The Ability Survival Requires

Farming World's content splits, broadly, into two. There is base content—farming near the house and raising crops—and hunting content, stepping past the house to pioneer unknown land. Two, if you follow the main trunks. Break them down, and the branches run past counting.

They divide in two, and still the two join into one. To farm, you water by hand and till the fields yourself, but sooner or later you have to build an automation system, and that demands higher-grade resources. Those are not lying around nearby. You have to find a mine, and you have to hunt the monsters standing guard over it.

Hunting, the other way around, is not a matter of stumbling out and fighting. You need weapons made, and armor that can stop a monster's fangs. You have to raise a forge at home, smelt the ore, and craft gear meant for the hunt.

So the two contents branch apart at the trunk, and still they are the single core that runs through all of Farming World. Games of this sort are all like that. An RPG gives you the pleasure of hunting monsters and growing a character—the pleasure of moving by rules you set yourself and sinking into them. An FPS gives you the clean satisfaction of pulling a trigger. A game in the Farming World vein is built for a different pleasure: you empty your mind, farm at an unhurried crawl, raise your crops, and if the mood takes you, step outside and hunt with what you have grown, picking up the fun of getting stronger along the way.

Enjoying all of it generally costs two or three times the effort and the hours, so most people play together and divide the roles. The so-called herbivores, the ones who want to heal, stick to the base. Carnivores, who want adventure and hunting the way an RPG offers it, take the hunt. I, of course, had soloed for ten years and carried both roles alone, which was why I could compare them and judge with a colder eye.

Which side matters more in Farming World? Which side, holding an SSS+ rank ability, can reach hard enough to move the other?

"Not easy."

I had told myself to just blow through the tutorial, and even turning it over honestly, the answer would not come. If it had been that simple, people would have been calling Farming World a game whose balance had already collapsed. Both mattered. On a map whose overall difficulty sat at SSS+ rank, weighing the two against each other was close to impossible. Hunting was important, yes, but the base had to brace it, solid and safe, so the resources the hunt brought in could be processed quickly and well.

So I decided to stir a little of my own taste into this stubborn problem of efficiency and performance.

Farming World is, as I said, a farming-type genre. A minor one, and in some respects hard to call orthodox. In the usual games of the type, farming is the point. Here, the higher the difficulty climbs, the larger the share of hunting it takes to open the map. Even the resources are drawn from reality, and the monsters bound to them are, of course, nearly identical to the ones that crawl out of real dungeons.

And hunters' abilities?

The same. It was one of the three greatest reasons I had played this game for ten years as if my life were on the line. Even if luck had failed me and I never awakened as a hunter, inside Farming World, at least, I could live as one with an SS+ rank ability.

"Figures."

The thought leaned my heart, just a little, toward hunting. I wanted to know what an SSS+ rank hunting ability felt like. In reality I was a shabby life with no ability to my name, a man sunk in virtual reality. On the Secret Hidden Map, I could cut loose as an SSS+-rank, Lesal-class hunter—something that does not exist in the real world.

And in truth, the easiest and fastest way through the early game is to choose a hunting ability. Farming only starts to pay once an automation system is standing, and reaching that point means you inevitably have to find a mine and farm D-rank to C-rank resources out of it. Try to kill monsters with copper weapons and no ability at all, and you really do have to crawl like a dog.

Once the rationalizing started, more than thirty minutes of agonizing shed every bit of meaning. All that remained was which hunting ability to take.

Mad as its freedom was, the game did not reduce hunting to something as flat as a sword or a bow. In this world, everything is possible. You can take up a sword and keep the romance, or an axe. If you can manage it, you can even use magic—though that content opens only on maps where resource rarity sits at B-rank or above. In a world where you can build guns, what more is there to say?

Freedom that high, of course, charges a matching price for wielding a weapon freely, and in Farming World the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠price is time and effort. A single ability skips it.

"Sword... magic... summoning..."

There was far too much worth turning over. Magic, as I had said, would take until I farmed A-rank resources before it was any use on this bare ground, so I could not choose it. Even so, picturing the mages at work in reality, it was an ability I badly wanted to try.

"Sword or summon, then. In the end."

More precisely, the finer categories ran melee weapons, ranged weapons, summons, and magic. I had no particular taste for greatswords or axes, so if I took melee, I meant to use a sword. Among ranged weapons the bow is the most ordinary, and it carries a forward-looking perk: later, you can switch over to guns. I do not much like it. In the old Farming World, a ranged weapon—a bow, to be specific—meant you also had to make the arrows, and in this high-freedom piece of shit, making arrows is more tedious and more complicated than shooting them. Fail to recover what you fire, and the return falls off a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠cliff against every shot. That memory had stayed with me.

Easy and convenient is best. What is Farming World aiming at? Automation. A world of it, built through a long, long grind and a mountain of effort. You kick one-click ease out the door with your own two feet and suffer like hell, and in the end you suffer for the sake of that click.

A spoonful of romance, and you take the sword. Romance with your own taste stirred in—a step down from the click, and from the sword—and you take a summon.

"Hmm."

The choice between those two finalists was entirely mine. Sword and summon both cleared every condition I had set.

On the first and the third, though, the ground where sword and summon pull ahead splits cleanly. A sword has a hard advantage: even the wooden sword you are given lets you perform at once, with no resources at all. A summon's advantage comes later, when both the base and the hunt can use it. That ties into the second condition as well, and for sheer versatility a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠summon is overwhelmingly the more practical. But look at it as hunting, and the early days change the math. If I meant to stay safe—if I meant to keep my own body intact—then a sword was far safer than a summon.

"Ah. This one really is a problem."

If I could choose an SSS+ rank ability like this in the real world. Sword, or summon. Which would I take?

I turned it over, and in the end I chose.

"This dumbass. Seriously thinking about the future."

I had nearly walked into the angle this shitty game was playing. I had been weighing it on the assumption that everything would work out, granted. But pick a summon, and the tutorial might have been nothing but suffering I did not need to volunteer for.

"Summons, well... they'll hand me one again later."

Even short of SSS+ rank, summoning was an ability I would end up raising anyway.

At last, the tutorial quest began. I opened the wooden chest beside the door that led out of the small hut. All sorts of things were packed into that narrow box, and the contents arranged themselves before my eyes, slot by slot.

The basic issue, sitting inside a basic ten-slot small chest. Realistic as the game was, it was still a game, and in virtual reality opening a chest laid the contents out before your eyes as a system message, neat as an inventory. I took them out one by one and set them into the belt at my waist. Anything slotted there went into an inventory that never got in the way of movement and never carried a felt weight. The belt was the issued Farming Belt, seven slots—a simple inventory for the basics, if you wanted to think of it that way.

"Hah. Time to start."

I did not feel like it. But I had to find my house.

I drew the wooden sword first.