Viva Pinata Channel

Viva Piñata has no formal tutorial. Instead, learning how to operate the garden is all built into the engine itself. And quite honestly, you’ll learn pretty much the whole "point" of the game in under a couple hours. The trick is to consistently work with all the ins and outs of the garden as things get larger and more complicated; the game ends up being a large balancing act of multiple factors while you try to work on goals that YOU set.

And if that bit of prose didn’t confuse the Taffly out of you, nothing will. Besides, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The first thing we need to do is introduce you to the world, and more importantly, your garden.

First of all, if you are able to use both analog sticks at once to any degree of success, set the controls to "Advanced." Keeping them on "Simple" actually makes it extremely difficult to get anything accomplished. Little kids might need it on Simple if they do not have the fine motor skills to use both sticks in tandem, but if you’ve ever played a first-person shooter on a console before, you’ll have no trouble here with Advanced.

Jumping into the garden shortly thereafter, you’ll find yourself standing in the middle of dirt whilst a human-looking female with a leafy mask is crying. What’s a guy (or girl) to do but help her out in a time of crisis, yeah?

You’ll see a moving circle on the ground, one with red and yellow triangles. This is your cursor, naturally. Move it on the crying girl; it should change color, and it should "snap" to her. Whilst your cursor is on her, just hit A to engage in conversation.

The girl’s name is Leafos, and she is crying because of the mess around you. This is, apparently, a garden; or at least was, as it’s now pretty much nothing but caked dirt and random junk spread around. Leafos is sad because she wanted some "help" to clean it up. Because you happened along, she volunteers you.

Now, here, she’ll explain how to use the journal, the menu, and the alert system. She explains it better than anything we could say, so check all that, then return to the guide. We’ll pick things up when you get your first tool.

After prattling for awhile, Leafos gives you the world’s oldest shovel and proceeds to tell you to get to work.

Although she literally said that she just wanted some help, her contribution to your efforts is to stand around and talk about meaningless stuff whilst you do all the work. This is unsurprising. But hey, at least you don’t have to pay for that shovel. 

This shovel of yours really only has one purpose: to turn the hard, nasty dirt that is basically in your entire garden to soft, malleable soil. Leafos tells you to both destroy the junk and to start getting all the soil ready for something useful. To do either action, it’s as simple as equipping your shovel by pressing Up on the D-pad (or going into the menu), then placing your cursor at a spot and pressing A.

It would take forever to prep the garden if you tried it one spot at a time. Instead, go to an open area, then hold the A button. The shovel will continually smack the ground, even as you move your cursor around. If you hold your cursor over a piece of junk, each whack of the shovel will damage it, until it breaks completely.

Speaking of junk... when you hover the cursor over it, a series of small chocolate bar-looking things will appear to the right. This represents the "power meter" (or "hit points" or whatever) of the junk. Each little chocolate bar is one "point," and each whack of the shovel damages the thing one point. So, if the junk has four chocolate bars, you have to hit it four times to break it apart.

Breaking all the junk is a good idea, because doing so will make a little coin, called a Chocolate Coin (or CC for short) hit the ground. Run the cursor over it to collect it and add it to your coffers.

Pretty much anything in the world can be attacked with the shovel. Even Leafos can be hit, but if you hover the cursor over her, you’ll see that her chocolate bars are covered in... er... foil? Whatever causes the silver color, it represents that she cannot be killed. You can beat the living daylights out of her, and she’ll cry, but that’s the length of it.

Anyway, continue to shatter junk—collecting coins in the process—and turning all the nasty dirt to soft soil. You’ll only have to worry about the area within the white box, which is admittedly small, but it will grow as you play.

When even just a sliver of your land is prepped, you’ll see a video of your first piñata arrive. This is a Whirlm, a worm with a big-eye complex. 

When all piñatas arrive, they start off black-and-white like your first Whirlm. This indicates they are merely looking at your garden, and not yet ready to live in it. Leafos explains this as well. What she doesn’t explain are the three different levels a piñata goes through before it becomes an actual member of your garden.

