Vinnie is one of the NPCs in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life who plays a very important role on the farm. This sentient plant has the ability to crossbreed different crops and fruits to come up with new hybrids that not only sell better but also look bizarre. Read ahead as we talk about Vinnie and its crossbreeding ability in Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life.
How to unlock Vinnie
To unlock Vinnie, simply play through the game until you reach Spring 1, Year 2. At the start of the year, Takakura will call you into his house, where the potted Vinnie sits in the corner of the room. You can then talk to Vinnie like any other NPC.
How to unlock Crop Mixing
To unlock crossbreeding, you will need to talk to Vinnie plenty of times until he offers you his crossbreeding services. Vinnie is a very talkative plant and will ramble about stuff, but just keep listening to him and agree to everything it says, and if he stops and asks if you want to continue, simply say yes and go through his dialogues again. Eventually, once your friendship level has reached around 90%, Vinnie will ask you what you need, and you will get a new option to choose: “I’d like to mix some crops”.
Selecting that option will allow you to start mixing two crops together to form a hybrid crop.
How the Crop Mixing works
Crops (and Fruits) can be fed to Vinnie to get a chance to create a new hybrid crop. Both crops should be different from each other but should be within the same type and tier, i.e., crops can be mixed with crops, but crops cannot be mixed with fruit or with a hybrid crop. Both seeds and a crop/fruit can be used to feed Vinnie. If the combination is invalid or fails, you will still get a seed bag of the crop that you placed in the left box.
Here’s a quick guide on the combinations that can be fed to Vinnie, including the special flower hybrids that result in crops with special attributes:
- Crop x Crop or Fruit x Fruit yields a Tier 1 Hybrid Crop (HC1) or a Tier 1 Hybrid Fruit (HF1)
- HC1 x HC1 or HF1 x HF1 yields a Tier 2 Hybrid Crop (HC2) or a Tier 2 Hybrid Fruit (HF2)
- Crop/Fruit x Trick Blue Flower yields the “Blue” variant of that Crop or Fruit
- Crop/Fruit x Sagesoil Flower yields a variant that is strong enough to be planted in any type of soil.
- Crop/Fruit x Happy Lamp Flower yields a variant that can be planted in any season of the year.
- Crop x Upseed Flower yields an S Rank variant. *Fruits and seeds from a fruit tree cannot be mixed with an Upseed Flower.
Take note that despite mixing a valid combination of crops, there is still a chance that it will fail; simply try again until you get a result.
Also, the Upseed Flower can only be used on Crops and not on seeds and fruits from Fruit Trees. However, if you mix a B-rank fruit tree seed with an S-rank crop seed, the resulting seed should be an S-rank fruit tree seed.
Check out our Hybrid Crops guide which contains all of the known combinations for all hybrids in the game.