Viva Piñata

If you're like me and like to have something physical to reference/ check off, I made an excel file with all the species and hyperlinks to their requirements from the http://pinataisland.info site. I find going into the menu>journal>player awards>pinata awards guide too repetitive and time consuming, where you can just have a file up on your laptop or a piece of paper in front of you to mark things off.

There's colour coding also to know which pinatas are domestic, evolved and tamed sour species. * With thanks to Gregor Lenko I've added the updated workbook to the skydrive so it now includes a counter to aid in keeping track of your progress.

http://cid-e98dd928536aca23.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.P...

This will also help you keep track along the road to:
"Variants Master"
"Master Evolver"

and
" Master Romancer"

There are 60 species in the game, you must make 50 of them resident to get this achievement.

This will take a while, but as long as you go through your encyclopedia one species at a time and make them residents, you'll get this rather quickly. This also helps out with the Master Talent and Longevity Master achievements.

I want to add something to the solution above as it's a frequently asked question: You don't need to have 50 different species at the same time in your garden, that would be crazy.

A good tactic for the Collector and Romancing achievements (and gaining experience points) is selling all of your piñatas and obtaining and master romancing each single one, one at the time. Use the website pinataisland.info for all requirements and more. Check your Journal > Awards > Pinata awards to track each one down.

This doesn't have to be "guide", but an addition to everyone else's guides.

The easiest way to add an extra 10+ resident pinatas is to:

A) Buy all 8 Pinata Pets
B) Get all flutterscotch color variants. Each color is considered another "resident", and it's how I'll be finishing my 50 residents.

For this achievement you need to make 50 different piñata species become a resident to your garden.

A piñata which is not currently a resident of your garden will appear in black and white, the first species you encounter in the game don't require much to make them take up residence in your garden, for example Whirlms only require you to have a certain amount of soil or grass in you garden, once you've attracted a few Whirlms into your garden then Sparrowmints will start to take notice, the entire game is based around this mentality, you always need something to attract a piñata to your garden, you'll always need to go a step further to make them join your garden.

When a piñata visits your garden you can move your cursor over it and press "Y", doing this will bring up the information about that species of piñata, use this to work out what you need to do to make them join your garden.

Rather than list out every single piñata and how to make them want to join your garden I've provided a link below which is the Viva Piñata wiki site, it has all the information you'll need regarding what the different species need to make them want to visit and take up residence in your garden!

For the wiki page please see here; http://http://pinataisland.info/viva/Species, that's a complete database with information on every piñata from both games, use the search feature to find a specific species and you'll be presented with all the information you need to make them want to visit your garden and join it!

Lastly, you can keep track of which piñatas have taken up residence in your garden by opening up the menu, going into your journal and then selecting player awards, then selecting piñata awards, here you'll see a breakdown of all the piñata species, which ones have visited your garden, which have decided to reside in your garden at some point.