Right, brownies are a sort of fairy. Then I guess the other settlements have something similar.
“So each settlement has their own mascot, huh? When I first opened the chest, there were four buttons, and I chose the fish one. That’s how I got Pekkles.”
“Four? I only saw one.”
“It...might be first come, first served.”
So me choosing fish removed Pekkles from the selection pool, leaving only three options.
Still, for the girl to be trapped in the desert when she wanted to farm...that was some tough luck.
Thinking back, the uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean was probably the best possible environment to raise Pekkles. If I’d gotten Pekkles in the desert...was there even a fishing spot? I’d have to pin my hopes on the oasis.
Emoji nodded. “It’s possible.”
That raised the odds of there being four settlements in total.
“The first time I saw it, there was only a carrot button, you see. And when I pressed it, a Bunowny appeared.”
“I see... So what happened to your hired Pekkle when you employed a Bunowny?”
Support characters sometimes went away if you hired a different one. I had to make sure.
“My Pekkle handed his hat to the head Bunowny, who bestowed it on a newly summoned Bunowny that inherited his abilities.”
So there’s a conversion feature? Maybe each mascot has their own jurisdiction.
Anyway, that report from the Santa Hat Bunowny seemed to be a status update on the development area. Apparently there was a food shortage.
Maybe the development hasn’t gotten too far?
“And now... I’ll tell you about the friends I summoned. From here, the tale turns dark...”
Emoji began recounting what had happened in the Prado Desert.
After being granted the settlement on the frontier, Emoji enthusiastically threw herself at the event. Soon enough, the Bunowny asked her to invite her friends over.
Those who came were just as enthusiastic, eager to seize success just as the lord of Cal Mira’s party had done before them.
Eventually, they managed to open the Desert Dungeon. It was all smooth sailing up to that point. That is, up to the point they realized that the drops were hardly any different from what they could get from Cal Mira.
These were the players of a top-ranked guild—ones who prided themselves on being frontliners. The moment Cal Mira opened up, they charged into all the content it had to offer... Now, they were faced with a dungeon that was the same difficulty level as the one they’d cleared ages ago. No challenge, no thrill.
On top of that, desert development took quite a lot of time. Progress felt like no progress at all, and a sense of impatience began to set in among the settlers.
Worse yet, they’d been summoned in the midst of challenging Mikakage... Would they have been better off there than here? Their doubts grew louder.
“Wouldn’t we have become much stronger had we stayed?” became a common talking point.
“We pushed through it, mind you. Little by little, the development advanced. However, each time someone new arrived from the outside, they would bring with them gear stronger than anything we could find here. It started with crab gear, and everything that came after that.”
Well...crab gear was famed for its incredible versatility. We were the ones who were selling it, after all.
“And finally, the people I summoned started shouting, ‘Don’t drag us into your obsolete content!’... They dove endlessly into the dungeons to make up for lost ground, and I was left developing on my own.”
Yipes. So there are still players who only think about combat and nothing else? This must be the issue Alto was skirting around back there.
“When I first summoned them, they’d boast about surpassing the Island Lord Party. After a point, I heard them muttering...‘It’s all rigged. It’s pointless to even try.’”
That sounds like something Shouko’s former party members would say. They’re not here, are they? I don’t even want to think about it.
“Loley here has real leadership and player skill. But she’s too kind—and that kindness attracts all sorts. She even invited the player that kicked me from the guild.”
So in a way, I’ve been invited into enemy territory? That’s a little concerning. I might burn a hole through my gut if I don’t handle this properly. My character’s weak to stress after all. Probably.
Emoji went on, summarizing what happened afterward.
The whole place turned into a toxic environment, most likely. She looked completely exhausted as she talked about it.
Getting locked away...in a place like this had to be insanely stressful.
Even I’d felt like Urashima Tarou when I finally left the island.
But at least on Cal Mira, we were able to push past the front lines and find powerful weapons and tools while fighting formidable monsters. Here? Here, it felt like just going to Cal Mira was enough... It was no wonder they wanted to wrap up development ASAP and leave. That was in a gamer’s nature.
“If they know the goal, they should just grit their teeth and work toward it.”
Was this how it was for people who only had a mind for combat? They could say they’d do it, but it’d just be all talk? Did they not see a problem with that?
“The problems went deeper than that. First and foremost were the members themselves.”
There were problems left and right, but this didn’t seem to be why she’d called me.
