Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

“Dirt, Tulland. Real dirt. It’s a miracle.” Necia’s voice was dry and flat. “I’ve never seen the like. The prophecy has been fulfilled.”

“Haha. You have to know how big of a deal this could be, right?” Tulland asked.

“I do. It’s just funny.” Necia leaned over and gave him a squeeze around his shoulders. “Don’t let me keep you here. Go look at your dirt. Let me know what you find.”

Tulland immediately slurped down the last bit of his food, then walked to the newly filled soil pail. Even from a few paces away, he could tell it was good stuff. The normal soil in safe zones was a five on some one-to-ten soil scale and the worse soils he had seen in the swampier or more desert-like floors were a two.

“This stuff is like an eight.” Tulland said, letting a loose handful of dirt flow between his fingers. “Maybe an eight and a half.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“It’s not. I’ll explain what I mean later.” Tulland took the soil directly over to his farm patch with a bemused Necia in tow. “I’m going to dig up all these briars. I need you to hold them.”

“Sure.”

Tulland took the bucket and set it on the ground, then took his Farmer’s Tool shovel and portioned out a big lump of soil from a nearby pile. Carefully dumping his bucket so as not to lose any precious high-quality stuff, he started stirring them together with his shovel, thoroughly mixing in the magic soil with the only-slightly-less-magic corpses of his soil-based enemies.

“Well, it’s only one bucket, right? These briars are my highest value plants. I’d like to do a whole garden entirely made out of this soil, but there just isn’t enough of it. So I’m mixing it with the soil that everyone brought back for me.”

The army of dirt-men wasn’t the best soil Tulland had ever seen, or even the best he had ever made for himself. But it was pretty good stuff, and the resultant mix was much better than the soil he had been using on this floor so far. The only question was what plants to give it to, but the clear winner was his briars of all different varieties. Overall, they contributed more points than anything else by far.

Tulland carefully uprooted each of his briars, leaving enough soil around the root structures to make sure they’d survive the process. He had tried this before, only to find that most of his plants had a maximum of a few minutes out of the soil before the System started considering them dead. He figured it was a stealthy limitation on his class, and usually, it didn’t matter that much. Today, it put a hard time limit on what he was trying to do.

Handing each of the briars to Necia as he pulled them out, he then left her holding the huge pile of them as he carefully excised all the normal soil from the area then filled in the rectangular cavity with the new, bucket-juiced soil. He added the briars back as he went, pleased to see he only lost a couple members of the weaker varieties from uprooting them.

Once they were all back in the soil and re-watered, his farmer’s intuition was happily informing him the vines were in a much, much better situation. Even the Chimera Sleeve vines he had replanted in the soil after their time hunting dirt monsters seemed to be thriving.

“Those seem livelier.” Necia pointed at the chimeras. “The new ones. Any reason for that?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out. The Infinite lets them live and level out of the soil. That was part of some class features it took away from me, once upon a time. I’m not sure why it gave them back now.”

“Were they used to drink blood and level while they were fighting?”

“Something like that. Although these seem to level from killing, rather than eating. And they won’t drop seeds even if they die out there. I have to be involved with the growing process. Probably to keep them from taking over the world.”

“Is that that big of an advantage?”

“Right now? Yeah. Those Chimera Sleeve vines grew to level three already.”

“It’s weird.” Tulland went over and stroked one of the vines. “I would have been content with just what they do already in terms of combining the functionality of older plants, and keeping up with the power curve of the dungeon. These do more than that, even if I don’t know what it is yet.”

“Then figure it out? Can you… I don’t know. You can sort of talk to them, right? Did you ask them?”

“Sort of.” Tulland sent a message to the vine to simply be active, leaving the exact details of how mostly up to it. It wiggled faster, and puffed out one end of itself into a much larger tube. “It does that.”

“Huh. It looks hungry.”

“Well, it will have to keep looking hungry. Because I’m not going to deal with it right now. I’ve done my soil stuff, I’ve dumped all my magic into this farm, and now I’m going to go take a bath.”