• Appear: When a piñata species appears for the first time, you’ll see a video of it coming out of the wild, much like you just did with this Whirlm. This video will not play for subsequent appearances, although you can watch it again through the journal. Piñatas that have merely appeared will stay outside the borders of your garden and just watch you work.
• Visit: Piñatas that actually wander onto the garden are called visitors. Once on the garden, they can interact with anything you’ve got, including other piñatas, but they are out of your control (although you can still beat them to death with the shovel). You get no video indicating a species has become a visitor, but you will get an alert.
• Resident: Piñatas that decided to make your garden their home will change from black-and-white to color. The first time this happens to a species, the camera will zoom in on them. Residents are under your somewhat direct control (more on that later), and are naturally full-fledged members of your garden.

All species have different conditions that must be met for each of these levels. Whirlms are an exception: they appear, visit, and become residents when 1% of the total garden area (not just the small section you’ve got right now) is soil or grass.

Pretty much all other species have different conditions, no matter how small they might be. There is one species, for example, that appears when 15% of your garden is water, visits when 20% is water, and becomes a resident at 25%.

All the information for the requirements of a species can be found in the journal.

Back to the garden... continue turning the hard dirt into soft soil, and Leafos will grant you a seed packet that grows grass. Do not use this yet. Instead, make sure that every square inch of your land is filled with soil and free of junk first. Hard ground, you see, is completely worthless, and you can’t plant grass on it anyway. May as well finish up making everything soft and ready, right? 

NOTE: Rare had some marvelous foresight when it came to doing mass dirt softening. You’ve noticed that when you hold A to soften the soil, you’ll automatically destroy the junk too, right? Well, this doesn’t apply to creatures that get in your way. So, if you’re whacking the hard dirt, and a Whirlm happens to get under your shovel, you will not harm it. In order to attack something, you’ll have to stop all action, then rest the cursor over it before tapping or holding the A button.

Anyway, once all the land within your border is flat, clear, and soft, grab your grass packet from the menu. Now you need to coat your entire garden with grass, because dirt is fairly worthless as well. While the grass packet is equipped, press A once; you won’t have to hold it down like you do with the shovel. Pressing A again will stop the seeding, and pressing B will stop the seeding and unequip the seed packet.

Seed the land, and you’ll wind up a Whirlm resident before too much longer (not to mention probably another species or two will at least appear). Leafos will tell you how to get information on your residents and rename them; check those out, then come back here when you get to meet Willy.

After a short while, a blue creature with a hammer on his head will appear and introduce himself. This is Willy Builder, a... well, a builder. His job for practically the majority of the game is to create homes for your residents. Houses make your piñatas happy, which has all sorts of bonuses, the biggest of which is that they’ll listen to you better.

Will donates a house to you, one for Whirlms. In order to build it, you get to see a "footprint" of the building, a semi-transparent full-scale model. If it flashes red, it’s in an illegal place; probably because the door is too close to your border. It could flash red if a piñata or Leafos is standing in the way, but again Rare had some foresight here: if there is indeed a creature standing where your footprint is, they will move out of the way as quickly as possible. If the footprint is still red, there’s a different problem involved.

Anyway, not only can you move the footprint around, you can also rotate it. The front of the footprint is marked with a door with Willy’s picture on it. You’ll want the door to face the general direction away from your border, naturally. If you hold down the X button and move the left stick, you can rotate the building however you wish. If you merely tap the X button, you will rotate it 90 degrees and square it up with the rest of your garden, which is a plus for over-organizational freaks like me.

Once you’ve got the footprint over a suitable place, simply hit the A button to place the building. Confirm its location, and Willy will shortly arrive to build it. While he does so, a counter will appear on the door. This shows the number of seconds it will take him to finish. This first Whirlm house will only take 10 seconds, but later houses will take significantly longer. 

Once it’s done, whip out your shovel and smack the framework away. The house immediately becomes available for use, and your piñatas will find it on their own. All houses can hold an infinite number of the same species, so you only need one house per species.

With the house built, and more than likely two Whirlms as residents in your garden, Leafos tells you that it’s time to romance them to increase your population. We’ll cover romancing in the next section.

Romancing

Attracting pinatas to the garden is all well and good, but the goal of being a piñata gardener is to have your residents create offspring.

All species have different conditions they must meet to become romance-eligible. The only constant is that the species must have a house of their own somewhere in the garden. Otherwise, conditions vary from species to species, typically increasing in difficulty and complexity as the species itself is more advanced.

