Wilted Bouquet
| Wilted Bouquet | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Furnace |
| Sell Price | 100g |
Dropping a Bouquet into a furnace with a lump of coal scorches the flowers, and what comes out is the Wilted Bouquet: the valley's polite way of ending a courtship. Handing one to anybody being dated breaks things off immediately and drops the friendship back to five hearts, but it stops there. They will still talk, still accept presents, and the relationship can be rebuilt afterwards if the farmer changes their mind. It only works before a wedding, since a spouse cannot be given one and ending a marriage means a very expensive visit to the ledger in Mayor Lewis's house. For anyone who has handed out bouquets a little too freely, the wilted version is the tidy way out.
Overview
Making one is the quickest job a furnace ever does. A Bouquet is bought from Pierre's General Store once a marriage candidate has reached eight hearts, and one coal and one bouquet in a furnace produce the wilted version on the next tick of the clock rather than after the usual hours of smelting. The only real cost is the bouquet itself, since the burnt one sells for the same price as a fresh one at the shipping bin, and Pierre will not buy either of them back.
Giving it works like giving any present. The courtship ends there and then, the boyfriend or girlfriend label disappears from the social tab, and the heart meter settles back to five. The rest of the relationship stays intact. That is a very different outcome from a divorce, which costs a fortune to file, resets the relationship to nothing, labels the villager as an ex who refuses gifts and will not come to future weddings, and strips their room off the farmhouse. By comparison, burning a bunch of flowers is almost gentle.
The reason the item exists at all is the way dating works. A bouquet can be given to every single marriage candidate who has reached eight hearts, and nothing stops a farmer from dating all of them at once while deciding. The game notices. Raising every bachelor or every bachelorette to the top of their heart meter and seeing all of their final scenes triggers a group confrontation, after which the whole set gives the farmer the cold shoulder for about a week, refusing gifts and answering with cross dialogue. A single Wilted Bouquet given to any one of them prevents that scene from ever happening, which makes the item the standard way to tidy up a crowded love life before it goes wrong.
Offering one to a spouse does nothing. The game simply replies that it would not make sense, which is a kinder refusal than most of the valley's error messages.
The last use is a joke at the item's expense. Cloth in the feed of a Sewing Machine with a Wilted Bouquet on the spool produces the Darkness Suit, so a failed romance can at least be worn.
Notes
Making a spare is worth doing before the courting starts in earnest. Coal is cheap and a bouquet is not expensive, and having one in a chest means a crowded heart meter can be untangled the moment it becomes a problem rather than after the group scene has already fired.
A broken-off relationship is genuinely recoverable. Five hearts is most of the way back to the eight a new bouquet needs, so a farmer who changes their mind about a candidate is a few weeks of conversation away from dating them again.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
