Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

Some books are easy to write. Deadworld Isekai was, despite being the first long-form fiction I had ever done. It was fun, new, and wrote itself. How to Survive at the End of the World was almost as easy, and I really liked the story so it drove itself very quickly to where I wanted it to be.

Demon World Boba Shop was a challenge, since it had to be interesting at all times despite not having any real danger. It was very character-driven and had very few swords, axes, and bows, which meant I had to think really hard about every scene and every plot point to make sure it didn’t get bogged down or boring for the readers. The flip side of that was how very rewarding it was to write, and how much appreciation I got from the readers after every chapter.

This book? It’s hard. Real hard.

That had to happen eventually. For one, I’ve written something like 15 novels worth of words in the past year or so. That’s a lot! I was bound to eventually get tired, to pick a lot of my own personal low-hanging fruit, and to have to work harder to make things work. For me, that was never an if it happens but was always a when it happens proposition instead. And it happened here.

Now, understand: I don’t think that means that this book is bad. I like it, at least, and I think it’s at least close to my usual par for novel quality. But the amount of work it takes to keep it at that level has been much higher than any other series I’ve worked on, bar none.

Stephen King wrote one of the best books on writing I’ve ever read, and a much bigger proportion of it than you’d expect is just him telling you how to sit down at a desk and start writing. He says to have a room with a door that closes where you can retreat, be undistracted, and have absolutely nothing to do but write. He recommends a minimum word count per day and gives some tips on maintaining the writing habit.

I think he has to do this because writing, like all things, eventually becomes work. It’s fulfilling work, if you are the type of person who gets a lot out of it. It’s important work, I think, so long as you think making other people happy and enriching their lives a bit is important (I do).

But it’s work.

At the end of every novel I write, I put down my thoughts on the novel and my current writing process so other people can read them and get a little more behind-the-scenes on my thought process. For a lot of the novels, those notes are pretty repetitive, mostly because the same guy is writing all of them and there’s only so much I change on a month-to-month basis.

As always, I hope these notes are either fun to read or helpful for other writers who are trying to make their own way. Enjoy!

The setting for the entire novel is a single string of unending dungeon floors, which is actually a very, very hard thing to write.

A normal entire-world setting tends to have a lot of things in it - people, places, items, and so on. Even when you don’t show them initially, the reader isn’t going to be incredibly surprised when you introduce new things/places/folks/mechanics from just outside the main character’s current knowledge, since it makes sense for an entire world to have that kind of thing-diversity.

There’s a limit to this (think George Martin introducing seven new religions and eighteen new world mechanics every time he gets bored, and forgetting to advance the plot of his books), but for the most part having a bigger, better-fleshed world makes the act of being creative in an interesting, sustainable way much easier.

In book two, the difficulty of writing another novel in a world that just had “Floors, safe zones, well-regulated rewards, and the few people around to see them” hit me pretty hard. This got even worse when some of the things I had initially planned to do (like bonus dungeons and glitchy-weird floors) didn’t end up fitting very well with the story pace and had to get scrapped.

What was left was me trying to do my very best with what was left. The safe zone was never meant to be a very big place, but I tried to have as much story happen there as possible, and spent a lot of time fleshing out the concept of Tulland’s power coming from his home-base garden, and the various ways he had to promote the level of that farmland to make himself stronger.

Originally, the idea was that the safe zone would be completely safe. A person living there wouldn’t be able to get so much as a paper cut, much less die. Tulland’s farm was meant to be completely unassailable. That ended up being pretty boring, so I shifted a lot of the danger of the story to the safe zone by having the Rogue be a constant potentially unseen threat there. I still made Tulland’s farm protected, but engineered some weaknesses in that protection so that eventually the “trap” of destroying his farm could be sprung on him and leave him in a very bad place, forcing him to address one of the biggest weaknesses of his class head-on.

After developing the concept a bit mentally, I ended up writing from a two-paragraph summary something like this:

Tulland’s power is developing, and the mechanics of his class mean that his farm acts something like a Lich’s phylactery now. He has the potential to become very powerful via the strength of his farm, but anyone who finds his farm and destroys it renders him weak and vulnerable.

