At the Triassea Picnic, dinos from the valley are celebrated by including them in the feast. Dinotic holidays are explained in detail in this guide. So, do you need detailed information about the Triassea Picnic? This Paleo Pines Triassea Picnic guide includes bonus information for rare dino opportunities!
This is the guide Wobblegong it was created by. You can find the author’s link at the end of the guide.
Paleo Pines Triassea Picnic Guide
The Triassea Picnic is a Veridian Valley holiday that happens around the 19th of Triassea every game-year. The picnic celebrates the valley’s dinos by including them in the feast: people put out picnic blankets and spend the day with their neighbors, but they also make a treat pile for wild dinos to come enjoy after they leave. Festive! And this Paleo Pines Triassea Picnic guide has the details!
Players get festival tickets from Owynn as thanks for adding treats to the pile. More treats added = more tickets gifted. Other characters may gift a spare ticket or two as well, so be sure to talk to everyone. These tickets are gained from/used in every holiday so I won’t go into depth about them, but note that Corlan will trade you Triassea Picnic decorations in exchange for tickets. The achievement “Living The Cottage Life” requires a full set of these specific decorations so achievement hunters may want to save tickets for this holiday.
But the tickets aren’t the fun part of the picnic. The fun part is that the Triassea Picnic brings rare dinos!
Picnic Summary/tl;dr
- The Triassea Picnic pile attracts at minimum uncommon dinos, with boosted rare/ultra rare odds, the day after the picnic.
- Pile flavor is determined by what flavors you put into it; pile flavor attracts species which would like that flavor of poppin.
- Use your cheapest/no-star treats because quality doesn’t matter.
- Fill the pile completely (240 treats in stacks of 20) to make it last THREE days for as many special dinos as possible! This also gets you the “Triassea Picnic Master” achievement.
Details, Mechanics & Bug-Avoiding Tips
The day of the picnic dawns with a small random-flavor treat pile at the center of the picnic (near Mari’s house where the Coelophysis normally are). As you add dino treats to the pile (crops, foraged plants, etc) it changes the pile’s flavor and size.
Pile Flavor
- Pile flavor is visible as a topper on the pile that looks like the corresponding poppin flavor.
- Pile flavor determines which dinos will be attracted. For example, a Crunchy pile can potentially attract any species which could be befriended with a Crunchy Poppin.
- Pile flavor is determined by what is put into it: if you add more of one flavor than any other, the pile will change to/be that flavor. Because every treat has two flavors it’s best to use at least two treats which only overlap in one flavor. For example Carrot (juicy + crunchy) and Potato (earthy + crunchy) only share the crunchy flavor, leading to a Crunchy pile.
- Caution: random characters will walk by the pile and add tiny amounts of treats to it through the day. If you contribute only a small amount of treats, or you add very equal amounts of flavors, this can potentially change the pile’s flavor!
- Treat star quality does NOT matter. Using 0☆ treats gets the same result as 3★ treats, so use your cheapest/least valuable crops.
Pile Size
- If you add just a few treats you’ll get a smaller/regular pile. This will attract dinos the day after the picnic.
- If you fill up the pile’s entire inventory in one go you’ll get a Giant-sized pile. This requires 240 treats (12 slots × 20 items per slot). A Giant-sized pile will attract dinos for three days after the picnic! The first time you do this you should get the “Triassea Picnic Master” achievement. (Caution: don’t halfway fill the pile and come back with more– this is buggy and can lead to the pile “forgetting” what you added the first time. Do it in one interaction!)
(If someone wants to test intermediate-sized piles and report back, I’d appreciate it!)
Do It For The Rare Dinos!
No matter how your pile turns out it will lure some dinos the next day (usually Triassea 20th). These lured dinos will appear next to the picnic pile and they have special spawn rules: they will be at minimum an Uncommon color/pattern and have better odds than usual of being Rare or Ultra Rare! The Triassea Picnic is a great way to look for harder-to-find dinos, or just see a rare oddball you hadn’t encountered before.
And because we can influence the picnic flavor, we can influence which species appear at all. If there’s something you’re specifically looking for, make the picnic pile its favorite flavor! There’s still a big dose of random to what appears but this is the one time of the game-year that you get some power over the dino-odds.
Giant-sized piles are hard to pull off for your very first picnic (since you’re probably broke with five carrots to your name) but once you have the treats they’re great: each of the three days attracts another set of dinos following the pile’s rules. Players semi-reliably report they see at least one Ultra Rare per Giant-sized pile; it’s possible to get multiple! Rare dino hunters rejoice.
That’s The Picnic! Happy Dino Hunting!
Stop here if all you want to know is how to pick a pile flavor and see some nifty pals!
But if you’ve got the dino fever and won’t settle for anything but the best….
