Rebuilding the Faerie Village Side Quest - Breath of Fire III
When Ryu becomes an adult you'll be able to start a side quest at the Faerie Village which involves helping them rebuild the town. Just like when you were a kid, you can access the village by finding a circle of flowers on the World Map. Standing overtop of this circle will make a ? appear above you; press X when this happens to enter the village.
In order to rebuild the Faerie Village we'll need to give faeries different assignments and help them organize their village. As you get into random encounters out in the world time will pass in the village. This will result in faeries finishing their tasks, more faeries showing up and/or other changes in the village. Below is a picture of the screen where you'll be doing most of this work.
In the top row you can see all available Faeries. The right hand boxes are the main tasks you want the faeries to perform; Hunting, Clearing or Building. Hunting is the most important of these because your faeries need food to survive, you'll usually want to make sure your food is always going up and/or always at 99. Clearing and Building are kind of the same thing, before you can build you must clear the land. You clear the land, then build, then clear the land again then build the next structure. Rinse/repeat.
Below the food/culture counter you'll find 8 empty boxes, these are the houses you will make through building and clearing. You only have 1 house available when you first start this side quest. We can have faeries research Jobs or Culture at these buildings as well as perform those jobs. You only start with one house and I would recommend putting 1 or 0 faeries into it at first. I did 2 hunting and 1 in the house my first time visiting.
Culture always comes first, make sure to increase your village's culture up to 7 then switch every faerie to studying Jobs instead. Culture gives you a permanent increase to how fast your village does stuff and it never goes down. It caps at 7 so it's best to get that out of the way first then focus on other things.
To make things somewhat easier for you I have made a list of the important things you can do at the Faerie Village and given you a brief explanation of why they're important and what they do.
Food: Just like humans, faeries need food to survive. Normally you'll want at least half or 2/3 of your colony hunting for food. You'll have to adjust it as time goes on to find a happy balance, it all depends on the skill of the faeries assigned to the task. When you hit 99 Food you can start taking faeries off the task until the number starts to decrease again.
Culture: You can assign Scholars to raise the Culture of your city. The higher the culture the less random battles you need to get into to make the city progress.
Clearing & Building: In order to build more houses you will first need to clear some land. Clearing and building work this way in sequence, once you clear land you're able to build. The workers won't clear an additional plot until the first one is finished being built.
Jobs: When you advance the town a little bit you'll be able to start assigning jobs to faeries. There is a boat load of different things they can do, all of which are mentioned below in the jobs section.
Faerie Stats: Every faerie comes with four different stats, they are represented by the bars under their name when you inspect them (pictured below). Sometimes they can have 0 in a stat, so if you don't see a stat bar that's why. As you can probably guess, the longer the bar the higher the skill.
Red Bar: Hunting and Exploring
Green Bar: Building and clearing
Dark Blue Bar: Merchant, Inn and Antique Shop
Light Blue Bar: Scholar, Copy Shop and Fortune Teller
If you get a faerie with really low stats or one that has a lot of green or light blue you can "reroll" them by sending them on expeditions at the Explorer buildings. Research the Explorer Job and then put faeries you don't care about into the building. They'll probably die and then new ones will be recruited in their place.
Faerie Jobs
When you assign a faerie to a house you are able to pick a job for them, when you first start this side quest the only job that will be available is a Scholar. Like with Clearing and Building, getting into random encounters will advance the progress that your Jobs make. When you first recruit a new merchant you're going to have to wait a bit until they start stocking good items. If you have an Explorer, you'll have to wait until they bring back items. The same is true for a Gift Shop, random battles are how you advance the gift giving timer.
Culture is another way to advance how long it takes for your town to do things. I am not sure how much of an improvement it is, but from everything I read online it says that Culture caps out at 7 and each rank decreases how many random battles you need to make advancements.
Scholar: A Scholar is a job that will build Culture and also unlock other jobs.
Merchant: When opening up a merchant shop they give you too many options. Items is self explanatory, Handyman is a mix of items and weapons and then Weapons is just weapons. They also will ask you Ability or Speed, there are slight differences between them all but when it comes to weapons Ability gives you the best stuff. Honestly though most of the stuff you can buy is not very good by the time you get to the 3/4 point in the game. I changed all my Merchants into Explorer or Gift Shops by the time I sailed across the ocean and did The Black Ship stuff.
Inn: Self explanatory. If you assign multiple faeries to the Inn they will tell you things about your playthrough like how many battles you've fought.
Gift Shop: The faerie here will give you items; the more random battles you get into before coming to talk to the faerie the better your item will be. For me they often give items that give me permanent stat boosts (which I am more than happy with). If I had to guess I often wait around 30~ish battles to go talk with them.
Fortune Teller: Predicts the future. Don't make one of these.
Explorer: You can send faeries out on expeditions. They will bring something back if successful which can be anything from a weapon or piece of armor to an item that gives you a permanent stat boost. I find myself using the Explorer job mostly to recycle bad faeries, since they have a chance of dying while finishing the mission you can get rid of faeries you don't want this way.
Antique Shop: Any item you have that has the description 'Appears valuable' can be sold here for extra.
Music Shop: It plays songs from the game for you.
Casino: You can play a game called High and Low or a Number Guessing Game. High and Low is for money but the Number Guessing is for prizes. You can win a Goo Knight Sword through this, if you guess the number right on the first try from the second faerie at the casino. If you're planning on trying this I would recommend save states.
Copy Shop: The last job you can pick for faeries is a Copy Shop. You give them an item and they will make a copy of it. Sometimes they can fail to copy an item in which case you'll normally just get it back... However there is a small chance they will give you a Riceball instead of your item.
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