It is vitally important that Tulland protects his farm well, and in book two the best place to do that is the fifth floor safe zone. There Tulland can use The Infinite, purchased system perks, and a loosely-knit alliance of various friendly dungeon divers to build a reasonable level of security around his farm, which leaves him shocked when he is finally betrayed, his farm is burned, and he is left vulnerable and weak on the final floor of the novel.

That was the basic core of this novel, and everything else was hung on it.

I’ll talk about this a little more in some character deep dives, but there were some specific points I wanted to cover in this novel and very specific elements of story progression I wanted to make sure happened before the close of this chapter of the story. ɽÀƝộΒĘ𝐬

In my usual process when planning a novel, I first set a starting point. This is mostly just me writing down where the story is at that point, thinking about every element of what’s happened so far and putting it into a compact summary so I know the exact shape of my launchpad. For this story, that would have looked something like this:

The first five floors of The Infinite Dungeon were hard on Tulland, but they are about to get much, much harder. He’s completed the deadly floors and tests The Infinite thinks of as the tutorial stage, and is now moving on to tougher floors, more pointed tests of the viability of his class, and a more complex environment where the distance between friend and foe can be deceptively thin.

For all his growth, Tulland is still the weakest person he knows. His only advantages at this stage are the sudden acquisition of a safe place to grow a semi-permanent farm and his ability to grow edible crops. Food is a great way to make friends, and Tulland will need to utilize every ounce of that purchased goodwill to survive.

Tulland’s relationship with Necia is still active, and he is still in communication with the still-untrusted System.

I then set an endpoint, somewhere I want the story to get to by the end:

Tulland has grown substantially and is now stronger than Necia and anyone he partied up with during the novel, whether that’s acknowledged by characters or not. He’s expanded his collection of plants, made good use of his crafting skills, and has built up a high potential for creating variant plants in the future. He’s not overpowered yet, but he’s closed most or all of the gap between himself and the average combat class. He doesn’t realize it yet, but he’d do just fine in a battle with a generic swordsman. His farmer class is still complex, but it is no longer a weakness.

By the end of the novel, Tulland will have partially or entirely neutralized the rogue as a threat, leaving him open for new challenges in book three.

Tulland and Necia’s relationship will have moved forward without significant problems, setting the stage for them staying together until one or both of them dies. The system is still untrusted, but Tulland knows a lot more about his backstory now, and is starting to have to grapple with the idea that he is, despite his betrayal, consistently trustworthy in the advice and help he’s given in The Infinite Dungeon so far.

And we got there. I’m more and more a fan of creating these starting point/ending point summaries and sticking to them as much as possible, especially compared to how I wrote my first two books. I’m leaving room to change them as the story progresses if there’s a good reason to, but I don’t think it would have been nearly as easy to get through the pretty difficult writing process this book presented without them.

I know some people do a lot more structuring, down to every little step every character will make in their development, and that they do it before they ever write a word of a novel. That’s fine, and I don’t think there’s an upward limit on how much of that a person can do and still get benefit from. But something like those start/end points is more and more what I’m coming to consider to be a minimum before launching on a new novel, the very least you can get away with while still having confidence you know where your story is heading.

If Tulland’s build was meant to be overpowered, it would have looked something like one of these options:

1. Plague Farmer

   When Tulland steps onto a new floor, he scatters some seeds, encouraging them to grow into a fortress, then to grow outward and exponential rates until they strangle the entire level, monsters and all. There are some slight limits to how this works, like very strong monsters that can’t be passively defeated. Still, Tulland is always fighting in a jungle of his own creation, on terrain that favors him, and the writing challenges are purely figuring out enemies that can survive long enough to get a swing in on him.

2. Botanical Bombadier

   Tulland can grow and carry unlimited amounts of plants, and there are no system limitations on how he uses them. At the outset of every fight, he lobs as many plants as he can carry here, there and everywhere, exploding some of them into poisons, establishing some of them as terrain issues for his enemies, and pushing a variety of them to do combat for him in various ways.