When visitors aim to become residents, they will act on their own, which can be a bit dangerous. For example, a Lickatoad has to eat a Taffly to become a resident. If you have a Lickatoad visitor and a Taffly resident, the Lickatoad will automatically attack and eat the Taffly unless you can somehow put a stop to it with your shovel, which is highly unlikely.

Conversely, residents will never romance on their own. If a condition requires some direction, you’ll have to do it yourself. For example, Sparrowmints must eat a Whirlm to become eligible to romance. The Sparrowmint will actually leave all Whirlms alone until you give the order.

To direct a piñata to do something, hover the cursor over it, then press A to select it. Part of the cursor will remain on the selected creature. Then, move the cursor you still have control of to the target, and press A again. Piñatas are smart enough to know what to do; targeting a Sparrowmint, then targeting a Whirlm, will cause the Sparrowmint to attack and eat the Whirlm. Simple as that.

For Whirlms, the conditions for romancing is essentially automatic. The romance conditions are the same as the appear, visit, and resident conditions. Whirlms are the only ones this simple, however.

Leafos will tell you that the Whirlms are ready to be romance. Any piñata that is indeed ready will have a pink heart over its head. Both your Whirlms do indeed have the heart, so they’re ready to go. Simply select one, then target the other and press A again.

The two Whirlms will approach each other and do a little dance. Then, you’ll be taken to the Romancing Mini-Game. This has you guiding one of your targets to the other in a maze within a given time limit. The "walls" of the maze are red creatures called Loathers. Loathers explode on contact, which is definitely a mood-killer if I’ve ever seen one.

Also around the maze are coins, but to be honest, these are never worth the effort to get them. At most, you would collect 20 CC per mini-game, which is chicken feed by the time you get past even Whirlms. Instead, concentrate on getting your controlled piñata to the goal.

You move the controlled piñata with the left stick, and can vary between running and walking by how hard you press the stick. This doesn’t change no matter what species you’re trying to romance. What does change is the level of control you have: some species move faster than others, some turn tighter than others, some stop quicker than others. Add that to the increasing complexity of the mazes, and you’ll realize that this is no walk in the garden.

Should you bump into one of the Loathers, you’ll lose a little time, not to mention a "chance." If you run out of chances, you’ll lose the mini-game and be ejected back to the garden. The number of chances you have changes: the first time you attempt to romance any species, you get five chances. Every few times you try again, the chances will decrease, possibly all the way down to one. Once you get the Master Romancer award for a species (explained below), the chances usually bump back up to four or five.

If you fail the romance mini-game and go back to the garden, the two targets will stand there sadly, and their pink hearts will be broken. They’ll be frozen like this for about a minute. After that, the hearts will repair, and you can try again with the same two, or have them mate with others.

After the mini-game concludes, if you were successful, the two piñatas will retreat to their house and engage in a "Romance Dance." The first time any species does so, you’ll see a movie of it. Subsequent romances does not produce the movie automatically, but you can press A while highlighting a house in which the dance is happening to watch the hot piñata-on-piñata action!

Now, this is important... once the romance dance is finished, the romancing conditions reset. If you get two Sparrowmints to romance, for example, they will each have to eat another Whirlm to qualify for a second romance dance. This, I’m sure you notice, can get expensive or deadly.

You may not notice this when you romance Whirlms because although the conditions reset, they just immediately get fulfilled again. After all, if you have at least 1% soil or grass when they start their romance dance, you’ll have the same 1% after they’re done. For all other species however, you’ll need to fulfill the conditions again. There is a way around it, but we’ll touch on that in a later section.

Once the Romance Dance is done, a girl named Storkos will fly to the house and deliver an egg. After a short time, this egg will hatch, and a baby piñata will be born. The baby will wander around for awhile, then grow up and be inside a cocoon. Wait a bit longer, and the cocoon will shatter, freeing the new, fully grown adult!

All adults of the same species can romance provided the romance conditions are met. Yes, this means children can romance with siblings or parents. We managed to romance a Whirlm with its great-great-great-great-grandparent. Pretty nasty, but also rather efficient when you think about it.

Most species will have "variants," which means different color schemes. We’ll go over the details of that later, but suffice to say that all variants can still romance with each other. All that matters is the specific species involved.

