How to get free sacred leaves in Island Experiment

A few weeks into playing Island Experiment, you will be given a quest to restore 2 dead trees into a new resource called Sacred Trees. There are 5 specific dead trees that you can choose from, and you can choose any 2 of the 5 to restore. Doing 2 will fulfill the quest and you will move on; you can leave the other 3 trees undone if you like, or you can also restore those if you prefer. Here is the placement of the 5 trees; in this picture, 2 trees have been restored, and 3 are still dead trees.



Once you have finished this quest, you will start occasionally seeing sacred leaves in deliveries, and every once in a while, they will be in a regular quest. Harvesting sacred leaves from the trees costs 5 food per leaf, but there is good news! We no longer have to harvest the leaves when a quest or delivery asks for them.

Step 1: Fill every other item request that is asked for in the quest or delivery. In this picture, I have a delivery order which asks for 3 items - sacred leaves, black crystals and pink crystals. I have collected enough of the black and pink crystals to fill their part of the order.



Step 2: Without collecting any sacred leaves at all, hit the green SEND button that you will see, whether it's a delivery or a quest. When you click the SEND button, you will get a window that pops up to tell you "Not enough resources" and offers to sell you the missing sacred leaves. But look - they are ZERO gems, and they always will be. Click the "BUY ALL 0" button and the order will be automatically filled and sent and you are done.



That's all there is to it! IMPORTANT: You MUST fill all the other items in the order or quest FIRST before clicking the "send" button. If you don't, it will charge you for those missing resources. Make SURE that the buy all button says zero gems before you click it!

For those wondering, this is NOT a glitch or a cheat or exploit. The developers programmed it this way a few months ago because a small subset of players do not have any sacred trees at all and therefore would have gotten stuck in the newer quests that came out this past winter. So they made the sacred leaves free for everyone, but you must do it this way in order to get them for free.