   Since the limits on how he approaches this are light or non-existent, he’s going to eventually have dozens of plants in play in every fight, covering all angles of his own vulnerability and attacking every possible vulnerable spot on every enemy he meets. His ability to develop new plants is also strong, allowing him to make “customized” plants to defeat hard threats he otherwise couldn’t tackle.

You all saw me rule out Option A as a class. I don’t think an entirely passive build where Tulland just sits around and waits until his plants have killed everything is very interesting, and if I had let that go much further, I think the readers would have very silently got bored with it and left. Whatever direction the farmer’s class took, it needed to be more active if the novel was going to have interesting stakes and not devolve into slice-of-life, which was never the plan.

Option B was a lot closer, but still had problems. If Tulland had hundreds of plants in play in every single fight, it would be messy. The most logical outcome of most fights would be that he very easily won most of them just by zerg-rushing any new threat with dozens of varied attacks. It would have been chaos at all times, which I’m actually okay with in a lot of settings, especially if it was a wacky-and-zany type of story.

What it wouldn’t have been was something that lended itself to making it feel like Tulland was having a hard time and that he was barely keeping abreast of the difficulty of a legendary dungeon. There was still a lot there to be used, but it needed to be limited.

At the beginning of the book, Tulland has the ability to store a few plants that are very slightly buffed by his farm at any given time. He has an underpowered melee ability (via the Farmer’s Tool) that is just enough to keep the enemies off him and let his plants do their job. It was enough for floors 1-5, but he’s very clearly going to die if he doesn’t do better than that.

By the end of the book, his class has grown in several ways:@@novelbin@@

1. His permanent safe-zone farm is much bigger and better than most single-floor farms could be, and insulates him against the worst effects of floors where he can’t farm very well.
2. He can carry a few more plants in his dimensional storage, and has more plants to choose from. He can customize his loadout for the kind of threats he expects, if not as much as a dozen-plant always-ready arsenal would let him.
3. Buffed by the farm, his melee skill is beginning to approach the power a melee-fighter class can show. He’s still generally weaker than they’d be in that one respect, but it’s made up for by his plants.
4. His ability to create new plants is expanding, and he’s had at least one big haul on a weaponized plant floor that gave him a lot of seeds to work with.

If the first book was about just surviving, the second book is Tulland catching up with a lot of medium-potential character builds and putting in place potential for his power to explode in the third book.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The System

The System is taking the headline here because it is the most interesting character in the series to me right now. It’s purely a voice in Tulland’s head. It supplies him no power. It can’t mind-control him, and it can’t compel him to do anything at all except in the normal way any of us might convince someone else by using words and argument. It’s a voice, and outside of what it says it has no agency at all that we’ve seen since it made Tulland his starter equipment at the beginning of book.

At the beginning of the book, that’s still a reasonably scary amount of power for it to have. There is no question and no trickiness around the idea that it betrayed Tulland. It did. It intended for Tulland to die, and to profit from that. When Necia and the System itself tell Tulland not to trust him, they have an absolutely valid point. The betrayal is enough, all by itself, that Tulland would be justified turning off the System’s voice and never turning it back on.

But at the same time, the manipulation and subsequent betrayals Tulland has always expected just keep failing to happen. When the System tells Tulland he needs to eat or to look out for some danger just around the corner, it has always told the truth. When it’s talked to Tulland about his class, it’s always accurate information. Even when they disagree about whether or not Tulland should pursue some path, it’s always been a valid disagreement on the honest merits of the argument, not some trickery or dishonesty.

I’m not sure I want anyone to forgive the System. It has a sob story background, a legitimately sad story about failure, a broken friendship, and betrayal, but even in that story, it isn’t flawless or a clear victim. It seems to have been acting out of legitimate desperation in betraying Tulland, but it’s not like it didn’t have any choice at all.

What I’m trying to do here is to make the System more complex, not to tell you that it’s very good, actually. At the end of the book, I’m hoping the average person is just thinking about the System as a character, someone who makes mistakes and acts imperfectly as opposed to existing on exactly one dimension of good/bad alignment.

