I love the Trading Sequence, but it could be better (concept)

I don't know how people feel about this, but personally, I kind of love trading sequences. They're a staple of older Zelda games, which I adore, and they're fun to figure out. Stardew's trading sequence, which is Birdie's quest on Ginger Island if you're not sure what I mean, isn't a bad one at all, but I personally felt a bit underwhelmed when it only had a handful of steps and didn't really present any significant puzzle. Personally, I'd like it to be a repeatable quest, and in this post I'll outline my vision for how that could be done. This is in essence a suggestion, but as you'll see, it would likely be a very large amount of work, and I highly doubt that ConcernedApe would want to go to the trouble of implementing this. So treat this as more of a concept than anything else.

The value of a trading quest, in my eyes, is that they reward socialising and exploration, which are things that Stardew Valley emphasizes. The more you've talked to the NPCs and learned what they're about, the easier the trading quest becomes to figure out. So it's a shame to me that the trading quest only has you interact with a handful of the game's NPCs. So why don't we expand on that?

My proposal is this: allow the trading quest to be done multiple times. After the first time you finish the trading quest and Birdie gives you the walnuts, you can check back with her maybe once a week (or longer, if once a week is too often for peoples' tastes) to begin another trading sequence. The start doesn't need to be complex or significant: she's looking for another one of her husband's heirlooms, or she found something strange washed up on the beach and wants to see it returned to its owner, or she simply offers to give you another treasure hunt. If you say yes, she gives you a random trading item.

These trading items would be exclusive to the trading sequences, just like the ones already in the game. The difference is that, after the first quest, the list of items and applicable participants is greatly expanded. Ideally, every single named NPC that you can regularly interact with would be on the list. This means everyone you can increase friendship with, and perhaps some more unorthodox specimens like Mr. Qi, Prof. Snail, and the raccoons. But the real value comes from the items themselves. The list of items you could get would be absolutely vast; in my dreams, I see a scenario where every single applicable person has 6 or 7 items specific to them that could be a part of the trading sequence. That would be an extremely large amount of items, of course, but I won't let that stop me.

The actual quest would be much like it is in the game already. Birdie would give you one trading item at random, and then you'd have to take it to the correct person, who would accept it gratefully and give you another random trading item. You'd bring it to the next person, and so on. Given that this is now a leisure activity and not part of progression, the sequence this time could be a lot longer - maybe 10 or 12 steps, up from the 7 that the one in the game is now. Within one sequence, no person would be repeated; each item goes to someone new. There are two ways I see this revamped trading sequence ending; one, the last person gives you something to bring back to Birdie, who rewards you for your efforts, or two, the last person simply gives you the reward themselves. The trading sequence would be completed, and you'd have to wait a little while before starting the next one.

But what rewards would you actually get? Given that this is a lategame quest that requires a decent amount of legwork, I think the rewards should be a bit better than what you typically get from bulletin board quests. The way I see it, the quest is all about giving people items they want, so the reward should be some item that the player would want. The person the quest ends on wouldn't change this; the reward list is the same no matter what. I've got two ideas for a possible list of items.

The first is just some useful items that aren't too rare but the player isn't necessarily likely to have a great amount of. Things like Triple Shot Espresso (and other cooked dishes), some Fairy Dust, a random book, a few Prize Tickets, warp totems, artifact troves, or maybe even some rarer stuff like Animal Crackers. Just assorted things that a lategame player might find useful, or at least cool to receive. Perhaps there could even be rare hats or furniture on the list, like the ones that Penny makes in her 14 heart event.

The second is three random loved gifts for three different characters. This could pull from the same list that the Statue of Endless Fortune uses. This would be very handy for finishing up the friendship objective for perfection, and still wouldn't be useless to a post-perfection character, as many loved gifts are still decent food items or materials.

That's about everything I have to say. I'm really not suggesting that this be added, since making half a dozen unique items for every NPC in the game would be a very large amount of work, so this is really just an outline of how I would buff up the trading sequence if I were at the helm. Who knows, maybe I'll learn to mod someday and make this on my own. Thanks for reading, and do let me know what you think.