How to Farm
The hut isn't large.
It still hasn't been expanded, and the moment those big plastic moving boxes are hauled into a space of barely thirty square meters, one whole side of the room feels packed solid.
"Whoa. There's so much."
The house had gotten smaller, yet Ruru looked happier for it. She fluttered her wings and fidgeted, every twitch of her making it plain she wanted to tear into those mystery boxes right this second and pull out whatever snacks or ramen she was craving.
"Uuugh. You're too cute, Ruru."
Watching her, Kim Sujeong stamped her feet in delight.
Ruru is tiny, and the way she talks is adorable, so to anyone else she might well land with the same kind of cute as a cat. I, however, am a cold man. Ruru's cuteness does nothing whatsoever to grow my farm. On top of that, an ancient fairy who's already lived this long won't earn her keep unless you ride her hard, so as the owner of the farm I have no choice but to swallow the cuteness and treat her with ice in my veins.
"You ate everything that was here?"
"...But I finished everything I promised, Master!"
Here it comes.
Ruru hurried over to protest, showing me the crops stored in a wooden crate by the door and clearly fishing for praise.
"You didn't skip a few, did you?"
"I watered every single one and grew them all, carefully!"
"All right. Good work."
"Hehe."
Scolding is one thing. I don't expect her to pull off more than she's capable of.
As Ruru herself said, she's a helper built—if "built" is even the right word—to take on more of a manager's role once she's grown. Demanding the features you want without investing anything is the kind of absurd nonsense no Farming World gamer would stoop to. You hand out a mission, and if it's completed, you pay the reward. That's how you get a next time.
I beckoned Ruru with a grave expression.
"Yes!!!"
She answered with everything she had and followed.
"Pick three."
The plastic boxes of food came to about two and a half in all. The moment I dumped them onto the floor, everything I'd brought tumbled out in a heap.
"Waaaaah!"
Ruru flew through the mountain of food like an overexcited child.
"What is she doing?"
Kim Sujeong couldn't get her head around the bizarre sight.
Fair enough. A tiny fairy who looked like she lived on dew was drooling with joy over ramen, snacks, instant rice, ham, canned tuna, and kimchi—not even real food, just instant junk. Anyone living in the modern world would have a hard time getting used to that. I still wasn't used to it myself.
Whether we were or not, Ruru had fallen into genuinely serious deliberation.
Exactly three. Of course I wasn't going to starve her at mealtimes—we'd eat together—but the three I was giving her meant something else entirely. Food that belonged wholly to Ruru, something she could tear into whenever and wherever she wanted. No wonder she was torn.
"I really should go with the snacks... hmm... no... eating ramen on the roof in the middle of the night would be nice too... hngh... but there are new foods as well..."
For the moment, Ruru chose a single cup of ramen. Then she asked, carefully.
"Um... Master... may I take my time choosing the other two?"
With new snacks and foods added to the pile, she clearly wanted to be careful about it. I told her to go ahead.
"Thank you!!"
"Too cute... Ruru... it's like watching a niece."
Kim Sujeong quietly snatched up a jelly and held it out.
"This is a present from Auntie."
Ruru took it with a bright face, then snuck a glance at me. I didn't make a fuss about it. Controlling the food was only meant to give her a certain level of motivation. Honestly, Ruru isn't even my kid, and unless I made a point of locking everything down, I could hardly scold her for eating food that was just sitting out.
Unpacking was over quickly. There wasn't much unpacking to speak of. We hauled the old bed outside, spread the vacuum-packed mattresses we'd bought wide across the floor, and had no choice but to leave the rest of the luggage—everything except the food—in the plastic boxes.
"It's way too cramped."
"Want to sleep outside?"
"No."
Two big, plush mattresses meant half the hut was mattress and the other half was almost nothing but plastic boxes. If we actually meant to live here, one of them would have to go—which meant sleeping on a single mattress with Kim Sujeong, spacious or not.
I'd sooner kick Kim Sujeong out.
So we decided to leave the luggage in the boxes for now and pull out whatever we needed into a small crate as we went.
In the end, in Farming World, you either spend Farming Points to fix an inconvenience or you put up with it. Those are the only two options. Expanding the house with Farming Points still isn't unlocked, and I'd already burned through my points raising the login-logout level, so there was no choice either way. At least one method remains—growing the house through an achievement quest—so all we can do is endure a little.
