Infinite Farmer

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Infinite Farmer

(aka: Infinite Farmer Cultivating The Infinite Dungeon)

A System has to eat. And sacrificing the willing to The Infinite is one of the few ways we can do that. ... What advice I can give from this point on, I’ll give. What help I can manage for you, I’ll manage. Because from the first major checkpoint in the dungeon on, you are a source of profit for me. Something that makes me stronger.

Tulland Lowstreet is a young man bored with the idyllic, unchanging life on the island of Ouros. When he's passed over for the chance to receive a class and grow stronger, he snaps, discarding the church's warnings and accepting a deal that the System has whispered into his mind. Finally he'll have a class of his own, and a chance to adventure!

Too bad he didn't Read the Fine Print. He's not The Chosen One — he's the System's next meal. But hey, it genuinely wants him to progress as far as he can; he's so much more nutritious that way...

Infinite Farmer is a LitRPG published on Royal Road by R. C. Joshua (author of Deadworld Isekai and Demon World Boba Shop), starting in November 2024.

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• Adaptive Ability: The eighth floor doubles up, adapting its overall form to the individual so as to present a challenge, then sending waves of monsters that adapt based on what attacks were used to dispatch the previous ones. If Tulland uses caltrops, the next wave may gain toughened feet. If he uses toxins, future waves will become resistant. Tulland responds by deliberately holding back what he can do, accepting a long slog with each wave in exchange for revealing his capabilities only incrementally, so that by the tenth wave, the boss is merely difficult but still manageable.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • Tulland tries grinding against the motes in the dungeon's first room, but soon gets a system notification that the amount of XP he can gain from low level enemies is capped, especially for his non-combat Farmer class. To advance further, he either needs to fight enemies at higher levels than he's expected to handle, or else gain XP from non-combat class activities (farming, in his case).
  • Even farming rewards are steadily reduced when he keeps doing the same thing over and over, until what was at first a bountiful source of XP is just a trickle.
  • The Infinite Dungeon pushes delvers to progress. The Ouros System is able to negotiate with it to reduce the effect on Tulland and stretch it out to give him weeks longer on each floor, knowing that if he rushes through then he will just die pointlessly, but still, Tulland can't just sit endlessly in one place.
• Attack the Injury: Tulland gets the upper hand in his spar against Brist by lodging a wickedly sharp Silver Star fruit in Brist's shoulder joint, causing ongoing damage the longer Brist uses the arm, then spraying explosive acid bulbs at the same time Brist manages to yank the star out. The acid doesn't do very much damage, but it does greatly hinder the wound's healing.
• The Bet: Once Tulland is confident that he can pass the first floor, he wagers that he can finish both that and the second within a month. The System points out that neither one of them could enforce a bet like that — but The Infinite offers to mediate it, with one of Tulland's skills at stake, versus "a reward appropriate to his class and situation chosen by The Infinite's system" — but paid for from the Ouros System's energy. Since the Ouros System has a very limited energy budget and could benefit from consuming a skill, it eventually accepts.
• Bludgeoned to Death: Tulland's combat potential gets a big boost when his seed splicing results in a Clubber Vine, capable of delivering repeated heavy wallops that can send smaller enemies soaring through the air or outright pound them to jelly. Unfortunately it's a genetic dead end, so he can't build on it, but it's still very welcome.
• Boring, but Practical: Tulland's tutor was a great believer in things like the importance of an army's logistics train, while Tulland was always more interested in the fighting. They had an argument about whether a historical army could have just pushed through to its objective despite not having enough food supplies (Tulland thinking that it takes a month to starve, without seeing the whole picture, such as morale or the fact that they're doing exhausting work). On another occasion the class discussed how a ruler who wants to make more swords will first need to ensure he can feed and clothe and house and pay all the specialists who will be involved in the process. Becoming a Farmer starts to teach Tulland how right his tutor was.

  Boring is powerful. If I had to sum that old man in one sentence, it would be that.

• Bring My Brown Pants: Razored Lungers tend to loose their bowels out of fear when the Lunger Briars seize them, so Tulland has a reasonable level of familiarity with what those leavings look like, and can tell when a particular pile is from something else.
• Caltrops: Steel star fruits are nasty things, very tough and covered in razor sharp spines. Tulland can't pick one up without cutting his hands, but that also makes them effective hazards when thrown on the ground.
• Cap: The Farmer class doesn't boost Tulland's physical stats to assist him in combat, but he could work around that through cleverness. What really cripples him is the fact that as a non-combat class, he can only gain a limited amount of XP each level from killing monsters. Where a warrior might take months to hit their XP cap, he'll reach it in days. Which forces him to get more creative in finding ways to become stronger.
• Cast from Calories: The Vitality stat provides a Healing Factor, but it doesn't create mass from nowhere, it draws on the body's own stores. After recovering from life-threatening injuries, Tulland notices that his wrist is half the thickness it used to be, looking like a twig.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Tulland's tutor consistently beat him at a board game of "stones and armies," by building flexible support structures while Tulland built focused attacks like needles. Tulland draws on that lesson when fighting monstrous ants, which are stronger and tougher and faster than him, but blind, not good at turning, and not very clever, especially after he interferes with the sense of smell they rely on.