Once you romance a given species enough times, you’ll earn the Master Romancer award for that species. Note that every species has its own number of times it must be romanced. You’ll need less than a dozen Sparrowmints to get that one, but you may need upwards of 15 to 20 Tafflys. Being a master romancer doesn’t really help anything specific, but it does add experience petals, which we’ll cover in the next section

Gardening and Experience

So far in this guide, we’ve talked about how to construct a zoo more than garden. There are, however, many trees to plant, flowers to grow, and fruit to harvest. We’ll touch on those here.

Also from here on out, we’ll be giving you more general advice. This is where the game basically stops being its own tutorial, and where it gives you freedom to approach things as you desire.

After setting up your first romancing between two Whirlms, Leafos will give you your very first seed. Seeds can be planted anywhere there is soft dirt, including grass. After you plant your seed, Leafos will also give you a very crappy watering can.

Watering your plants is a very touchy affair. Too much or too little water will kill it. Trees will grow less fruit if they were watered poorly; flowers will never have a poorer quality, provided they actually survive to full blossom.

With your watering can equipped (through the menu or by hitting left on the D-pad), you have two options on how to water: a short pour or a long pour. Note that pouring affects the entire area within the cursor, so if you have several plants close together, you’ll water them all, which you may not desire to do.

One more note: see those blue triangles on the cursor when your watering can is equipped? Those represent how much water you have in your watering can. As you pour, the triangles turn from deep blue to light blue. When they’re all light blue, your watering can is out of water and you have to wait until they fill back up to continue.

Or you would, if there wasn’t a massive cheat to get around it. If you run out of water, simply unequip the watering can by pressing B, then equip it again. Its water amount will be topped off, and you’ll be free to continue gardening. Just be careful not to get too pour-crazy and drown your plants.

Although you can’t do it quite yet, you can hedge your bets with your plants by buying a variety of fertilizers. Trees have a number of "active fruit points" that actually grow the produce; the right fertilizer can increase these points, leading to more fruit, which leads to more money. A properly watered tree that gets no fertilizer will only have half its possible fruit points active, which shows just how important the right fertilizer is.

Fertilizer is also important for non-trees, of course. Giving the right fertilizer to flowers will give them more flowers, which is helpful when you’re going for the different variants. Not to mention, you get awards when you trigger this "bonus growth," thereby increasing your experience petals and possibly your garden level.

Viva Piñata, for better or worse, is all about the basics. Once you’ve got basic care and garden maintenance down, the rest of the game is just altering and building on the basic ideas, doing them quicker and more consistently, to get what you need.

This section will tell you how to finish out those last few rewards to get the greatest garden in the universe. Take special note of the "Gaining XP Painlessly" subsection, which lists a rather underhanded (but quite "legal") exploit to get XP that would normally be annoying to get.

After you’ve owned the garden for a few days, Leafos will introduce a new concept to you: piñata happiness. Hovering the cursor over any resident piñata will make a circle appear toward the bottom of the screen. The circumference will be comprised of a series of blue and brown triangles; this indicates the piñata’s current happiness level. Brown triangles are good, blue ones are bad.

A happy piñata is an easy piñata to deal with. Happy piñatas will listen to your commands more, and react just a bit quicker. Otherwise, happiness is fairly irrelevant, although if a piñata gets too sad, it may run away permanently.

There are several ways to increase happiness, and most of them are pretty easy to do. Renaming a piñata to anything adds a bit, as well as having Willy build a house for that species. Initiating romance, and getting them to successfully have a kid, really gives a boost.

Some species also enjoy being splashed with water from a watering can, especially from the One Pour Wonder. But watch out: some species get really upset when you do this. Don’t rely on this method though, because any boost they get from that wears off fairly quickly.

Finally, you can feed piñatas Joy Candy or Happy Candy to, also temporarily, boost their happiness quite a bit. It’s better to focus on fixing the problem more permanently with houses or children rather than relying on temporary methods, but you can use these short-term boosts to help you out if they’re, say, refusing to mate or otherwise annoying you by refusing orders.

