The third Pop-Up Exhibit in Two Point Museum, Elementary Shoal, challenges you to breed a large number of fish in your Aquariums and sell them quickly for a profit. Unlike the previous exhibitions, this one starts you with a nearly-empty museum, giving you more freedom in developing your approach.
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Who doesn’t want a little more breathing room (or space to cram more exhibits) in their museum?
However, Elementary Shoal also forces you to rely on the game’s most-randomized mechanic. If you want to have any shot at earning a Gold rating, you’ll need to either be very lucky, or have a plan to skew the odds in your favor.
Fish Farm Exhibition Goals
Your rating in the Fish Farm Exhibition is based on the total money you receive from sales of fish with the Select Specimen trait; that is, fish that were hatched at the museum using an Egg Cup. You’ll need to earn money through the usual methods as well just to keep the museum running, but income from donations, ticket sales, and everything else don’t count toward your final score.
Fish that don’t have the Select Specimen trait can still be sold, but won’t count toward your score.
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Rating
Total Fish Sales
Bronze
$50,000
Silver
$75,000
Gold
$100,000
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Monthly Auto-Selling
In this scenario only, all fish hatched in the museum are automatically sold on the first day of each month. You can manually sell them before that, which is useful if you need to clear space in an Aquarium or get some cash quickly. Both automatic and manual sales count toward the objective.
The scenario only lasts 361 days rather than a full 365; as such, you have until December 28 to reach your goal. That means that you need to manually sell your December hatches, since the game will end before the auto-sell day on January 1.
Getting Started
The museum is mostly empty, with a few Wetlantean Artifacts and a staff that could generously be described as a skeleton crew. Hire more Marine Experts, Assistants, and Janitors, and even though there are no criminals in this scenario you’ll want one to two Security Guards to pick up donations.
A minimal Training Room isn’t a bad idea either, as it can help your Experts get useful skills for Expeditions.
The starting Aquarium has a variety of specimens, but only one breeding pair, the Clownfish. Keep one Expert at home to maintain the tank, while the other goes out to Hogsport Peninsula for cheap, easy freshwater specimens. Ideally, you should be able to fill the initial tank with a breeding pair of Clownfish, Flying Fish, and Floating Fish within the first few weeks.
If you end up with multiple pairs, build a new Aquarium with a separate Egg Cup; this will create two separate hatching queues, as having more than two specimens of a fish in the same Aquarium doesn’t seem to affect the spawning rate.
At the same time, build a basic Gift Shop with a single cash register and the essentials; trinkets, books, toys and plushies, all themed around Marine Life.
Completing Side Objectives
You’ll be given side objectives one at a time; when you complete one, a new task will be assigned immediately. Each time you fulfill an objective, you’ll get some new fish in your inventory. These are often larger fish than your Experts have any hope of catching in the wild, given that you only have a year and they’ll never be able to level up in time for the more dangerous Expeditions.
Recommended Strategy
Once you’ve got enough income that you can start building large tanks, make similar tanks to the one you started with, with a wide variety of small, easy-to-breed specimens. These hatch much faster than more valuable fish, and their quantity will more than make up for their low individual sale price.
The tanks should be large enough that you can include a pair of Goldfish when you receive them as objective rewards; they’re slower to breed, but when they do they’re worth a good amount, and they fit well with other Temperate fish.
As soon as you can train an Expert with Pilot Wings, try sending them to Gulfweed Grove to look for Seahorses and Water Dragons. You need a Seahorse to pair with the starting one anyway, and if you can get a pair of Water Dragons early you’ll have another mid-tier option to use alongside Goldfish.
By the time Autumn rolls around, you should have three large tanks consistently spawning new clutches of eggs, and a fourth for large species (see below).
Should You Farm Sharks And Turtles?
You’re likely to get several Bull Sharks, Lionhead Fish, and Hermit Turtles as objective rewards. It’s worth setting up one large tank to try and breed one of these species, but no more. Their spawn rates range from mediocre to bad, and you can consider yourself lucky if you hatch even one over the course of the entire scenario.
Of course, if you do get lucky and successfully breed one of these larger species, you’ll be in great shape pushing toward a Gold rating; they sell for big bucks!
The shark tank (or turtle tank, as the case may be) should be used to generate Buzz and drive donations, which you can use to build large Aquariums for smaller species.
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