The Summit
| The Summit | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Location |
The Summit is the clifftop above the Railroad, and it is the last place in the valley a save ever opens. A boulder sits across the stairs for the whole game and only rolls away once Perfection has been reached, which means shipping every crop, cooking every dish, catching every fish, filling every friendship, building the obelisks and the Gold Clock and finding every Golden Walnut. Walking up the morning after earns the game's one real ending: a long scene on a bench, a flight of familiar faces across the sky and a credits roll through every villager, animal, fish and monster in the game. It is the only location that exists purely to say well done. The weather up here is always sunny, which is the game being gentle with a player who has earned it.
Area
The stairs climb from the northwest corner of the Railroad, past the spot where the boulder used to sit. The ground at the top is a small bench on a grassy ledge with the whole valley spread out below it.
The place behaves oddly on purpose. Although it lies outdoors, it never appears on the map, and the interface hides itself the moment the farmer steps in, so nothing sits between the farmer and the view.
Notes
The scene begins as soon as the farmer arrives. They sit on the left of the bench, and somebody joins them on the right. A spouse takes the seat if the farmer is married, and otherwise it falls to Mayor Lewis for a save that restored the Community Center, or to Morris for one that built the Joja Warehouse. A roommate does not count as a spouse for this purpose, so Krobus stays at home.
What is said depends on who is sitting there. Lewis talks about his long years as mayor and says that nothing has made him prouder than watching the farm come back to life, that the place has gone beyond anything Grandpa imagined, and that the valley itself has changed. Morris admits that he once saw the move to Pelican Town as a step backwards in his career, and that the years here have humbled him and shown him another way to live. A spouse looks out at the view, counts up the years they have spent together and then says something only they would say, and the scene ends with a kiss.
Then the sky fills up. Krobus, the Dwarf and the Wizard sail past, with the Witch behind them, and crop fairies and flying saucers follow. A farmer who has earned a hundred million gold even gets the traveling merchant's pig. After that the credits scroll through every villager, Dusty included, every farm animal, every fish and every monster. A save that never took a single Joja service, meaning the Community Center was restored, no Golden Joja Parrot was used and no Perfection Waiver was bought, gets the line about using no Joja services, with Morris flying by to underline it.
Grandpa and Mr. Qi close the scene together, congratulating the farmer on the climb. It is the only moment in the whole game that hints the two of them know each other. Read at a normal pace, the whole thing runs about five minutes.
There is a wrong way up, and the game has an answer for it. A farmer who reaches the ledge early through the sword swing glitch finds the view replaced by a screen of broken sprites and gets Mr. Qi instead of a party. He calls out the attempt to cheat the system, says the word despicable and charges, and the farmer wakes up in Harvey's Clinic. Trying again simply knocks them out on arrival.
The rewards for Perfection arrive around the trip rather than on the ledge. Parrots fly over the farm the day after, Grandpa writes to say he is proud, and the tracker in Qi's Walnut Room hands over the Statue of True Perfection, which produces a Prismatic Shard every day.
All Locations
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
