Infinite Farmer

Announcement: Rewrite of Chapters 16-21 (and start of Beta Reader group)

Revision TLDR: I have a longer note on this I encourage you to read, but I've responded to reader feedback by enhancing the fight with the Forest Duke to give a better payoff, pushing back the class adjudication to after that fight is done, and making it more clear that Tulland's class changes aren't a nerf outside of very necessary he-can't-overgrow-entire-levels changes.

I'm glad to do it, and happy to have had the kind of reader feedback that helps me make the story better. Thank you all!

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Hi everyone! RC here.

First, I want to say thank you to everyone who has been reading and enjoying the story, and even those who have been reading and only-kind-of-liking it. Every little bit of interaction with the story you give is a nice thing for me, something that keeps me going in the job.

This particular story has been controversial on a couple points, and I wanted to address those. Some of you have had a few problems with the story, most of which revolve around these few specific things:

Several of you felt the fight with the Forest Duke was a lot less satisfying than it could have been. There was all this build-up, you said, that felt like it came to a point where it needed to explode, and then just fizzled, sparking complaints that you were robbed of a payoff.

Some of you, not all but enough that it matters to me, felt that the "nerf" on Tulland's class came sort of out of nowhere.

The same people tended to feel that Tulland was robbed of a lot of power that he had justifiably earned, as if The Infinite was saying "Hey! We see you just got viable. How about you just die anyway? Sorry-not-sorry, screw you, see you in hell."

I write a lot, but going back and looking at chapters with a very critical eye isn't something I'm good at. I did my best to do it here. I want to take that kind of feedback seriously, and I never want to be the guy who just decides he wrote everything perfect on the first pass and has no room for improvement at all. Reading through the affected chapters, I came to the following conclusions:

Tulland was never meant to be a plague-builder class, and I don't think the story would be very interesting if he was. The potentially exponential way seeds work coupled with the fact that "Tulland sat back and watched as another floor was eaten, haha, broken" isn't a very interesting story type means that the potential of him being a plague-builder had the be addressed at some point or another.

I did, honestly, a remarkably bad job of addressing that in a satisfying, fun way. I nerfed him at the very apex of a fight I had done a lot of work to build tension in, and pulled the rug out from under the readers.

I also did a very bad job of indicating that Tulland was getting paid out heavily here. I very much wanted the System to say "Hey, you are stronger. You can't be stronger just like that because I couldn't let anybody be stronger in that way. But still, we want to make sure you get much, much stronger here like you deserve, even if we can't let it be literally unlimited and broken."

I missed the mark doing that well. I just did, flat-out, and I'm actually literally sorry about this.

After conferring with Dotblue and taking a whole weekend's worth of writing and applying it to the problem, I made some really substantial changes. Here's what you need to know:

Chapters 16-21 have all had changes.

Regarding the adjudication, it now happens

after

the fight. The Forest Duke fight has been edited to let Tulland enjoy the benefits of his mega-vine, and to barely make it even with its help. The tension is much better preserved, and the payoff feels more organic.

Regarding the exact changes to Tulland's class, they are still much the same. It's now more clear that those changes don't take anything from Tulland's overall strength in the moment. He is just as strong or maybe stronger after the adjudication as he was during the Forest Duke fight.

At the same time, the broken plant-plague thing is still impossible for him. The propagation rate of his plants is capped, and how much they get out of fertilizer is still now tied to his farmer-skill levels.

Tulland is still going to be a bit limited in terms of how many plants he can carry. Later on, the exact way he's limited will change, which will eventually (spoiler) mean that he can carry more weaker plants, and less of his stronger plants, preserving a balance that doesn't just have him throwing big packs of hundreds of briars at problems. He'll still have to think. (end spoiler)

The biggest thing I want you to know about the changes is that this is a story that is always, always going to be about farming. The huge risk here is that this story eventually becomes about a man who can just conjure summoned plants, for whom farming is an afterthought, and who we barely see touch a hoe or a shovel. You've seen stories with a gimmick that go that way, right? That eventually just become generic melee-guy stories, no matter how exciting and new the premise was? I want to avoid that. I think the story will be the most fun that way.

The biggest thing I want you to know overall is that I appreciate the feedback that helped me make these changes very, very much. There's practical, career-related reasons why I'm always a bit sad to see low reviews when a story isn't liked, but that doesn't mean the feedback itself isn't valuable and helpful. I'm always listening, even if my mental health doesn't always let me engage the way I'd like to.

Please never stop telling me what you think about my stories and how you think they could improve. I'm glad to be working with you to make the best stories I'm able to.

Thank you so much,

RC

PS: On a different note, we're starting up a beta-reader group to avoid these problems in the future. As a beta-reader, you'll get advance access to everything Infinite Farmer related. All that we ask is for you to give us your unfiltered opinion on how you feel about the writing and depending on the feedback, we might edit, rewrite, or preserve the chapter. For now, we're limiting the beta-reader group to five people. If you're interested, could you write a line about yourself to [email protected]?