Day selection menu
The day selection menu allows the player to choose which day to start playing from in a saved game. It is the menu used to go back to previous days to try parts of Story Mode again. In Pikmin 3, this menu replaces the saved game selection menu found in previous games, while in Pikmin 3 Deluxe, it comes after the saved game selection menu. This menu will not appear if the player is playing Story Mode for the first time (Pikmin 3) or starting a new saved game (Pikmin 3 Deluxe).
To the left, some bubbles represent the days in the story, and the largest bubble represents the currently highlighted day. It is possible to switch back and forth between days with these bubbles. To the right is a quick rundown of the stats at the start of the highlighted day. It shows bubbles that get filled with leader icons as they are available, as well as Louie's icon when he's on the ship. This box also contains info for the number of fruits gathered, how many bottles of juice are left, and how many of each type of Pikmin there are on the Onions. Above this box is the objective of that day, but if the latest day (or END) is selected, it will instead show the current real-world play time. (This time measures everything that happens within the saved game, including time spent on menu screens, but will not count the day selection menu itself, the main menu, or menus related to the side modes. This means that restarting a day or going back to a previous day (except day 1) will not lower the time to compensate.)
At the bottom of the screen, there is a button to start on the chosen day. If the player chooses a day that is not the latest one, a warning will appear notifying the player that if they save at the end of that day, all progress on record from there on will be deleted so that the story can progress from that point. The first day's bubble is called "NEW", indicating that starting from this "day" will begin the story mode's progress from the start. (Interestingly, highlighting this bubble will show that the leaders brought seven bottles of juice with them as provisions, but four of them got lost with the crash landing.) There also exists an extra bubble on a completed file, showing "END". It contains the final count of Pikmin and shows Olimar's icon instead of Louie's. The Start button is darkened and unusable if the END bubble is highlighted.
On the GamePad, the voyage log of the day prior to the chosen one will be displayed. On a completed file, the END bubble will show the otherwise unavailable entry for the last day of the voyage.