Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

After a minute or so, Tulland had got about all the benefit from the rest room that he thought he could.

Something just occurred to me.

Yes?

Most of these levels take days and days. Sometimes weeks. Right?

Correct.

So what if Necia gets out days and days after me? We just become off sync then, and one of us has to sacrifice our rest to get back into a party?

I suppose I don’t know for sure. That kind of thing doesn’t have hard and fast rules. But if I had to guess, I’d guess that The Infinite allows some kind of flexibility. If you haven’t noticed, it’s very careful to avoid things that look like death sentences.

Which confuses me. Because once, a long time ago, I would have been able to turn whole floors into briar hells. It wouldn’t have scaled against very strong monsters, maybe, but I could have adjusted for that.

That… I hate to defend what amounts to my better. But from what I understood of that time, The Infinite simply couldn’t allow you to come that close to a known class exception. Some class paths are banned, for reasons having to do with what you would have eventually tried with that class. You must have noticed that no Invincible Warrior Who Can Defeat Any Enemy With A Look classes exist.

I could at least come close. The Infinite almost certainly could overpower an adventurer enough to trivialize their journey. But the point, Tulland, lies in the struggle itself. In the adventurer’s experience. In the living and dying. Making one man a demigod denies all that.

But… the next question would just be why you chose those goals. Instead of some others.

The quick answer is that I didn’t choose them. The longer answer is… yes, I thought so. Still very banned.

Well, let me know if you can ever talk about it. I’d be interested…

Tulland suddenly thumped into the ground of the safe zone, surrounded by dark and not exactly where he thought he’d be.

Despite the half mile limit, Tulland only needed a second’s orientation to know exactly where he was. He was outside of the safe zone village, but only just, on essentially the opposite side of the settlement from where he lived. It was a relief not to get immediately attacked when he landed, something he wanted to keep true as long as he could. Skirting the village under the cover of darkness, he managed to get as near to his house as he could without being in the town proper, then making his way as fast as he quietly could through the streets until he got to his own door. To his delight, nobody killed him while he tried this or even seemed to know he had arrived.

There were changes when he got inside that he had never expected, mostly in the form of a large stone tub, a few pipes, and what looked to be a series of barrels hacked out of a solid piece of tree. And on them, stuck into the wood with a small cheap-looking dagger, was a note.

“Oh, yes.” Tulland looked down at his blood-and-dirt covered self, then the tub. He just had a few quick tasks to do and he’d be right on that, and giving Ley whatever the hell he wanted for making it happen.

The first thing on his list, even before getting clean, was getting to know some old friends a little better.

“What in the world do you think it means by willed?” Tulland furrowed his brow. He very, very much wanted access to the original form of his briars, and had regretted not bringing them with him from the early levels almost every day. “Because if it was just a matter of wanting it…”

Have you ever wanted it to revert back to an earlier generation specifically? While enriching a seed, and making it grow?And how often?

“Not that often, I guess. But there’s no shortage of seeds.” Tulland grimaced at his farm. “And I’m told I have ten too many Lunger Briars here, compared to… something.”

Your skill’s best judgement, likely. That judgement will be limited. You will want to use it as a rule of thumb and optimize from there, as you find the opportunity.

And Tulland did. He first went through the farm, pulling out or adding to his plant stock as he could. He had scooped up some grasses and shrubs from the last floor, but found that his intuition considered virtually all of them trash in terms of the plant power they held. For now, he followed Farmer’s Domain instructions to the letter, which in turn left him with a completely full farm that was worth about a hundred points more than it had been before.

And then, hating every moment of it, he pulled out ten of his Lunger Briars, left them on the ground to die, and then used their own enriched seeds to replace them.

Regress. Revert. Turn back into your old self. Get simpler.

Tulland had no idea what thought process was going to make this all work, so he tried them all. The briars came up fast enough that after just a few runs of Primal Growth he was able to tell that he had failed and start another batch. It was the better part of fifty total seeds before he finally got what he wanted.

And just like that, his passive skill was just about where Broadcast had been before the merger. If he ever saw a downside from the merge, it was likely it wouldn’t be much.

“Yes. That’s so good.” Tulland watched as his first-ever success in farming proved its low quality by absorbing a Primal Growth charge and springing out of the soil so fast he could actually watch it grow. “You seeing this?”

Yes. It was oddly easy.

“And yet, I would have never gotten there without knowing for sure that it was possible. I would have never wasted that much time doing something that barely made sense when there was anything else I could do. And this farm was already fully grown. I wasn’t making any more Lunger Briars here.”

And what will you do with them?

“For now? Get a cool fifty points better in my farm. But later? I have four big chunks of that generic beast meat in my pack. Seems worth a try.” Tulland stood back up from his briar and started making the rounds of his farm one more time. After taking one more look at every plant, he had a short list of ingredients. His orange trees, which he still thought of as that, needed more iron. His briars needed more bone. He supposed that made sense, given that he usually only fed them meat. And several plants, trees and briars included, wanted more of what the Dungeon System called life material.

“Life material,” Tulland said. “And here I thought I was giving them plenty of that. They have all the outhouse dirt and monster meat they could want.”

That’s not what that word means. And, I am pleased to say, I can tell you what it is. It’s common enough knowledge.

“Well, spit it out. I have a bath waiting for me.”

It’s leaves and grasses. Dead ones. Just material from plants to give the soil a certain texture, I suppose. Perhaps some nutrients it can’t get, otherwise.

“Well, it will get them now. Anything to raise the level of these trees would help. The new ones aren’t easy.”

None of the ingredients were easy to get except the organic matter, but that would require Tulland leaving town, something he’d never do without backup so long as the rogue was wandering around. And that meant, finally, that he could take a bath. He let the water out of the two big barrels into the stone tub, and then, in a moment of inspiration, dug a hole underneath it and started a small fire with wood from his trees. Tulland was pleased to find that Wolfwood was as clean-burning as charcoal, barely producing smoke once it got going.

In a few minutes, Tulland had a pile of shavings and Wolfwood aflame, producing a fire so hot it almost immediately set the entire stack of wood under the tub aflame. Surprisingly quickly, the water was hot enough that it would have hurt his old, fragile skin.

Now, it just felt nice, and scoured off all the dirt and blood from his body so fast he hardly needed the soap. He used it anyway, then soaked a bit longer before washing his clothes and armor, tossing another layer of soap over everything, then rinsing off in the lukewarm water from the barrels. He hadn’t been cleaner in months, and was as dedicated to the cause of Ley Raditz as he possibly could be about someone he had just recently met. He wouldn’t quite die for him, but it was close.

Just as Tulland was about to lay out on his mat and rest up from the last level, there was a shout outside his door.

“Open up, Tulland. Or come out.” It was White, visible to Tulland through the privacy veil around his house if not at all able to see him from the outside. “I know you’re in there. I can smell the smoke.”