“Each new arrival was stronger than the ones already here. That made the atmosphere worse and worse.”
Then came the demon lord’s invasion event. The settlement’s members were exempted and got a considerable reward from it.
This just served as a reminder that they were stuck in obsolete content.
Come to think of it, that’s around the time I stopped hearing Emoji. She was always taking command in the events before that.
Sure, it had to do with how the events were structured too, but it felt like our command structure had gotten a lot sloppier since...though we still managed to clear them.
“The moment someone I summoned told us that new areas had opened up in Mikakage...that was the breaking point. Everyone began to speak ill of me.”
Ouch...harsh. It’s like she’s sitting on a powder keg ready to blow at any second.
I could easily have seen myself going down the same route. I didn’t know many people, and it was only because my party members were easygoing that they accepted my actions.
“Development finally reached a point of fatal stagnation. Nothing worked no matter what I tried. We were completely stuck.”
“What was the problem?”
“Well, you see—”
“Kizuna, you’re good at farming, right?”
My sister impatiently cut in before Emoji could answer me. It was like she’d been waiting for this.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Cut the bull! Don’t even try to deny it! I know how obsessed you were with that crazy farming game.”
Fair enough. I definitely sunk a lot of hours into it.
“I mean, yeah, it was the kind of game where actual farming websites, videos, and academic textbooks could be treated as legit strategy guides.”
Most farming games were simple: Dig a hole, plant seeds, water, wait, harvest, and profit. But the game we played instead opted to cram in all sorts of complicated and esoteric systems in an attempt to get closer and closer to absolute realism. That was the hook that made it famous.
Wait...is that why sis called me here?!
If Bunownies ran on carrots, then someone would have to grow the crops to keep them going.
“Dimension Wave’s development mechanics are pretty loose,” I said. “Back in Cal Mira, all I had to do was fish.”
You just had to give the Pekkles the fish you caught, and they’d do the work for you.
“If I had to say...this region, being a desert, might have a higher base difficulty for development. They too thought that things would grow if you gave water, and they did lend a hand...”
Oh...so the challenge level is way higher when the rewards and EXP are the same. Of course you’ll have people complaining about that.
“Think about it, Kizuna,” Kanade cut in. “You tweak your setup and do all sorts of things when you’re fishing, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
And you put on good equipment to fight. Same idea.
“It’s all the same. With fishing, you consider the tools and locations beforehand. There are similar factors involved in farming.”
“But you should at least get some hints if you raise your mastery level high enough.”
“Kizuna. Have you ever used skills to choose your rigging?”
No...never. It’s all trial and error. After a point, I got some tips from the aquarium and library too. I guess skills can only take you so far.
“Point taken,” I said. “But what exactly went wrong with the farming here?”
“The yields are far lower than expected. The crops won’t mature.”
“Well...farming in a desert like this is pretty hard to begin with.”
The terrain itself was against us. In fact, the location was so bad it was insane to ask for any yield at all.
“There’s more. First, could you look at the fields?” Emoji said as she led me out into the sand...
And somehow, there was actual farmland.
“How’s the growth rate here? On Cal Mira, we could harvest every few days.”
We did have some agriculture, for what it’s worth, although it wasn’t our main source of food and the Pekkles were doing most of the work.
“It is the same here. The garden at my player housing functions like that too.”
They were summer crops...mainly cucumbers, tomatoes, and eggplants.
I approached to take a closer look.
Most were shriveled. Definitely not a good sign.
The next field over—seemingly napa cabbage—was the same story. Growth was terrible, and the vegetables were in no state to harvest.
Ah, she does have sprinklers set up. That’s a convenient system you can’t do without in a farming game.
They seemed to fall under the trap category, and while I’d lost my Trapping Arts when it got fused into Hunting Gear, I could still craft them like crab traps.
The water source seemed to trace back to the oasis.
Looking at the cucumber field, the vines seemed too stunted to grow any vegetables at all.
“Who’d have thought they’d grow powdery mildew in the middle of a desert...”
It seemed like a good idea to discard all my fixed notions of what a desert should be.
“Did you figure anything out?” Emoji asked me.
“Nothing you wouldn’t have found out with your farming skill.”
The buffs from my Seven Tools of the Pioneer allowed me to judge agriculture to some degree. But it was mostly knowledge I’d brought in from other games and information I’d heard from other farmers.