Trout Derby
| Trout Derby | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Festival |
The Trout Derby is a fishing weekend rather than a village party, and it behaves differently from every other festival on the calendar. Shops stay open, time keeps moving, animals still want feeding, and the farmer can come and go as they please across two full days. The game is simple: catch Rainbow Trout in the forest river, and roughly every third one comes up with a Golden Tag attached. Tags are traded one at a time at the derby booth for a fixed run of prizes, starting with a Tent Kit and working through a Bucket Hat, a Mounted Trout, a Diamond, a Quality Sprinkler and more. Tags also keep, from one day to the next and from one year to the next, so nothing caught is ever wasted.
Event
The derby runs on the twentieth and twenty-first of Summer, opening at ten past six in the morning and closing at two the following morning on both days. It takes place in Cindersap Forest, along the river near Marnie's Ranch.
Unlike the village festivals, the rest of the valley stays open. Every home and shop keeps its normal hours, the clock runs as usual, and the farm still needs working, so the derby is something fitted around a day rather than a day in itself. Animals are not automatically counted as fed, which is the trap: a farmer who spends both days on the riverbank and forgets the hay loses two days of produce.
Rainbow Trout can be caught all day throughout the derby, in any weather, which is a considerable relaxation of the usual rules for the fish. Each catch has roughly a one in three chance of carrying a Golden Tag, and catching several trout at once multiplies that: two at once makes it about two in three, three at once makes it nearly certain. Only one tag comes per catch however many fish arrive with it. When a tag turns up it either comes in with the fish or arrives inside the Fishing Treasure Chest if one appeared during the catch.
Trout caught outside the forest count too, and so do trout from any farm map with Cindersap Forest water, which covers the Riverland, Hill-top, Forest and Meadowlands layouts. Those fish are still bound by the usual seasonal and weather restrictions, so the forest river remains the easy place to be. Fish pulled from a Fish Pond never carry a tag.
Willy comes to the derby, which closes his Fish Shop for both days. He can still be given gifts where he stands. The riverbank fills up with visitors from outside the valley too, and talking to them is worth doing once: a self-declared Trout Man explains that he spent five years learning to think like a trout, the Fishing Sisters sing about themselves, and a Fisherman who wants peace and quiet gets steadily more threatening the more he is spoken to.
Shop
The derby booth is not a shop in the usual sense. Talking to the fisherman behind it offers two choices: hear what the event is about, or hand over a Golden Tag.
Tags are exchanged one by one, even when several are in the bag, so a good haul means a short queue of clicks. The first prize is always a Tent Kit. After that the prizes come from a fixed list, with the first of them picked at random and every one after following the list in order, looping back to the start once all of them have been handed out.
The list is a Bucket Hat, a Crab Pot, three Mystery Boxes, a Diamond, a Mounted Trout, twenty Deluxe Bait, two Triple Shot Espressos, a Quality Sprinkler, three Warp Totem: Farm and three Omni Geodes, with the Bucket Hat always following the Omni Geodes. The Bucket Hat and the Mounted Trout are the two prizes worth planning for, since neither can be got anywhere else.
A full bag will block the exchange, with the fisherman pointing out that there is no room, so it pays to clear some space before cashing in a stack of tags.
Notes
Bait choice decides how many tags a weekend produces. Challenge Bait is the strongest option, because it brings in three fish at a time and a perfect catch with it is close to a guaranteed tag. Rainbow Trout Bait is the next best, and the Training Rod is a last resort for a farmer with a low fishing level, though it does raise the chance of hooking a trout specifically.
Pushing the perfect catch is what makes Challenge Bait pay. Cork Bobbers and fishing buffs both widen the fishing bar, which makes perfect catches easier, and a farmer who lands a perfect every time will earn more tags with Challenge Bait than with anything else.
A Bait Maker is worth crafting before the weekend, since it turns trout into Rainbow Trout Bait. Taking the machine down to the river means the bait can be made from the morning's catch, and nothing is lost by doing so because the tag chance applies to the fish as they are caught.
Low luck, a low fishing level and casting close to the bank all raise the proportion of Rainbow Trout among the catches, which is one of the rare occasions where being worse at the game helps.
Eating Mayonnaise to recover energy in front of the other anglers produces a short run of disgusted comments from the fisherman in the green shirt, who wants to know why.
All Festivals
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
