The Lottery in the Ground
Had Farming World ever truly been a mainstream game?
Ask me that, and I have no choice but to say no.
And yet, back in the early days—when hunters and dungeons were only just emerging, when virtual reality had seized the mainstream and the whole world was crying out for Sword Art Online—RPGs, MOBAs, and FPSs were locked in a dead heat, shouldering past one another while the rankings lurched back and forth in a free-for-all worthy of the Three Kingdoms. Games with genuinely solid design found devoted followings among people of completely different tastes. Slot any of those genres into virtual reality, and there was simply no way they could fail to be popular.
Raids that had been nothing but keyboard clicks became fights where you moved your own body against colossal monsters. In a world you could adventure through in person—enhancing your gear, customizing your character, escaping reality outright—every new boss sparked a World First Kill event that turned into a war between nations, and every time, viewership climbed into the billions, proving the fantasy fans right when they swore the RPG was immortal.
MOBAs needed even less defending. Even back on PC, League of Legends had held an unshakable first place for more than ten years from the day it launched—a genre that had already proved itself. People earned the title of "pro" with nothing but their fingers, pulled salaries from the hundreds of thousands into the tens of millions, and were recognized as having an actual profession; the game even coined the word esports. Bring that into virtual reality, and failure was impossible. MOBAs kept their undisputed throne in the VR era as well. The only exception was when an RPG World First Kill event broke out—then, and only then, enough players came back for the nostalgia that first place had to be set down for a little while. Esports stayed wildly popular. If anything, it only grew.
FPS, by contrast, never quite touched the heights of those two. A game about shooting guns simply had a ceiling on its fun next to a MOBA or an RPG. Fold battle royale into the formula, though, and FPS held steady all the same, locking down a firm third place as the side game of choice for anyone maining the other two. It ran world championships as well, and once—just once—it even stole the top spot.
And those three weren't the end of it. Plenty of genres that, on PC, had been loved only by tiny minorities picked up a bonus from the simple fact of virtual reality and grew genuinely popular. Zombie apocalypse games were one. In a certain light, games of that same farming genre might have been another.
If you could play "realism" with your own hands, then a minor genre gained new ways to entertain a mainstream audience, not just the people who already liked that sort of thing. Looked at that way, Farming World hitting number one right after launch—only for a moment, but hitting it—might have been for exactly that reason. Not because it was a farming game. Because, while it had chosen open-world farming as the main course, the side dishes had been packed thick and rich with the flavor of an RPG.
One of those side dishes was the lottery farming system.
You could chase a jackpot from anywhere. The map of Farming World was itself a space where a user could farm and pull resources. The door was open. There was a glass ceiling—resource rarity, scaled to the grade of the map—but the odds of punching through that ceiling existed too, however thin.
And it wasn't only resource rarity. Even the most trivial materials. Even the basic resources you expected nothing from at all could, if luck settled on them, turn into something of real value. That was the lottery system. Users called it the lottery in the ground. Strictly speaking it wasn't in the ground at all—more of a lottery you found on the roadside.
The odds themselves were miserable. You might as well have said they didn't exist: 0.001 percent. A seed dropping from a weed or a tree counted as a Rare reward, and that was a full 1 percent. Ore from any random stone was the same. What actually popped at 0.001 percent was a Heroic reward—something one full tier above whatever resource you were farming, and a good specimen at that.
A gem naturally refined over a thousand days of drinking in nothing but moonlight. Absorbs mana with ease.
When crafted into an accessory and worn, the effect of skills that consume mana increases by 20%.
Farming World holds so many kinds of resources that memorizing every one of them is a lost cause. Figure that all of those exist in the dungeons too, and even a Heroic reward is still a roll of the dice once it drops. But the Glass Stone I'd picked up was a jackpot.
"This is auction-grade, isn't it?"
Some jobless bum pissing away ten years of his life on Farming World wasn't about to know real-world resource prices. Still, the genuinely precious resources that came out of the game were precious in reality too, and on the Farming World forums it was common practice to plug whatever rare drop you'd farmed into real-world prices and jerk off to the fantasy that you'd actually made that money. I'd only overheard it. The Recovery Herb had come from the same place. The info was probably years old by now, so the price might not even hold anymore.
