the water.
A walk around the west side is worth repeating rather than exhausting. Artifact spots come back, so the pair tends to appear over two or three visits even on a bad run of luck, and each circuit also brings up the other island fossils, walnuts from the mussel nodes and stone for the farm.
All Collections
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