Around the time of Albedo's first rerun in 2021, I began a quest in Genshin: to craft the maximum possible quantity of his special dish, the Woodland Dream. Today, I finally hit 2000.
This has been around 2.5 years of daily fishing, milk and salt purchasing, butter crafting, and small lamp grass collecting. Never mind artifact grinding, this is the grind I had on my mind.
I was inspired by Youtuber Memorii, who crafted 1000 of Noelle's special dish for her birthday back in 2021. At first I thought I would just craft a hundred Woodland Dreams, which I figured was an impressive but manageable number. But, as I hit 100, I just wasn't satisfied. Why stop at 100 when the item limit is 2000? And so here we are today, 2.5 years later, with a full inventory of Woodland Dreams.
Fun stats, musing about optimised Woodland Dream production, and my attempt at cooking Woodland Dream in real life below the cut:
The Sunshine Sprat recipe uses 3 butter, 3 fish, 1 salt and 1 small lamp grass. Like any 3-star special dish, you have a 15% chance of crafting a Woodland Dream whenever you cook a Sunshine Sprat with Albedo. I was cooking Sunshine Sprats at a rate of around 100 per week, and while I didn't keep any exact records, we can use these facts to make some estimates.
I would have crafted roughly 13k Sunshine Sprats in total, over the course of around 133 weeks. 85% of those (around 11k) would have just turned out as regular Sunshine Sprat. Of course regular Sunshine Sprat has an item limit of 2000 too, which means I would have had to discard (consume) about 9k Sunshine Sprats in the process.
Crafting 13k Sunshine Sprats takes approximately:
40k butter
40k fish
13k salt, and
13k small lamp grass
I exclusively crafted butter from milk, as it was easier and cheaper to buy in bulk than directly buying butter. This means I would have bought around 80k milk, which cost me 7.2 million mora.
Fish can be gathered from the wild as well as purchased from various merchants around Teyvat. In the early days, I was very diligent about collecting fish in the wild, but towards the end I got a bit lazy and started buying fish more. Overall I bought roughly 10k fish, which is around 75 fish per week, and cost me around 2.2 million mora.
(Sidenote: I was using mora gained from expeditions exclusively for this Woodland Dream quest. This gives me a decent estimate of how much I spent on fish, since I can calculate how much mora I received from expeditions over 133 weeks, and my estimates for milk and salt costs are a bit more concrete.)
The other 30k fish were gathered from the wild. With the assistance of Kuki Shinobu and Yelan, who I discovered were very, very good at killing fish efficiently (helpful when you have high ping like me), the fish populations around Yujing Terrace, the western shore of Mingyun Village, and the Dawn Winery shoreline were absolutely decimated. There are many places to gather fish in Teyvat, and I didn't limit myself to these 3 spots, but these I found were the most convenient places.
(Klee, I found, was surprisingly not that good at killing fish. Her bombs are not very easy to aim properly, and the explosion AoE isn't that great.)
Salt cost me around 670k in total. Nothing more really to say about salt.
And finally, small lamp grass. I had an intensive teapot farm going, and grew nearly 2.5k small lamp grass. But the teapot farm could only give me 8 lamp grass every 3 days, so the bulk of lamp grass, the remaining 10.5k, was harvested from the wild. Whispering Woods and Wolvendom are good sources of lamp grass (17 and 19 lamp grasses respectively), and there are 4 west of Dawn Winery, which were also convenient to collect while I was fishing. Nahida was a blessing for easy lamp grass collection.
In total, I spent around 10.1 million mora on this quest. I don't want to try to calculate the actual number of hours I spent gathering fish and small lamp grass because that will make me cry.
This screen makes it totally worth it though.
I did take this quest at a pretty leisurely pace, admittedly, so just for fun, I thought I'd calculate how long it would take to craft 2000 Woodland Dreams at the most optimised pace. I'd say there are two cases, one where you have unlimited access to resources in co-op worlds, and one where you only have access to your world.
For the first case, you can assume unlimited fish and small lamp grass since these can be gathered from as many co-op worlds as necessary. The limiting factor ends up being butter. It takes 5 minutes to craft butter from milk, which means 288 butter can be crafted every day. (This takes 576 milk per day, which is not a problem, as 600 milk can be purchased daily across Teyvat as of version 4.2.) Additionally, 40 butter can be purchased weekly. Thus you can craft 96 Sunshine Sprats every day, plus an additional 13⅓ each week. This comes to about 685 Sunshine Sprats per week, and on average, 102.75 Woodland Dreams per week. Thus, it would take just over 19 weeks to craft 2000 Woodland Dreams at the most optimised pace possible, about 7x faster than it took me.