As a stretch goal, I’m trying to build up an impression that this system is a little more involved than most, and that it always was like that where it had an opportunity to be. Necia’s System is pretty much absent in her life, and The Infinite only chimes in when it has to, or on special milestone occasions. From what we saw of the System’s past life, it made a friend who it followed and talked to for decades before things fell apart. And in Tulland’s life, it’s been constantly with him, giving him surprisingly valid advice and help whenever it can.

Whether or not all that is an insidious plot, turning a new leaf, or simply slipping back into old beneficial habits is still to be seen.

Tulland and Necia

In this book, I decided to treat Tulland and Necia as a unit for the most part. This made sense for a lot of reason, not least of which is that their goals are so clearly aligned that it would have been weirder for them to spend much time apart in the first place, even if they didn’t get along very well.

But they do get along. Even outside of the romance side of things, they trust each other. In a place as temporary as The Infinite is for the individuals who encounter it, they probably have as much confidence in each other as anybody could. They’ve interacted a lot on non-romantic lines, have both seen benefit from it, and are very likely to see more benefit from it moving forward than they ever would from whatever amount of experience they’d get from betraying each other. They share an enemy.

If they can’t trust each other, they can’t trust anyone, and as The Infinite is a place that demands at least a little bit of cooperation, they are each the best bet that the other could make.

On the romance side of things, I’ve been trying very hard to write their relationship in a way that makes it seem as healthy as a relationship between two young people caught in a eternal death-trap could be. They both enjoy the relationship to the extent they can, they make very few demands on each other, and each supports the other as best they can.

If the average teenage couple doesn’t have very good prospects of a life-long relationship, that hardly matters here, since neither of them expects to live longer than a few more months anyway. They don’t dwell on that, or bemoan it. Necia is probably smart enough to understand that whatever good she can find in The Infinite is worth hanging on to all by herself. Tulland might not have understood the full implications of having something good in a place that’s almost entirely bad, but he has the System to keep him straight on that account.

In my own personal head-canon, one of the reasons their relationship works is that despite Necia’s unspoken hinting that she’s more savvy about romance than Tulland, she’s a princess. The likelihood that a princess who spent most of her time in martial training has had a lot of relationships is pretty low, and even though it’s not something I talk about, she’s probably about as new to the whole having-a-significant-other process as Tulland is.

As their classes progress, I’m slowly reeling back in Necia’s trained-fighter advantages over Tulland and making it clear that her class is fundamentally best utilized as a tank. As Tulland grows, she’s moving into more and more of a support role, something that blocks enough heavy shots to let Tulland flex his weird build and come up with more creative ways to take down overpowered foes.

One hard thing with Tulland’s class is giving the reader the right feel for his progression without making him overpowered or absolutely drowning you in status screens. What I mostly tried to do is find ways to tie his power more and more closely to the farm, giving him new tools to use but making very clear that those rules only work as well as his farm quality allows them to.

Like a god who gains power from his believer’s faith and the overall strength of his followers, Tulland simply can’t ignore his botanical church and expect to survive.

Necia’s class is hard to write simply because Tulland isn’t that overpowered. I need her to block for him, but never to be strong enough that she trivializes fights. At the same time, I can never let her get weak enough that Tulland carries her blocking duties for her - that’s the realm of the overpowered protagonist, something I try very, very hard not to write.

What this all boils down to is two characters who are entirely devoted to each other’s goals, and who are slowly realizing that only one of them has real outlier potential.

White

One hard thing about writing a book with a threat that the hero knows about but is as of yet unable to face is that if the threat gets to him before he trains up, he either dies or you have to get real tricky to let him live. If you go the latter route, basically everyone who comments on your work is going to accuse you of some variation of “plot armor,” the idea that your protagonist is only living through this or that encounter because if he died, the book would have to end.

The easiest solution to this is to just make the hero really hard to get to for some reason or other. If it’s Frodo, you just keep him constantly on the move and barely hidden. If it’s Harry Potter, you have him spend all his time with mom-death-blessing protections at his uncle’s house or being protected by dollar store Gandalf in an enchanted castle.

(People who are paying close attention might notice that this is still the protagonist staying completely safe where logically he should just die, entirely because the plot demands it. For some reason, nobody ever calls this plot armor despite it being the same thing.)

