Cruise ship
The Cruise ship is a limited-time cooperative event where Captain James brings tourists to the farm and needs a hand filling the pantry and the cargo hold. I take on tasks either as shared ones together with the rest of the cooperative or as a personal fallback, and completed tasks earn me cruise points that count towards the league leaderboard of the whole cooperative. The higher the cooperative finishes in the league, the better the rewards waiting in the next run of the event.
The Cruise ship pays off mainly for an active cooperative where the members split the tasks between them instead of letting them sit around - without a cooperative the event cannot be played at all. If the cooperative pulls together and someone invests in jokers for the whole team, moving up to a higher league and getting better rewards is realistic within a single run.
Captain James brings tourists to the farm and waits for a hand
Captain James's cruise ship drops anchor right at the pier on the farm, and the crew and passengers immediately give the whole cooperative something to do. The job is to fill the ship's pantry and cargo hold, and every completed task adds cruise points to the cooperative's shared account.
The event cannot be played without a cooperative - without joining one or founding my own I do not get into the Cruise ship at all. Cruise points add up for the whole cooperative and decide how high it finishes in the current league and what rewards it gets at the end of the run.
The cooperative handles shared tasks together while personal tasks are a fallback
Shared tasks are visible to the whole cooperative at once, but only one member can work on each of them - which is why it pays to agree inside the cooperative who has taken which task, so the work is not done twice. Once a task is completed a new one appears after a short wait, and the wait can be skipped.
The cooperative leader or the deputies can also unlock four extra task slots with gold from the cooperative account - the unlocking can only be repeated a limited number of times and lasts only until the end of the current event.
If nothing in the shared offer suits me, I also have personal tasks available - they are a bit easier, but they give a smaller reward and cannot be improved with a joker. I treat them mainly as filler for when all the interesting shared tasks are already taken.
Jokers and task boosters increase the cruise points I earn
I either buy jokers for myself as a personal bonus, or have the cooperative leader buy them from the cooperative account as a bonus for the whole team at once - the game tracks both types of bonus separately and their total effect adds up. A joker also only applies to members who were already in the cooperative the moment it was activated, and the effects of several jokers add up, even though their durations do not.
On top of that there are boosters aimed directly at a shared task in progress - they add points to the reward, add a difficulty star, or extend the task's time limit. They only work on tasks from the cooperative's shared offer, not on personal ones, and they are used up when applied.
Leagues and the leaderboard decide promotion and better rewards
- Beginner league
- Bronze league
- Silver league
The cooperative's current league placement is visible right in the event overview, together with how many cruise points are still missing until the next reward.
The best cooperatives in each league move up and play for even better rewards in the next run of the event. After the event ends, which the game announces with the message The cruise ship has set sail, the placements are still being calculated - even if a cooperative does not manage to move up under its own steam, it can still climb higher if another cooperative above it in the leaderboard falls apart.
Besides the cooperative leaderboard, the event also has an overview of the members inside my own competition group, where I can see which of my fellow members are doing best in the event - I take it as motivation not to fall behind.
Two compass roses open two different shops
The gold compass rose is earned for placements in the Cruise ship event and is used to build, upgrade and activate the harbor statue by the cruise pier. The silver compass rose, on the other hand, is collected along the way for completed tasks and is spent in the event shop.
In the joker shop I buy jokers for myself or for the whole cooperative, and in the cruise shop I spend silver compass roses on exclusive items, including useful task boosters.