If you only have access to your own world, the limiting factor becomes small lamp grass. 77 lamp grass can be collected from the wild every 48 hours. Also, every 3 days, 8 lamp grass can be harvested from the teapot, and 5 bought from Flora. Thus, every 6 days, you can collect 257 lamp grass, and thus can craft 257 Sunshine Sprats every 6 days. On average, this gives you 38.55 Woodland Dreams every 6 days. Thus it would take you just over 44 weeks in total to craft 2000 Woodland Dreams at the most optimised pace when you only have access to your own world. This is about 3x faster than it took me.
But I was already getting quite tired of spending the measly few minutes needed every day to catch fish towards the end. I had no interest in doing it "more optimally" - it was a marathon rather than a sprint, to use a cliche.
Anyway to celebrate this historic moment, I cooked some Woodland Dream in real life. I followed the recipe in this video.
The fish used is barramundi fillet (which was the best size and shape out of all the fish at the local supermarket). I had just as much trouble drawing with the sauce as the guy in the video. But tastewise the dish turned out pretty good! The sauce especially was very nice (I slathered a lot more sauce on when I started eating). This is a dish I'd definitely make again, but I don't think I'd bother making it look fancy like this. So basically, I'd make regular old Sunshine Sprat in the future instead, which I suppose is fitting.
I shall now proclaim myself #1 Albedo Fan (culinary division) 🥇🎣
and oh my GOD guys she has five dishes. her lucky number. instead of five mouthfuls she’s eating five DISHES OHHH MY GOD KUJOU SARA IS HEALING MY BABY IS HEALING MY BABY😭😭😭
GUYS . GUYS. the title of her letter is change… and she’s going thru the same arc ei did… guys. She’s learning how to talk to and understand people. STOP
And hER BROTHER IS SUPPORTING HER THROUGH IT!! HES HELPING HER LEARN SHE HAS AUTONOMY !! SHE IS MORE THAN THE SHOGUN’S WEAPON!!! THERE IS MORE SHE IS WORTH THAN THE STRICT RELIGIOUS GROOMING!!!! my angel ohh my gOD my baby. my baby. she’s been getting happier and happier hoyo you better give her a pet soon. a dog or a cat. giVE HER ONE NOOOWWWW
happier and happier every year… i expect a full BEAM next year. SURROUNDED BY THE INAZUMA CAST. IMMINENTLY!!!!!
You seem surprised. Did you not expect me to prepare my own meals?
My duties with the Shogunate leave me little time for such things. Given that, I suppose your reaction is understandable.
Even so, on the rare occasions when I have time to spare, I find cooking rather enjoyable. It offers a welcome taste of ordinary life, would you not agree?
It is nothing special — only a few simple home-cooked dishes. Still, if you do not mind, please sit and join me.
Want to lie down with this little one for a bit? let's not let this lovely afternoon sunshine go to waste. It's nap time, so no more "foxy business"... Ahem, I just mean I'd like it to stop chewing on my hair. This little troublemaker is quite clever. It's probably doing this to get me to play with it. Guess I'll just have to do what it wants. If you don't have any other plans for later, how about you join me for a walk by the lake?
I think that Kujou Sara should be stuck as a bird for a while. For enrichment.
Feed her a grape. Or seeds. Carry her in a pocket or in a hand. Let her build a nest, or hang out with a murder of crows who try to preen and care for her. Put her in a cardboard box with ventilation
The Tenryou Comission wondering why there's a very fat, very serious crow on Kamaji's shoulder is also an image I like
I agree 100%! :> Imagining the various people in her life trying to care for crow!Sara (and playing keepaway with Yae XD) is very very fun. Especially as you know Sara would be focused on trying to find Solutions so that she can go back to being her Shogun's loyal general. But on the other hand being cared for is... kind of nice? Is her Shogun petting her?
Sara is not going to let being a bird keep her from reviewing the troops! Which Kamaji should be getting into the habit of doing anyway, so she can supervise.
