LogFAQs > #940220774

Grimlyn posted...

The bog standard passive sidequests are just there as bonuses for as they happen, but the main sidequest chain stuff is then about community development, building the town's relationships and deciding their stories (as the choices you make branch the townsfolk off to make different decisions and result in different relationships with other NPCs), and so you'll know which quests these are because they'll be coming from named NPCs that show up in the Affinity Chart.

Raising affinity with the a region opens up more of its residents sidequests, and also lets you trade with everyone for rarer items - for instance let's take Dorothy:

Colony 9 Affinity : Dorothy trade items
1* : Small Shell
2* : Prairie Dragonfly
3* : -
4* : Dark Grape
5* : Caterpile Silk

Each resident of course has different items and not every resident will have a new trade item with every single affinity rank up - like Dorothy doesn't have anything new from 3*, but others might.

Also fun fact with trades, NPCs also have a designated item(s) that will give you if you over-trade them (you give something decently more valuable than what you're trading them for)

Raising area affinity comes from talking to NPCs and completing their quests. Interesting note is not all decisions you make to a quest result in the same affinity game, such as choices that result in less happier people - some quests may even drop your affinity no matter what (but obv lead to other quests raising them back up). Really this is more detail than anyone needs to at all be concerned with, just some interesting tidbit.

Yeah, there's no one true way to maximize the affinity chart. For reasons you stated, but also because for Colony 6 there are a couple points where you pick between different people to recruit, so some move and others don't.

It can also be a lot of pointless busy work getting all the connections, because sometimes a person only makes the comment needed for an affinity change during a single hour of the day as they're walking from one spot to another. Or you do a sidequest for one person, but you still have to talk to a different person for them to say something like "oh wow they're really turning their life around" and then the chart gets updated. If you only ever talk to NPCs once, like in most JRPGs, that affinity chart will be missing a bunch of stuff.

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Change is weird.