The original plan in this book was to make safe zones completely safe, and to have this protection extend to PvP battles. If the rogue wanted to kill Tulland, he’d have to catch him in a level or something, since The Infinite wouldn’t allow any kind of attack on Tulland or his interests at all.

At some point I decided this was too boring, and that it would make it really hard to portray the rogue as a threat at all. Instead, I decided to go with the he-isn’t-always-in-the-safe-zone mechanic I mentioned above, as well as having White be present.

The idea behind White is that he was what amounted to a fantasy world cop, something like a sheriff who became a legend keeping towns safe and peaceful. The basic model was the idea of a Wyatt Earp type of character who would make everyone hand over their guns when they rode into town, and who had the muscle to force that to happen.

Since that meant that White was probably packing a really strong variant of some kind of “town guard” class, it would make sense that he had a bunch of skills specifically for catching things that went bump in the night, thwarting concealment, and that these skills probably got stronger in places that looked more or less like settlements or towns. In essence, the idea was to build an anti-rogue peacekeeping class, the kind of thing that would almost certainly exist in any world that had sneak-rogue assassin classes but wasn’t constantly in danger from them.

At the same time, White’s class probably doesn’t like it very much if he kills people for no reason. Adding that to the idea that he has his own interests to pursue that don’t necessarily allow an awful lot of time and risk for others, and you end up with a guy who can throw some weight and threats behind protecting Tulland, but who can’t spend 100% of his time and effort watching every little thing.

And worst of all, he can’t wait around for Tulland forever.

One of the things I liked about the existence of White is that he made it make more sense for Tulland and Necia to not spend a lot of repeat days in floors you had already seen before, grinding out every last bit of experience from them. In book one, that was a thing for everyone but Tulland, who capped out on experience very quickly. Here it would probably be enough of a benefit that Necia should do it, but can’t because of the time pressure on both of them to take advantage of White’s presence as much as possible.

Ley Raditz

Named after a level 5 light domain cleric in a DnD game my son is running for the family, Ley Raditz is a manifestation with my on-going obsession with multi-turn charge attacks in games, and especially with the idea that whenever I’ve actually seen that mechanic on character builds it’s almost never associated with a stealthy, wait-to-strike kind of tactic.

The idea with Ley is that he can either participate in a fight as a nothing-special speedy fighter, or that he can wait in the bushes building up potential for a single very lethal strike. Of all the classes in the dungeon that we’ve seen, Ley’s is the one least suited for higher level floors. He would have had an easy time with the Forest Duke if he encountered it, and there weren’t any small mobs on floors 1-5 that would have bothered him much. He would have been able to speed past the queen in the anthill, and would have been able to hit-and-run the Cannian Knight as many times as it took to take it down.

But after that? He’s in trouble. He needs allies to do well on most floors, and not every floor allows that. Worse, if he gets caught by a bad match-up human villain, he’s dead meat. This, of course, is exactly what happens.

We don’t see Ley betray the group, and we never hear his side of it. All we know is that where a hero would have realized they weren’t long for the world anyway, Ley decided that a few more days or weeks of life was more important than his loosely held alliance with Tulland and Necia, gave them up, and then paid for it.

Licht Light

Licht’s build was actually the first-draft concept for Ley, and was scrapped because I didn’t want to write a ton of scenes where he was harvesting bones in this particular book. He’s a crossbow user who can carry a certain amount of arrows enhanced with enemy bones with him, essentially making him a build that runs on consumables.

I like the concept of that build because it would be very, very good in the outside world where your risks and the timing at which you took them was mostly in your own control. Licht would have been able to dive into easy dungeon floors he knew very well, harvest the bones he needed to make limited runs at harder floors, and do that as much as he needed to in order to level and make good, steady progress.

In The Infinite, Licht’s build isn’t much better than Ley’s. Since he depends on a resource he can’t control and a timing that pushes him forward whether he’s ready for it or not, eventually Licht is going to find a floor that needs more bones to clear than he can carry, be unable to withdraw, and die.

