Guide to a Happy Garden

Published September 9, 2008

The beauty of Rare's Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise is the freedom it grants the player. There's really no right or wrong way to play the game.

Those gravestones should help tame those Crowlas.

But there are a number of essential tips that should help any gardener, no matter their style of play, experience the joy of discovery, and the thrill of a well-run garden.

Sections
A well organized garden goes a long way toward easy maintenance. Take the time to section off areas specific to just flowers, and another for vegetables and fruit. Create a spacious section specific to bushes and trees, and make sure your terrain types (such as short grass, desert, long grass) exist in single, larger sections rather than scattered about in smaller chunks.

This way, you'll know precisely where to go when you're alerted to a dying flower or plant. Similarly, with well-defined terrain borders, you can be reasonably sure of where to find your various piñatas.

Always Plant
Never ignore new seeds or even items as they often entice new piñatas to appear and visit your garden. Make sure then to talk to Seedos and Costolot consistently, and you should never be at a loss for new piñatas, particularly in the early going.

Quick-select your piñatas with the shoulder buttons.

Know Your Piñatas
There's more to your piñata than just luring them into residency and even romancing them. Many of them have specialized skills, the ability to evolve, or unique likes of which you should be aware. For example, knowing your newfound Cluckles can help hatch an egg faster, or that your Shellybean can eat weeds without getting ill is enormously helpful.

Whatever the case, there's a lot of useful info in your Trouble in Paradise encyclopedia. Select a piñata, tap Y to bring up their Information, and tap Y again to access their encyclopedia entry. Do yourself a favor and read up on any new piñata the moment they enter your garden. You might be surprised at just what treasures you uncover.

Not So Many
While you'll no doubt want to make residents out of as many piñatas as possible, you'll have a much easier time doing so in isolated batches. Sporting two dozen piñata species in a single garden creates chaos, confusion, and often danger for many of your charges.

Try selling off a few species to make room for your new piñata residents whenever you're feeling a little overwhelmed. Keep your garden population manageable.

Challenge Time
If you're interested in progressing the game's core storyline (recovering the lost piñata data files), make sure to spend plenty of time completing Langston's challenges.

Not only are there a number of achievements tied to these challenges, but often you'll find clues within the challenges themselves on how to successfully experiment with your piñatas. For example, a France-based challenge that required a blue Bispotti suggests right in the text to feed the Bispotti a bluebell seed. Voila! That's one variant Bispotti without having to experiment.

Having trouble managing everything? Bring in a buddy offline or over Xbox LIVE.

Romancing the Home
Want to pair up those Jameleons for a bit of romance, but you're stumped by the "???" Romance Requirement in your journal? You can bet that whatever the piñata, they're going to require a house courtesy of Willy the Builder.

Helper Schedules
Helpers like Weedling and Sprinkling are invaluable as they handle much of the busy work around the garden, freeing you to focus on the piñatas themselves. That said, they don't work twenty-four hours a day, so be sure you know their schedules.

For example, since Watchling only works from 3:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., you'll need to be on alert for sour piñatas in the afternoon through the early evening. Check each Helper's schedule by selecting them and pressing Y for Information.

Taming the Desert/Arctic
Baiting and trapping piñatas in the Dessert Desert or Pinarctic regions is only half the battle. From there, you've got to visit the post office and unpack your newfound piñata in your garden. Even then, they're only visiting, so you'll need to tinker further with your garden to get them to stay on as a resident.

Nice hat!

Only unpack these rarer piñatas when your garden is well maintained and free of chaos as it typically takes a good deal of focus and experimentation to get these piñatas to stay.

Produce Cash
While romancing piñatas and selling off the offspring can certainly bring in the Chocolate Coins, you can also make barrels of cash by growing produce and selling that off as well. Seeds usually cost very little, so your profit margins are enormous and your time commitment relatively small.

Cordoned Off
Once you've increased the size of your garden once or twice, it's time to consider placing fences, complete with gates, to further section off your piñatas. The more varied and exotic your population becomes, the more you want to eliminate fights to help make sure you don't lose a particularly valuable or prized piñata.

Try to create a couple of "stables" to help keep your prized piñatas safe. Just remember, gates won't keep out flying piñatas.

Experiment!
If there's any one tactic that will continue to surprise and delight Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise players, it's constant experimentation. Wonder what will happen if that Flutterscotch eats some watercress, if that Taffly catches on fire, or a pumpkin gets a dash of orange fertilizer while it grows? Give it a try!

No matter how strange an idea sounds, it's always worth trying. That's the beauty and genius of Viva Piñata, and while the preceding tips should help you along the way, creativity and daring are often rewarded, so never stop trying to come up with your own unique strategies.

Article by Ryan Treit