Infinite Farmer

Tulland's head was beginning to ache in a worrisome way. It had started to hurt a bit after The Infinite had forced his existing skills into other shapes, and had only become a little less pained after he had applied an extra point to his mind starts. Then it had amped up the hurt again as the new skill appeared. A duller pain was also spreading throughout his entire body.

Tulland cradled his aching head in his hands while he popped open his skills one by one. Most of them were unchanged, and those that weren't only gave him limited information at best. After a while, he had mostly just confirmed what he already knew. Spirit was useful to him as a magical power recharge stat, whereas force was the primary driver behind how well his various plant enhancement skills worked.

For the most part, if he wanted to enhance seeds better or have an increased influence over what his plants were doing or how well they did it, he needed a lot more force. If he wanted to be able to do more things over time, then he needed a lot more spirit. His Strong Back skill, which he needed not only to survive most encounters but also just to keep from getting slowly taken apart by the wear-and-tear of his new life, seemed to run almost entirely off his vitality.

That would have been inconvenient if all of his farmer skills weren't also influenced by his vitality stat for reasons Tulland had yet to fully comprehend. The language around why higher vitality was good for something like Enhance Plant was vague, but it seemed like it was a small-but-real effect that just about made it worth to keep pouring points into that one body stat.

Even though Tulland had pumped a few more points into his other physical stats, he suspected they might be almost the last points he would ever put there. The more melee combat he did, the more he understood how absolutely abysmal his class was at that, and how bad he seemed to be at it as a person on top of that. It seemed more and more like he would either be able to farm up a plant-based solution to problems or would be consumed by the problems themselves, with not much in-between to rely on as options.

Tulland sat as he felt his new stats finally start catching up with the changes to his skills, and felt everything start to slot into place as his new capabilities settled in. He sat very still and just let the process happen while acclimating to the lingering pains, spending about an hour resting before he felt good enough to get going again. He finally stood, dusting himself off and getting ready to get down to some serious testing.

Walking over to one of his newer Lunger Briars, he regarded it for a few moments. It didn't look drastically different from his tenth-level briar had while it lived, but his farmer's intuition told him that it wasn't nearly as tough. Even beyond the information he got from knowing it was a lower level, he could tell it was just a less healthy, less viable plant.

Not that you aren't tough too, little briar. You just aren't as strong as your brother was. We'll get there.

Extending his hand, Tulland made contact with the briar and tried to give it a simple command, something like "fight" or "lunge." The moment he did, he felt a fairly small amount of energy flow out of him to the plant, which immediately started acting an awful lot like other briars had when they were close to prey. He commanded it to stop, which worked just fine as well, and had a similarly small energy draw. It looked like Tulland could just about issue commands at will unless it was hundreds or thousands of commands at once. The costs just weren't high enough to care about, which was one less thing to think about that Tulland was very grateful for.

Before commanding the plant to fight again, he shot it with a quick application of Enhance Plant. That, at least, worked about like he expected it to. Much like Quickgrow, it took a large portion of his available magical energy and applied it to the plant's growth rate in a way he could feel and understand was happening. From his vantage point at that moment, it didn't seem different at all.

But the skill said that it would automatically apply to whatever the plant was doing. Tulland issued a quick command to the plant to start fighting again, which it obeyed with slightly less speed and power than it had before. Looks like you are running out of power, little guy. Try this.

This time, Enhance Plant took significantly less energy. It was still a good chunk, probably ten or twenty times more than just commanding the plant took, but was something he could apply at least several times over the course of a fight. That was interesting. It seemed like an intentional balancing decision on the part of The Infinite. Growing plants would be something he had to find time and safety to do, instead of being a spammable, always-on effect. But enhancing plants to do other things was cheaper, which meant he wouldn't have to be quite as careful about when and how he chose to do so.

Of course, the real question is how all this works in a fight. I guess it's time to take a walk.

Before leaving, Tulland cut six vines of varying levels. The weakest level-one vines went around his forearms, some level two briars went around his biceps, and the only two level threes he had left in his compound wrapped around his upper chest and neck, where he hoped they'd offer a bit of protection against strikes from whatever enemies he might find out there.

It was funny. Tulland was still exhausted, but having a bit of purpose helped paper over the worst of that in a way he wouldn't have believed otherwise. He had actual pep in his steps as he worked his way outside his territory and into the woods to try and find some Lungers roaming around.

Before he got quite out of the protective security of his most distant briars, Tulland issued his first battlefield command to the briars, something boring and necessary that it almost pained him to do it.

Okay, guys. No fighting. Hold still.

That was the first test. Keeping stronger briars in reserve as Tulland used his weaker ones to take out less-threatening enemies seemed like an important tactical thing, and it was important that he knew how long that kind of instruction would last. If Tulland could issue the command once to a plant and have it last forever, then his schedule would look very different than if he had to tell them what to do every hour, or even every minute.

It turned out that the skill wasn't an all-day thing. It took Tulland about five or ten minutes to find any prey, and the moment that the unlucky Lunger came around a tree to pounce at him, it was immediately clear that all of his briars were active and ready to fight as they uncurled from his body and launched themselves at the poor, doomed monster.

Once the enemy was dispatched and more or less absorbed by his vines, Tulland started walking again, now issuing the stay-still command every minute or so. This time, the vines minded their own damn business as the next Lunger attacked, except for the two weak, forearm mounted briars. Those shot off like arrows, caught the Lunger, and began to go to work on it.

Two weak briars were about what it took to take down a Lunger, something Tulland already knew from his initial plantings. These two would manage to get the upper hand on their prey, but it would take a while and they'd probably take damage in the process.

All right, guys. Eat up. Let's see how this works.

For the second time ever, Tulland sent Enhance Plant's power out into the world for the express purpose of helping a plant take care of a monster. The first time had been very important, but it was a hurried, chaotic command issued to a half-dozen vines fighting an enemy of ill-understood strength. So it hadn't been that useful for understanding his own class.

This was. Tulland knew exactly what it took to tear one of these little Lunger jerks apart, and so he could see almost exactly what his new skill was doing to help. And it wasn't much, really. If he had to estimate it, it seemed like both vines got roughly a ten or twenty percent increase in their strength and the speed at which they moved. Which wasn't a ton, but did move them from the "will eventually win this fight" category to the much more satisfactory realm of dominating their opponent in a clear, definitive way.

Better yet, his expensive, better-grown vines were still on his chest, minding their own business and not expending their limited stores of post-harvest energy at all.

So let's think about this. I can now strap some vines to my body, and use them for general fighting. There's probably a limit on how many I can take with me, but I can use up my cheap, disposable vines on things I know aren't much of a threat to me and save my more powerful vines for stuff I couldn't otherwise beat.

And eventually, I'll have some plants that work even better. Right?

Smiling, Tulland took the shattered, barely-held-together remains of his Ironbranch stick and put the poor Lunger out of its misery. It was time to do some more hunting, figure out some more limitations a little more exactly, and then to gather some seeds.

Because the skills were only about half of what Tulland could do. The other half came from his farm, and he was pretty sure he could do a much, much better job with that than he was currently doing.