That was the initial idea, at least. I’m still debating how much I want Licht to matter in future novels, and if he does end up being a bigger part of things moving forward things might very well change with his circumstances or his build to allow him to be more viable.

As a person, Licht was tooled to be almost completely neutrally aligned, with maybe a slight lean towards good. He’s friendly, he’s willing to spend a few minutes sharing information or working together with people in ways that are reasonably helpful to everyone involved, but he’s not a superhero and has no interest in being one.

I tried my hardest to make it clear that Licht is a little afraid of Halter/The Rogue without him actually saying it. When the time comes to confront him, Licht brings White to do it, and doesn’t contradict Halter when he says that he can’t hit him with his bow. In that sense, he’s no help. He makes up for it by being a consistent source of valuable information and help.

The Drunk

We know nothing about the drunk except that he’s very drunk in a place where people might kill him to harvest experience points. It’s an objectively bad choice, and one that we don’t see anyone else in the safe zone making.

One thing that would almost necessarily be true in a place like The Infinite is that some people who had done very well on their own worlds because things had worked out just right for them wouldn’t do as well starting from scratch in a new environment. Some people who had risen to the highest of heights through what they assumed was talent would find that they had simply been fortunate. Some people would find their builds weren’t suited for the constant climb. When they ran headfirst into the realization that their suicide runs at The Infinite wouldn’t end in greatness, that kind of knowledge would have to hit hard.

I think some people wouldn’t even get that far. When I imagine someone who has been on top of their world’s leaderboard for decades trying to restart in another place away from all their luxuries and support, I can’t imagine that everyone would cope with it well. When I imagine the people who jumped into The Infinite because of personal problems, it becomes even harder to suppose they’d be able to keep in the kind of mindset that pushed them closer and closer to an unattainable goal.

As a person, I have a tricky relationship with alcohol. For a very long time, I was a very happy drunk with a very happy life. Drinking tended to amplify that happiness, but it wasn’t hard to keep that amplification to a reasonable level and only drink in certain situations and at frequencies that didn’t put me at risk.

As I got older, stress got to be more of an issue. Jobs were often hard. People got sick. Relationships got to be harder to maintain and sometimes fell apart. Basically, I went from an almost entirely happy kid to a mostly normal adult, someone who grappled with various kinds of sadness and trouble alongside the happiness.

And just once, I was sad and drank to try to be happy. It worked. Not only did it work, it worked pretty well. I’m a happy drunk, so I was all smiles and forgot about my problems for a little while. The very next night, I picked up a bottle almost without thinking about it, and stopped drinking just in time to realize what a big problem it would be if I started relying on alcohol to manipulate my mood in that way.

These days, I drink about twice a month, mostly because I get a different kind of benefit from sleep when I do. The only exception to that rule is that when things get harder, I tend to drink less. It’s just not worth the risk. My life isn’t as dangerous as a dungeon, but I still have people to take care of and work to do.

Infinite Farmer is a book about making it. It isn’t a book about making one’s way easily and in an overpowered way, or in a low-stakes way where failure is easily forgiven and weathered. It’s about working through difficulties but walking away having earned a bigger reward than you ever could have in an easier set of tasks.

In that sense, I think it’s appropriate that writing it was so hard, this time around. That it hurt a bit to do.

The big question, for me, is not whether or not writing a particular book was a particularly big job. I’m not looking at that side of the scales. What I am looking at is the counterbalance - what that work produced, who it helped, and whether or not it brought something into being that deserved to exist.

Future books will be both easier and harder, I’m sure. And what will make me think a particular effort was worth it or not won’t be the difficulty level. Instead, it will be whether or not I can look and find that various people had fun reading it, or that some people were able to get through their own difficult lives a little easier because of it.

Which means, in large part, whether or not a book was worth writing has a lot to do with whether or not you found it to be worth reading.

If you’ve made it all the way through two books and still had time to read this author’s note, I suspect you did find it to be worth the time it took to consume. And that means I owe you thanks - you made my work worthwhile. You provided the rewards that make all the sweat and tears worth it.

I’m glad to have you here, and I hope you stick around as this series works towards its close and I start on a new journey. As always, you are more appreciated than you know.

RC