Pardon Parades in Where Winds Meet sit somewhere between a public shaming ritual and a low-effort farm. For criminals, they cut down real-time prison sentences. For everyone else, they’re a rotating social event where you pelt a caged player with rotten food in exchange for currency, experience, and slips.
What a Pardon Parade is in Where Winds Meet
A Pardon Parade is a short multiplayer procession built around the game’s crime and detention system. When a player is jailed for theft, property damage, assault, or murder, they can volunteer to be placed in a wooden cage on a cart and dragged through the streets. Other players trail the cart and throw spoiled vegetables or eggs at the prisoner.
Two things happen during each parade:
- The prisoner gets a chunk of detention time removed from their current sentence.
- Spectators who hit the prisoner with enough food receive a fixed bundle of rewards.
The event is deliberately simple. There are no combat phases or puzzles to solve, and the cart follows a short, scripted route through a town area before the prisoner is returned to their cell.
How Pardon Parades reduce detention time
Detention in Where Winds Meet runs in real time and can last for hours or longer if you stack up crimes. A Pardon Parade is one of the few ways to cut that timer without paying bribes.
| Role | Effect on Detention | Event Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Prisoner (criminal) | Removes 60 minutes from current detention timer when the parade completes | Up to 10 minutes, often shortened as food hits land |
To start a Pardon Parade as a jailed player:
- Wait until you’re in the prison sentence screen.
- Select the Pardon Parade option in the upper-right of the interface.
- Choose Go to Parade to confirm.
Your character is then loaded into the cart and moved to the route. From that point, you don’t need to perform any actions; the game handles the procession, and you return to prison automatically once it ends with one hour shaved off the sentence.
Detention can be shortened further by repeating parades if the remaining time is still high. What matters is that you actively initiate each parade from the menu; simply being online in jail is not enough to gain reductions.
How to unlock and find active Pardon Parades
Pardon Parades live inside the game’s time-limited activities menu, which unlocks early in your progression.
- During the opening chapters, you gain access to a Time Limited feature represented by a golden bird icon in the top-left corner of the HUD.
- This typically appears once you’ve reached around level 10 and advanced partway into the Still Shore campaign content.
Once that feature is available, you can locate parades with a few clicks:
- Open the Time Limited menu from the golden bird icon.
- Look for an entry labeled Pardon Parade or Pardon Parade in Progress.
- Open it to see a list of current parades, each tied to a specific prisoner.
Each entry represents a single instance, with a hard cap on the number of spectators. Events last 10 minutes at most, so the list refreshes frequently as parades start and end.
How to join Pardon Parades as a spectator
Joining an existing parade is the main way to earn rewards without ever committing a crime. The flow is straightforward and works similarly across PC and console.
| Step | What to Do |
|---|---|
| 1. Open Time Limited menu | Click the golden bird icon at the top-left of the screen. On PS5, open Options and move to the top tab. |
| 2. Choose Pardon Parade | Select the Pardon Parade entry to view all active processions. |
| 3. Pick a criminal | Highlight any parade with space remaining and select it. You’ll be teleported to the route. |
If a parade is full, the join action simply fails and you remain in place; backing out and trying another listing is often faster than waiting for a slot in a single instance.
How to participate and trigger the rewards
Once you arrive at the parade scene, you need to actively join the procession and complete a small interaction quota to get paid.
- Approach the cart and accept the Public Procession prompt when it appears.
- Your character becomes part of the crowd following the cart.
- Use the context prompt to throw food at the prisoner until you reach the required count.
The system tracks the number of successful throws against the prisoner. Hitting the cart or missing entirely does not count.
| Requirement | Threshold | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Food throws needed | 10 hits on the prisoner | Unlimited attempts during the parade; only landed hits matter. |
| Distance to cart | Stand a short distance away | Being too close can disable the throw interaction. |
If you finish all 10 hits before the cart reaches the end of its route, you’re effectively done; staying in the instance or leaving early doesn’t change the reward outcome as long as the requirement was met.
Pardon Parade rewards and weekly cap
Each successful parade you complete as a spectator pays out a fixed bundle of currencies and progression items, making it an efficient way to top up your account between heavier content.
| Reward Type | Amount per Parade | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Jade Fish | 500 | Premium currency used across several systems. |
| Coin / Gold Coins | 3,500 | Standard monetary resource for gear, items, and services. |
| Adventure Slip | 30 | Ticket-style items used to enter or claim from specific activities. |
| EXP | 2,000 | Character experience toward leveling. |
The payout structure is flat; it doesn’t scale with your character level or gear. That makes parades most impactful early on, when a few extra thousand coins and a couple thousand EXP have more relative weight.
There is, however, a hard weekly limit on how many times you can profit:
- You can earn participation rewards from up to 5 Pardon Parades per week.
- After hitting that cap, additional parades can still be joined for social reasons, but they do not grant further currency or EXP.
The weekly reset is shared across all characters on the same account, so you can’t multiply payouts by hopping between alts.
How Pardon Parades feel in the larger game loop
Once the novelty of public humiliation wears off, Pardon Parades settle into two clear roles in Where Winds Meet’s rhythm:
- For criminals, they are a cost-free way to erase an hour of detention time at once, reducing the friction of the law system without sidelining you for an entire evening.
- For everyone else, they are a quick, low-pressure event you can drop into between quests to convert a few minutes into a predictable, capped package of currencies.
That combination keeps the events visible in the Time Limited menu and ensures there is almost always at least one active parade to join, especially during peak play hours. Treat them as a weekly checklist item: run five early in the week to lock in the full reward pool, then ignore them until the next reset unless you want to watch another player ride the cart of shame.