Experience petals, or XP for short, are the main overall goals to gaining new objects, species, and storybook chapters. XP comes to you by doing actions you haven’t done before, primarily through the awards in the game. There are the basic piñata awards, given to you when you do the following things: Get a species to visit Get a species to become a resident Initiate romance for a species Initiate romance for a species enough times to trigger the Master Romancer Find the three color variations of a species

We’ll cover the variants in a later section. Note that this makes a total of seven awards for each species. Each award gives you valuable XP, with later species being worth more for each award. 

You also get awards for growing plants. Each type of plant has four possible awards: basic growth, and three levels of bonus growth. Bonus growth comes from fertilizer, especially the Special Mix that Ivor Bargain sells.

While arguably not as fun as just messing around and seeing what happens, the most efficient method for gaining XP is to "single-focus," or to pick one species, concentrate on getting all its awards, and then moving onto the next. It’s pretty convenient to do this, because... 1. A species must visit before it can do anything else. 2. A species must become a resident before being romanced. 3. Romancing the species is the only way to increase the population after you’ve got two residents. 4. Because you’re practicing the Romancing mini-game anyway, you’ll get good at it to the point where you can play it a dozen times, thereby getting the Master Romancer award. 5. And once you’ve got enough kids, you’ll have plenty to draw from for the mere three variants, plus more if you have to evolve the species to something else.

After that, you can just sell them all off, and the house as well, to make a ton of money. If you ever need them again (say, for a romance requirement of a different species), you can just buy ‘em from Gretchen Fetchem. You’ll have the money to cover it, after all.

Not all species of piñatas and plants can have all the awards. Weeds, for example, never have bonus growth, so all weed variations have only a single award. The piñatas that are buyable from Paper Pets cannot visit (they are only available to buy through Paper Pets after all), so they’ll only have six awards each.

Either way however, completely getting all possible awards for a given species or plant basically taps out all the potential XP for that thing, hence why you should move on afterwards.

In practice, it can become boring trying to single-focus all the way to the end of the game, so you may want to try and juggle two or even three species at once. Any more than that and the incessant romance mini-games may get on your nerves, or the population may actually top off with all the kids running around. We found it best to have two at once, but your mileage may vary.

Also remember that experience and money on a given profile is shared across all gardens on that profile. Having three gardens may be your best bet: one as your "primary," land-based garden; one as your aquatic garden (as some species require MORE THAN HALF the whole garden being water); and one as your garden that exists merely to grow plants.

Having the three gardens allows you to gather all the species without having to constantly reshape the entire thing, and allows you to grow plants and immediately sell them without taking up time and space from your primary garden.

Chocolate Coins, or CC for short, are the currency on Piñata Island. Pretty much everything is for sale, even piñatas, making cash-farming extremely important.

There are several ways to go about getting money, although some methods are clearly better than others. The first and worst method of gathering cash is to clear out the initial junk that is piled randomly around the garden. Shattering the junk with your shovel will net you some cash, but once the junk runs out, so does that source of income.

So, how else can you get money? Playing the romancing mini-game may earn you a bit, but it’s never enough to really sustain you. At most, you’ll get 20 CC from a perfect run in a romancing mini-game. Considering later seeds cost more than that, and buying piñatas will typically run you in the thousands, you can see that 20 CC is just chicken feed.

The best way to get cash in the early days (that is, before you can access the mine) is to sell piñatas. Doing so is actually the natural progression after you’ve earned the awards for a species, including the three variant awards and the master romancer award. After all, what are you going to do with your dozen or so piñatas of a particular species once you have all the awards from it?

Beyond that, one good way to earn money is just through simple farming. Hire a Gatherling, then plant a few trees. Eventually, the trees will bear fruit, which the Gatherling will automatically sell for you. You’ll be making money without any effort!

Further, some piñatas create produce for you if you have the right building. Buzzlegums can make honey, Goobaas can make wool, and so on. If you dress your producing piñata in a particular hat accessory (such as the Beekeeper’s Hat for a Buzzlegum,) the piñata will actually do this for you. Otherwise, you’ll have to give them the orders yourself. Having them automatically produce something, especially if you also have a Gatherling, will simply be gravy to your bank account. What can beat free, constant money?

