Requests and side quests
The achievement covers the whole request, so an untriggered side quest keeps it locked. Side quests only appear after you touch their trigger, and they are where nearly every launch bug lived.
A request in Lost and Found Co. is a contract; a side quest is the thing the client did not tell you about. Both live inside the same stage, both appear in the To-do panel, and only one of them is required to finish the story. The other one is required to finish the stage — which is why so many players end a request at 90% and assume the game has glitched.
This page separates the two, lists the side quests the patch notes have exposed over eight months of updates, and explains the reward structure behind them.
Request versus side quest
| Request objective | Side quest | |
|---|---|---|
| Who asks | The client, in the opening dialogue | A character or object inside the stage |
| Where it appears | To-do panel from the start | Only after you trigger it |
| What it asks | Find the main item, plus secondary objects | A short chain, usually two to four steps |
| What it gives | Story progress, Plum Coins, thank-you mail | Extra coins, a mail, sometimes furniture |
| Needed for 100%? | Yes | Yes — the achievement covers the whole request |
The last row matters most: Steam's achievement is "Get a 100% completion on [stage]", so an untriggered side quest keeps it locked after the scene ends.
The five shapes a request can take
Most requests are one of five patterns, and knowing which one you are in tells you how to search:
- A single lost item. The classic. One object, a small set of secondary items, one side quest.
- A count. Find every fox, every cat, every masked man. The To-do line counts down, which makes these the easiest to self-check.
- A delivery chain. Object A unlocks object B, which unlocks the client's item. The descriptions tell you the order.
- A cleanup. The stage asks you to restore something — a room, a table, a garden — rather than retrieve a single thing.
- A photo. Instapix moments count as objectives in some stages; the feed is the confirmation.
The Fall Update stages mix patterns: Love After Life runs a story request across two acts, and Fangtastic Feast puts a cleanup objective (the slime) inside a mansion-sized count.
Side quests the patch notes have named
Bit Egg's patch notes are unusually specific, and over eight months they have named most of the side quests that caused trouble. That makes them a free map of what to look for:
| Side quest | Stage | What the notes reveal |
|---|---|---|
| Masked Man | The Muddy Situation | The outro played before all eight were found — so there are eight |
| Graffiti | Apartment Apocalypse | Needed two separate fixes; it would not complete at launch |
| Energy drink | What An Unlucky Day | Was impossible to finish before 1.0.3 |
| Fishing | My Summer Memories | Had a display error that 1.0.3 corrected |
| Talk to Mallet | — | Could softlock if you earned enough popularity points first |
| Sword objective | The Cursed Memento | Its position was moved in 1.0.7 |
| Chest dialogue | Love After Life | Optional dialogue added in 1.2.1 |
| Slime objective | Fangtastic Feast | Did not display when re-entering the stage |
Two things stand out: the notes often leak the answer ("all 8 of them" is a count), and side quests are where the bugs live — launch-era softlocks cluster around optional content, not the main path.
Rewards: what a side quest is actually worth
Side quests pay in four currencies, and only one of them is money:
- Plum Coins, the Kit Shop currency. These buy furniture for Ducky's Room.
- Thank-you mails, which arrive after a request closes and sometimes carry a gift. Patch 1.0.7 fixed a suspicious mail that arrived without its gift, which tells you gifts are attached to specific mails.
- Furniture sets, in the case of collab quests. Elenora's quest in Love After Life grants the Princess of Valoria set; Toffie's in Fangtastic Feast grants Magical Toffie.
- The achievement, which is the only reward that cannot be bought or skipped.
None of it carries a stat bonus; Ducky's Room is cosmetic.
How to avoid the 90% trap
- Read the To-do list twice: once when you enter, once before you leave. A new line can appear mid-stage when a side quest triggers.
- Click the props that have no obvious purpose. Posters, mailboxes, noticeboards, wall art. The First Request had its wall image updated in a patch, which means wall art is interactive.
- Do the optional chain before the main objective. Main objectives advance dialogue, and dialogue can close windows.
- Never leave with an unticked optional line. Re-entering restarts your context; some side quests, like the slime, have historically misbehaved on re-entry.
- Check the mail after you leave. A missing thank-you mail is sometimes the only sign that a step did not register.
When a side quest looks broken
Patch 1.0.5 fixed a softlock in the "Talk to Mallet" side quest that triggered if you had earned enough popularity points before unlocking it. Patch 1.1.1 fixed objects being findable before a side quest unlocked in Master of Findjutsu. Both are the same class of bug: the stage lets you do things out of order, and the quest chain assumes you did not.
Follow the To-do order on a first clear; on a replay, doing things out of order is fine.
For the UI that tracks all of this, see How to play. For the stages with the most side-quest trouble, read The First Request and Fangtastic Feast.