ADVANCED Picnic Cheese: Savescumming For Maximum Dino Satisfaction
Alright, now that you know how the picnic pile works my rare hunters & other fellow madlads are likely to wonder: “what if I’m not impressed by what shows up? What if I want to aim for something better without waiting for next year’s picnic?” Good news, you can do that!
Kind of!
Paleo Pines Dinosaur Generation
This is the one part I’m going to put a disclaimer on: I’m not sure how it works on other versions/consoles. But I’ve tested this in my own Steam game so I’m confident for this one!
The term “savescumming” is widely used across all single-player video games. If you’ve never heard it before, it’s any kind of approach where the player uses the game’s save/reload mechanics for personal gain. The most common form goes something like: save right before something, take your best shot. If you don’t get the result you want, quit out and reload from the moment right before you tried, and try again. Keep quitting and reloading until you get the outcome you want!
“That sounds… tedious.” It sure is! But if the game would punish failure too severely, or restrict how many tries you could attempt, players become likely to decide exit-reload-try-again is the lesser of two annoyances.
Anyways, you can’t really do that in Paleo Pines, not for dinos.
The way Paleo Pines is set up, every save file has a unique seed number. To spare you the pain of mathematics, this means that different save files see different dinos (which looks and feels pretty random!) but all wild dinos past, present and future in a given file are predetermined. No matter how many times you reload your save, a given day’s dinos will never ever change. This is actually super helpful in case of rollbacks or mix-ups: if you saw an albino styracosaurus on Year 1 Jurassos 6, and you have to replay starting from Year 1 Jurassos 1, the albino styracosaurus will be right there waiting for you when you make it back to Jurassos 6!
This does however make the picnic a little tricky: just reloading that day, or the day before, won’t change what dinos show up. They’re predetermined too!
But there’s one variable we can mess with. We have one thing we can change: pile flavor.
Pile Flavor Part 2: Yes We Can
The rule is that only species which like the picnic pile’s flavor can be attracted to it. Because every species in Paleo Pines only likes one flavor, this means the pile determines a very set list of which dinos can appear, and which can’t. That’s enough wiggle room to go fishing for rares!
So the cheese goes something like: make the pile into one flavor. Zoom ahead through the subsequent days, checking what dinos appear. Then roll back to the day of the picnic and try a different flavor. Because of the seed number what you get for a given flavor is what you get: your Year 4 picnic with a Crunchy pile will always be your Year 4 Crunchy results no matter how many times you rewind. But that just means we can take notes, go back in time, and then try another flavor, confident that we’ve seen the Year 4 Crunchy results and can compare them to Year 4 Juicy, Year 4 Fragrant, etc. Once you’ve explored a result you like, all you gotta do is rewind to the picnic day and play normally from there, setting the picnic pile however you want.
Cheese How-To: The Picnic
- Save the night before/morning of the picnic. This is the save you’ll be returning to, make sure you can find it/remember which it is!
- Grab your 240 treats with the correct flavor profile (laziest is 120 & 120 which only overlap in one flavor) and head to the picnic. Add it all to the pile, make sure the poppin-like topper looks right, and head back to the ranch.
- Without saving, go to sleep.
- Wake up, grab your favorite sprinter, ignore your ranch chores (you’ll do them when you play through the day for real!) and sprint out to the picnic pile.
- Observe the dinos! Take notes/screenshot/record what you find so you can remember later. Sprint back to the ranch.
- Repeat steps 3-5 for pile day 2.
- Repeat steps 3-5 for pile day 3.
- Quit out, go to Load, and find the save file from step 1. You have two options: if you really loved what you saw and have made up your mind already, load this save and play the days normally. Otherwise…
- Repeat step 2 with a different flavor. (It doesn’t matter what order you test flavors in, just make sure it’s a different one so you are testing.) 240 treats into the pile, confirm the topper is correct, head back to the ranch.
- Repeat steps 3-7 (don’t save, sleep, check, sleep, check, sleep, check) until you’ve seen all three days’ results for this flavor.
- Repeat step 8: did you see something you MUST have? Cool, you’re done, reload the step 1 save and play from there. Still want to fish? On to the next flavor!
- Keep going until you’ve tested all five flavors or decided “these are the ones I want”, whichever comes first. Whenever you make up your mind just open the step 1 save and play on, armed with the knowledge of which flavor to make the pile.
If you test all five flavors that should be about 45 rarity-boosted dinos: 3 per day for 3 days, times five flavors. That’s a lot of rarity-boosted dinos! Please note that there’s no guarantees you’ll get something you like because Random is still a fickle beast. But if you check all five flavors and don’t like any of it, at least you confirmed this year’s a dud for you. There’s always next Triassea Picnic!
Good luck and happy dinos to you!