Once you have access to a mine, you should save up your money to build it. It costs 16,000 CC, but it’s worth every penny. Hire a Diggerling or two, and they’ll dig up rare items. Again, your Gatherling will help here, as she’ll sell off anything that is dug up that can’t be planted. Among the things the Diggerlings may find is a Gem Tree Seed, which can be grown into a tree that drops gems. Yeah, that sounds obvious, but it’s almost literally a money tree. One Gem Tree plus your Gatherling equals some crazy, crazy money.

Once you’ve got the mine and a Gem Tree, you’ll have the CC to buy anything you need to keep attracting, romancing, and selling high-level piñatas. That in turn produces more money, and you can keep the economic steamroller going. Eventually, you’ll probably have more money that you’ll know what to do with.

Absolutely nothing.

Sours are piñatas that are colored red and black. There are eight species in all, and they each do at least one thing to make your garden bleak. The Sour Bonboon starts fights with everyone, for example.

Sours can be "tamed," which is just a fancy way of saying that they have their own resident requirements. If you manage to fulfill these, the regular (sweet?) version of that piñata will be available to be attracted, visit, and become a resident. Sours themselves cannot do anything but appear and visit, although you’ll get an award for a Sour visit.

You’ll fairly quickly start a collection of items called the Tower of Sour pieces. You can access your Tower of Sour through the menu (top-left option), but only if your cursor isn’t on anything. If you’re hovering on a piñata or object, the option will not be available. 

The Tower of Sour is a totem pole with one section for each of the sour species. When the section is "lit," that sour species is prevented from coming to the garden. You can, whenever you wish, toggle any tower piece you wish. This is so you can attract a sour back for the purpose of taming it. Otherwise, there really isn’t a reason to keep a tower piece unlit.

Note that if you have the mystical Dragonache in your garden, sours will stay away no matter what tower pieces you have, lit or otherwise. You can dismiss the Dragonache and extinguish a Tower of Sour piece to temporarily attract that sour species back.

Just a quick word on garden items... Most garden items are purely for decoration. Paving, lighting, and fences help a garden’s appearance and value, but do not actually contribute much.

That’s not to say you should never have them. Some species are attracted by lights or statues, and others actually need to be set on fire to evolve to other species (explained in the Piñata Encyclopedia section). Plus, heck, it’s your garden: make it look pretty if you want to.

Fences do have a practical use. Non-flying piñatas can’t get through them, so they can be useful in separating two sections of the garden for a particular reason. If you have a gate in a fence, you can open it and close it at will. Helpers will automatically open a gate if it’s in their way, and they will close it behind them after passing through. Still, some smaller piñatas may sneak through during this process, so keep your eye on them.

Several garden items have very useful functions, such as the Red Eye Rainbow that reduces the chance of your piñatas getting into fights with each other. However, most of that useful stuff is sold by Ivor Bargain. You’ll definitely want to pay him that 1000 CC as soon as you can to get access to his shop.

Village Shops

Your garden isn’t the only thing on Piñata Island. This section will list the nine shops and what they’re for, plus the all-mighty Piñata Central.

Owned by a very pushy woman named Lottie, Costolot’s Store is your source to buy pretty much anything you need. Seeds, fruit, lights, fences... basically, everything but extremely rare items or piñatas.

Lottie also buys items from you. You can select to sell things from inside her store, but there is a shortcut. Merely hover your cursor over anything, then press B with no tool equipped, and you’ll enter Sell Mode. Press A on everything you wish to sell, and after a confirmation, you’ll sell everything you’ve flagged.

This will be the primary way to acquire money. Selling piñatas especially will net you tremendous capital.

Operating the garden gets a little complex after awhile, especially as it starts growing in physical size. It may be tough to remember to water all your new crops and harvest your old ones when you’re running around trying to stop fights and start romances.

This is where Arfur comes into play. Arfur himself does nothing but run the local inn. There, however, is where you can hire some help. There are several classes of helpers to employ, which we’ll explain in a moment. Selecting to employ one creates a contract, which you place anywhere in your garden. The employee will come by, read it, and start their services.

All helpers have work hours, which you can view on their information screen. If you have built the Helper’s House, they will live in your garden, and will be sure to start their job on the dot. Otherwise, it may take them awhile to actually get started by the time they travel from the town.