"Done!!"
After a cleanup that might have been organizing the luggage or just making the house messier, we stepped outside.
"What do I do?"
Brimming with motivation, Kim Sujeong gripped a wooden watering can and scanned the surroundings like she was heading into battle.
"Whoa... it's really huge. You're growing all of that? Corn? It's insanely tall."
"That's all weeds."
"Even if I just dug all of that up... huh? Weeds?"
"Things you're going to have to dig up."
"...Seriously?"
The wooden sword I'd been using was handed down to Kim Sujeong as well. Having lived her whole life as a mage, she looked awkward holding a blade and gave it a rough swing.
"Chop a little whenever you've got time. You won't be able to cut through them easily anyway."
The basic tools are at least D-rank, so harvesting D-rank resources isn't impossible, but she won't be hacking them down in great swaths the way I can. Tidying up miscellaneous resources is something you do when you actually have the time, so I didn't load her down too heavily. I explained the work she needed to do.
"You handle the farming."
I'd already suffered through making the vegetable patch myself, so there was no need to till the soil.
"There are seeds here, right?"
"Recovery Herbs have seeds too?"
"They do, but not right now. I used them all."
This is land with a high chance of rare rewards, so even if Recovery Herb seeds hadn't dropped often, plenty of other kinds were still sitting in the box. Not enough for mass production, but probably enough to run a patch this size through two or three cycles. The seeds are all different, so their growing times and cultivation times vary, which could get annoying—but that's just how farming is at the start.
If you want to buy exactly one planned variety and plant nothing but that, the farm is still too small, and the village hasn't been restored yet either. For now, all we can do is plant whatever seeds turn up while we're gathering resources.
"It's not hard, right?"
You just plant the seeds a reasonable distance apart. Water them once a day, or as much as the seed's information says they need, and there's nothing else to fuss over. Depending on your Farming skill there are more things you can do—fertilizer, extra care to raise the quality—but I don't expect that of her yet, and I'm not asking for it.
"This is easy, though."
"Right?"
Of course it's easy. Farming itself isn't hard. You plant, and you grow. The system guarantees enough convenience that you can just get up every day, water, and not worry about the rest. You don't even have to mind the temperature, and the seeds that grow in a given season come with their own corrections built in. Barring the occasional hit from some extreme natural disaster, a crop almost never fails.
Above all, the cycles are short. In Farming World a season only runs out to day thirty, so things have to be set short—but I don't really know how it'll work here.
And more than anything, Kim Sujeong isn't locked in as a manager yet. I'll have her try it. If she says she can handle it, she handles it. If not, I send her back home and get on with my own work.
"This is all I have to do? What do I do after that?"
"Whatever you want. Cut weeds, harvest wood, mine stone. Take a walk around if you feel like it. Just don't go too far. It could be dangerous."
"Dangerous? Are there monsters?"
"I cleaned things up, more or less. But it's not only Big Rats."
What do you do with the time left over? That's not a question I can answer. I'd brought all sorts of things along because I didn't have anything to do myself, and even though Kim Sujeong and I are family, we've spent so many years practically like strangers.
Still, she's a C- rank mage, and while her level isn't high, she's raised it well enough. Wandering around near the house shouldn't be all that dangerous.
"Ah! Master!"
I'd roughly assigned Kim Sujeong her role and was about to head off for the quest I'd been putting off—find the village and pick up the restoration quest—when Ruru spoke up in a rush, as if she'd only just remembered.
"While you were gone, Master, the Goblings came by. I think they stopped in because the Big Rats weren't around anymore..."
"Goblings? Right. After the Big Rats, it was the Goblings."
"About every two days, two or three of them look around the area and leave."
"Good."
Farming Points are needed without end. Right now I can coast on a single SSS+ ability and call it comfortable, but as the biome level rises, there's a clear limit to coasting on one high-rank ability alone. What you need then is levels and points. You don't just trust a single high-rank ability. You take the points earned from the levels you've raised, use them to solidly lift the ranks of your other abilities and skills, build a sturdy foundation, and let the synergy kick in.
What that takes is endless quests and endless grinding.
Goblings walking in on their own two feet were a welcome sight.