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Baguettes from the Bastille Day bundle. Mushroom seeds from the SBA of The Spore Castle. Rich chocolate from Nate's Crystal Mines adventure. And many, MANY other examples of food and farm items that are either extremely limited or purchase-only.

Not anymore! This idea came to mind when I was thinking how cool it would be to have a city area in the game. Why not have a Kitchen & Garden shop that sells these rare "supplies" we pretty much don't have a chance to get more of? Obviously the shop would not offer massive amounts of these - you'd be allowed to get only a small amount every day, with a new set of some three food and farm items available.

Also, a good fragment of the items I'm talking about are ones that would otherwise be purchased with real money. That's solvable with prices of the items as well as the placement of the shop in the unlock sequence. First of all, the shop would definitely be an "endgame" feature or at least require you to get far into the game. Perhaps you'd have to go all the way to Pompeii on the fifth island and convince a shopkeeper there to come over to the Commons to start up the shop.

Then, the prices would obviously be a big factor. I'm thinking that a combination of high amounts of gold (since gold seems to flood in once you get far enough in the game), high-level gems (sort of like the recent trinkets in the shop which require the player to have an abundance of jades) and maybe some small amounts of Bush Bucks too (of course not dozens, because the point here is to make these rare items accessible through non-pay elements of the game). This would create a wall that is passable only by long-term commitment to the game - which of course benefits the developers as well, since the longer you can get people to commit to the game, the chance they'll pay for something likely becomes bigger.

In addition, you could have the shop give the player daily quests. At the point of the game I'm talking about, one more daily quest does not increase the amount of dailies too much. One of the daily quests could be for whacking up ordinary energy-giving fruits from bushes, for example. There could also be non-daily quests where you collect ingredients for certain foods or baked goods and they appear into the rotation of the daily items you can buy from the shop. There are so many things one could do with the shop!

(Of course the balance of items compared to their cost would have to be looked into carefully. If the items were too expensive, purchasing them would be a waste of resources and the shop would grow mostly useless.)

EDIT: How surprising. Right after I post this, we get a purchase-only bundle that contains not one, not two, but THREE food items. Perfect for this concept.