To fire an employee, you can peacefully hover the cursor over them, then go into the menu. A special option will be there so you can fire them as necessary. Alternately, you can always do the more fun method of assaulting them with your shovel until they get too sad to stay around.

Here are the classes of helpers you can hire. Not all of them will be available immediately...

• Sprinkling: This one will water your plants for you. Very helpful when trying to grow trees, as that way you won’t have to keep checking it every few seconds to adjust its water level.
• Weedling: Eliminates weeds. This is overrated, as you should take steps to ensure you don’t have weed problems in the first place. Use Weedlings only in emergencies when a weed grew without your knowledge.
• Gatherling: Gatherlings will automatically seek grown fruit and sell them for you. This is helpful with trees, as they’ll automatically tap a tree with fully grown produce and sell them without your direction. The problem is that if you’re trying to grow something specific for a piñata (such as carrots for Bunnycombs), the Gatherling will probably sell them off before the piñata gets to it. In this case, you could just plant more than necessary (say, 10 carrot plants), so even if the Gatherling gets to a few, you’ll have more for the piñata.
• Watchling/Night Watchling: The Watchlings keep an eye out for the garden, ejecting anyone that is deemed a threat. They’ll easily scare away Sours, and they’ll try to scare away Ruffians and Professor Pester, but they’re not always successful in that. They’ll never scare away Dastardos, so be sure to heal piñatas quickly if they’re hurt to avoid them being broken.
• Diggerling: Once you get Willy to build you a mine, the Diggerling will go to work for you in it. The mine is the single greatest source of income in the game, so you may even want two or three Diggerlings helping you out if money (or the Dragonache) is the priority.

Run by Miss Petula (who has one the most alluring voices I’ve ever heard in a video game), this is your one-stop shop for piñata fashions. In addition to accessories, you can purchase several species of piñatas that you can’t get anywhere or any way else.

Petula can also gift your accessories, so you can send them to other players on your Xbox or over Xbox Live. They’re pretty cheap, so there’s some question as to how worth it this is, but I suppose this way an advanced player can give a later, more expensive accessory to a newer player.

Don’t make the mistake of shrugging off accessories as money sinks. Some species need accessories to fulfill romance requirements. Also, piñatas wearing accessories add to their value, which further helps you out if you use them to finish challenges for Piñata Central.

Still, don’t go crazy with accessories, especially for piñatas low on the food chain. Whirlms for example tend to get eaten a lot, and their hunters don’t care if they’re wearing the latest fez. If a piñata is eaten, so is all the money you invested in all his accessories.

After you’ve been in the garden awhile, a beggar will appear. Leafos implies that the beggar is your enemy, but this is not exactly true. You can pay him by hovering the cursor over him, then pressing A. You can pay him now and then, rather than all at once, but the goal is to give him 1000 CC total. After that, he’ll leave you in peace, and shortly after open up this store.

Ivor Bargain sells some extremely rare items. These range from the One Pour Wonder, which never runs out of water and gives plants special water that causes it only need to be watered ONCE to make it fully grow; to the Red-Eye Rainbow, which reduces tension among your population to prevent fights.

Sometimes, he’ll even sell items that you acquired other ways. After enough digging in a mine, for example, a Diggerling may find a Gem Seed, which creates a Gem Tree. After finding one, Ivor will start selling them, in case the tree you have has to be removed for some reason.

Gretchen is a piñata hunter. This doesn’t mean she kills piñatas, but rather tracks them and captures them for gardeners. She can grab any piñata for you, provided that species was at one point a resident (not just an appearance or a visitor) of your garden. For example, if you have a Bunnycomb, but it gets sold or killed, you can go to Gretchen and have her get a new Bunnycomb for you. However, you won’t be able to get a Chewnicorn from her, at least not until you have a Chewnicorn yourself.

Gretchen has two ways to fetch a piñata: standard and express. Standard takes several days, depending on the level of the piñata you want her to capture (Whirlms won’t take nearly as long to capture as a Cinnamonkey for example). Express seems to take a day or less no matter what species you choose.

All species have a base value in CC when you sell them to Lottie. That is exactly how much it costs for a standard fetch, and the price is doubled for an express fetch. The Whirlm has a base value of 100 CC, so it would cost you 100 CC to get a fetched Whirlm on standard speed, or 200 CC for express speed.