“I’ll walk with you. I feel like I got more dirt on myself in one day from exploding dirt men than I’ve had on me the whole rest of the dungeon.”

After each of them had made full use of their own room and tub, they walked back to their house and spent some time on the porch before going to bed. The next day, supposedly, they were going to be starting military drills under Brist, White, and a few other commander-types who had some experience in that realm. Neither Tulland or Necia fooled themselves into thinking it would be easy.

It wasn’t.

—

“All right. I see you were still bumping into people, Necia. And Tulland, you allowed people to bump into you,” Potter, the robed evaluator, shouted.

“Which do we change?” Tulland asked.

“All of it. In the heat of battle, being bumped takes on a different meeting. It interrupts dodges. It pushes people out of position into attacks. And sometimes, the bump itself is damaging. Remember that not everyone’s stats are built in the same way, and not everyone can play as roughly at close range.”

Tulland believed it. The last few collisions had actually hurt compared to the first few as everyone got more frustrated and determined to make things work. As a group, it seemed they were getting worse rather than better, responding quicker but much less accurately to the various formation changes as they were called.

“Iron Pillar!” Potter, done barking corrections, was now back to barking orders. He had taken over for white, arguing that it was a better idea to get people used to obeying someone without a command skill if they could. “No, Tretine. Iron Pillar, not Steel Wall.”

Tretine was seemingly in the business of making everyone else feel a little better about the group’s overall poor performance. He couldn’t remember the name of a single formation consistently. He always went to the assigned spot for at least one of the formations, seemingly chosen at random out of the five or so positions he had been taught that day.

“How did he even get this far?” Tulland angled his head so Brist could hear him, but hopefully so the other warrior couldn’t see. “He’s… not all that strategic, if you catch my meaning.”

“Physical guys are like that sometimes. I’m actually pretty smart for the kind of guy who could punch open a mountain pass.”

“Do what, now?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Brist dismissed the question with a wave. “Besides, he’s not the only problem. He’s just the most obvious one. Adventurers aren’t military, or at least aren’t usually. Almost everyone here is bad at this.”

Tulland watched as a rogue came out of stealth almost directly in front of a charging spearman and almost got flattened as part of the bargain.

“So what do we do?” Tulland asked.

“We practice. There’s a reason we didn’t plan anything else besides a simple formation earlier,” Brist said. “Nobody is going to get much better at fighting in this period, and everyone needs to rest. So we’ll spend a few hours a day on this, no more than that, and just try to get as close to competence as we can get.”

“How close do you think we will get?”

“Arrowhead Formation!” Potter yelled. “Go!”

That was the last straw for Tretine’s limited attention span. Not only did he not make it to the correct spot, he was so clearly torn between two different directions that Tulland was mildly surprise he didn’t tear himself in half trying to get to both. As it was, he moved a step in each direction before throwing up his hands, giving up, and storming off.

“Let’s just call that the end of the day, everyone. Come back tomorrow around the same time.”

Tulland breathed an audible sigh of relief as the groups fell apart and went their different ways. No particular moment of the practice had been all that hard, but the accumulated stress of trying to remember just where to go and how to get there from any given formation over the afternoon had accumulated in him. It was almost as hard as getting beat up by Brist, if in a somewhat different way.

“Tulland, wait.” Potter jogged over from where he had been calling instructions. “How did that soil work out?”

“No telling yet. I should have an idea by tomorrow.”

“I was thinking about it after you left, how much it must help you. I don’t know where you'd even get something like phosphorus or a nitrogen fixant for soil here.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The chemicals. For building up soil. Nutrients for the plants.”

“I only know some of those words.” Tulland threw up a pained smile of regret for Potter’s benefit. “I wasn’t much of a farmer before I came here.”

“Really? Then why get a farmer class.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Don’t worry. We all have one.” Potter shook his head. “Still, it’s a shame. On my world, we had quite the science of plants. Did you know, for instance, that the food you give to your plants as fertilizer isn’t really food in the way you’d suspect? Really, the plants are just taking up individual components of that food.”