Glass Stone was no different. The memory was hazy with age, but I was sure I'd seen people say that the moment one appeared, you put it on the auction house. The option alone was enough—the kind of accessory stat that made hunters, damage dealers especially, lose their minds. Mages, who couldn't grow at all without money, were said to be sorted into entirely different ranks based on whether or not they owned a ring made from Glass Stone.
"This is huge."
Even if you weren't a hunter, Glass Stone was a fairly precious gem inside Farming World as well.
"Should I use it myself?"
The only reason I could be this lukewarm about it was that I still didn't have a single active skill that spent mana, and for the moment, passives felt like more than enough.
"I'll hang onto it for now."
Sell it or use it—either way. I hadn't even hunted for the thing. It was found money I'd picked up off the side of the road.
"Congratulations, Master!"
"Yeah, yeah."
"If you have it crafted and wear it, I'm sure it'll help!"
"I'm trying to decide whether to sell it."
"What?"
The moment I voiced the dilemma, Ruru had a fit.
"No, Master! You have to use this to grow your power. The farm matters, of course, but things like Glass Stone are hard to find even if you have a farm!"
She had a point. Gems really were hard to come by, even one you'd only call C-rank at best. A C+ Glass Stone in particular only had slightly lower numbers—push those numbers up, and the same stone climbed all the way to A-rank, even S-rank.
Ruru was already bursting at the seams, so I went ahead and burst her completely.
"What are you talking about? Why would I sell it through the farm? I'm taking it with me and selling it for cash."
"...Huh? To your world, Master?"
"Yeah."
"Masteeeer!!!"
Ruru throwing a fit wasn't exactly strange.
"Everyone on Earth trades that way anyway. The Glass Stone here isn't any different from the Glass Stone that comes out of Earth, is it?"
She had nothing to say to that.
Of course, if you were looking at the future, Ruru was right. Fail to buy what money can't purchase—that's one thing. But sell it? And for paper bills that amounted to nothing but kindling inside Farming World?
But Earth was reality to me, too.
"The cup ramen and snacks you stuffed your face with yesterday all have to be bought with money from Earth."
"...Hng..."
And besides, I could always buy another.
"If it comes to that, I just earn the money again and buy one on Earth. Simple."
Hard to obtain didn't mean it never appeared. It would take a lot of money, sure—but the sheer majesty of a resource rarity rated SSS and reserves rated SSS+ had already filled me with confidence, courtesy of one Glass Stone I'd picked up walking down the road.
I left Ruru muttering to herself, lips pushed out in a pout, and headed home beneath the sinking sun. One look at the state of things told me reaching the village would take several more days yet. I had a logout cooldown to sit through anyway, and if I wanted to gather Recovery Herbs, the Glass Stone, and whatever else was worth carrying out, spare time was a blessing. I didn't let it fuss me.
"Oh. Right."
Back home, I washed up, stretched out on the bed, and opened the Farming Window again, set on clearing up the odd feeling I'd had while tidying the yard that day.
"The server settings on this thing seem a little off."
No matter how I turned it over, something was wrong. At first I'd just assumed that since this map had resource reserves of SSS+, dropping more than a normal map was only natural. But setting the quantity aside, Rare rewards felt like they were falling at a slightly higher rate. Probability being what it is, a bigger volume of drops meant the one-percent drop table rolled more often, so more Rare rewards coming out was technically correct. Even accounting for that, though, things seemed to be coming out too well. Today's Heroic reward was the same story. Set against the amount of basic resources I'd gathered cleaning the yard, it had dropped on odds that were absurdly too thin.
So, on the night the third day was drawing to a close, I finally checked the one thing I hadn't bothered to check, because it had seemed too obvious.
"Map Info."
An information window unfolded, kindly explaining just what kind of map this dimension—this map—really was.
1. [Lv. 1] All crop growth speed +50%
2. [Lv. 1] Rare / Heroic reward chance +500%
3. [Lv. 1] 3% chance for crop grade +1 on harvest
4. [Lv. 1] Experience gained +100%
I felt a flush of shame at how pleased I'd been to pick a lottery up off the roadside. Every time I looked, this map made sure I felt it—the map itself was the lottery.