You do not have to pay until you actually collect the piñata. Instead, you merely give Gretchen the order of what species you want, and she’ll go out and hunt. You’ll get an alert when she gets back. Then, you can choose to collect the piñata, at which point you’ll pay her the fee; or you can tell her to release the piñata, and you won’t owe her a dime. You probably won’t need her to release a piñata unless you managed to get one while she was out.

Speaking of which: when Gretchen is out, she is unable to be called back. Be sure that when you send her, you’re doing so with a specific target in mind, rather than just trying to keep her busy.

If you have previously dismissed the Dragonache, you can recall it for free through Gretchen.

Many items in the game can be upgraded; a lot of upgrades are needed for late-game species romance requirements. For example, one particular species needs to eat a carrot cake, which is an unbuyable item.

Bart is the closest thing you’ve got to a kitchen. In order to get advanced items, you have to have Bart "tinker" them. He sells three services: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. As you go up, the price gets more expensive, but the chance of success is higher as well. If a tinker fails, the item merely stays in its current form. If it succeeds, it upgrades right on the spot.

Once you pick a level of service through Bart’s shop, you’re taken back to the garden to flag items you want to upgrade. Generally, you can’t upgrade anything but produce, but usually that’s enough. After flagging all the items you want to tinker, confirm it, and Bart will travel from the town to your garden, which make take a minute or so. He’ll then tinker any item you have flagged, and leave after attempting them all once.

Some items are difficult to tinker just because the piñatas are attracted to them. Toadstools are poisonous, yet all the piñatas want to eat them. They can be upgraded to harmless mushrooms, but it’s tough to keep piñatas away from them while Bart is on his way. To solve this little problem, you’ll need to fence off the items. Check out the Advanced Strategies section for information about that.

Willy Builder is a builder named Willy, and he’s got a hammer for a head.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way... Willy’s is the first shop you’ll have access to. His primary job is to build piñata houses, but there are several other buildings he can make as well. The most important of which is the mine, which leads to the ultimate piñata, as well as a crazy amount of money.

The other special buildings he makes are to create produce, such as the Shearing Shed. If you have a Goobaa (sheep), you can direct it to the Shearing Shed. It will pop out, and a ball of wool will appear nearby as well, which you can sell. The earnings potential isn’t bad, but the mine is still better.

Details of how to place buildings is in the Early Days section. Note that you can only place one building at a time, and have to wait until Willy is back at his shop after building one thing before ordering him to build another.

Piñatas can get ill multiple ways, such as suffering the effects of certain weeds to being whacked by your shovel too many times. When that happens, you’ll need to give the Doc a call, or else Dastardos will come by and put the ill one out of its misery.

Calling Patchingo through the village allows you to flag ill piñatas, similar to Bart’s tinkering or when you sell things to Lottie. Still, you can also just hover your cursor over a sick piñata and press A to start the flagging process, saving you a couple clicks and a little loading time.

The post office is available through the main menu, not the village sub-menu. In it, you can buy a crate for only a single CC, then place it in your garden. You can write a short message to attach to it, and pack it with anything you’ve got. That means piñatas, garden items, money, and more.

Once finished, you can send the crate over Xbox Live. Then, when the other player plays, the crate will plop as soon as they load up a garden.

After you’ve been in your garden awhile, you’ll be contacted by the piñatas at Piñata Central (PC for short). The storyline of Piñata Island (and Viva Piñata as a whole) is to raise piñatas strong, so that they are full of candy, and can be shot up to children’s parties to make the little kids happy. As a gardener, you send your piñatas for this task.

In practice, what ends up happening is that PC will issue a challenge. Accept, and you’ll have to place one of their special crates. You fill the crate with their required piñatas (which changes with each challenge), and it gets shipped off. Shortly after that, the shipped piñatas return with a boost to their value and happiness, and generally a reward for the garden.

Doing PC challenges are great to get some Xbox 360 Achievements, but the rewards you get from it aren’t that great in the grand scheme of things. Still, some challenges are so simple ("One of any species") that you may want to just do it for the heck of it.

Declining a challenge brings no repercussion. Failing one (by running out of time) or canceling one (by destroying the crate) doesn’t seem to have a repercussion either, although it takes them longer to give you another challenge.