  "Because a needle can only point in one direction. And at any place but the point, it makes a poor shield."

• David Versus Goliath: The fourth floor is an immense space containing various giants. Tulland is particularly interested in the Earth Giants, which enrich the soil around them. Actually fighting one, however, mostly involves attacking its feet in hopes of making it fall over.
• Dead Hat Shot: Tulland is hit hard to find a bloodied but empty helmet that he recognizes as belonging to Necia.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • Tulland makes single strikes all over the Cannian Knight, aiming especially for joints, not trying for an immediate win (which isn't realistic) but just trying to leave it hurting and slowed all over.
  • Even though the "perfected beast" on level 9 is pinned down for a Coup de Grâce, it's so tough that Tulland has to hammer away at its brain stem area until his arms are going numb, before it finally dies.
• Exact Words: The System promised Tulland, "A class and time enough away from the Church to learn it, and grow it." It then proceeds to give him the cheapest class it can, and send him on a one way trip into the Infinite Dungeon.
• Exploited Immunity: Tulland surrounds his temporary shelter with as many Lunger Briars as possible. He can prevent them hurting him, but the wandering monsters on the floor aren't so lucky, chasing after him and then finding themselves entangled and eaten.
• Fattening the Victim: Once Tulland is stuck in the Infinite Dungeon, the System assures him that despite its betrayal in putting him there, it actually does want to help him succeed as far as possible — because that will mean collecting even more energy when he eventually dies.

  No, Tulland. I'll have what I want. The only question is how much I'll gain.

• Fragile Speedster: Tulland meets a rogue who can move faster than the eye can follow, but is otherwise weak enough that even a mere farmer can gain the upper hand and make him retreat, limping.
• Game-Breaker: In-Universe. The Infinite Dungeon intervenes to "adjudicate" and alter some of Tulland's skills, because he's found a way to use them that's just too powerful. The adjudicators are impressed by what he's done, and give him some rewards for it, but they also add limits to prevent him from steamrolling the whole dungeon.

  Your previous skill never got to the point of triggering a judgment session of its own, but it was vaguely possible for you to overgrow each floor of the dungeon using nothing but your Hades Lunger Briars and turning each of them into a kind of botanical hell.
  It is no longer possible to do this.

• Green Thumb: Between his [Enrich Seed] and [Quickgrow] skills, Tulland can turn a seed into a decent sized sprout overnight, or at higher skill levels, just minutes.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Tulland's tutor used to tell him that the best way to improve at the game of stones was to play against people more skilled than himself. However, although Tulland played many times against the tutor, who was definitely better than him, he didn't feel like he improved much. Upon discovering that the principle is sound, with getting endlessly pummelled by Brist actually teaching him a lot, Tulland concludes that he's just really bad at stones.
• Healing Factor:
  • A high Vitality stat allows rapid healing, even of injuries that would normally not heal, although it draws from the body's own mass and major healing can therefore leave someone skinnier than before.
  • The [Strong Back] skill slowly helps to set bones or fix dislocations.

    As he did, he felt Strong Back very slowly working to reorient his bones and get him back in shape for what the skill likely thought of as a hard day's work on a normal, completely conventional farm.

• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
  • A lone Farmer probably won't last long in the Infinite Dungeon, since they're intentionally nerfed in combat, unable to get full benefit from weapons and armour, and without boosts to physical stats. However, it turns out that food is very hard to come by, forcing combat classes to spend large amounts of their XP to purchase it, so a Farmer is extraordinarily valuable as a Support Party Member.
  • Tulland knows that gaining improved instincts for soil quality and other growing factors like moisture doesn't sound overwhelming. But he anticipates that [Farmer's Intuition] will be a Game Changer for him, guiding him to find and raise much more potent plant varieties that could give him a fighting chance.
• Heat Wave: Tulland wakes up on the third floor to find that it's much brighter than he expected. So bright, in fact, that he rapidly sunburns in the early morning while mostly working undercover. As the day approaches full noon, he barely manages a quick exposed run to get more water from the river, and watches his plants visibly wither away despite watering them — until they're somewhat revived by eating the monsters that tried to take shelter under them.
• Hostile Weather: The monsters of the third floor are nothing special, but the environment is its own kind of challenge. Tulland arrives in a massive hail storm, plants seeds afterward in an area visibly affected by extreme past floods, then wakes up the next day to literally scorching heat.
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: Tulland knows that the Hades Briar fruits weren't very appetising until his skills altered them, but since he can grow food himself, the Infinite never offered him the option to purchase it. It's not until he meets another delver that he learns just how hard it is to obtain food in the dungeon, and how valuable it is to be able to rapidly grow it.

  "But can’t you hunt, or something?"
  "We can forage, but there’s not much food to find. And hunting is no good. The beasts are poisonous."

• Kill Enemies to Open: Encountering the first floor's optional boss causes the exit stairs to become unavailable until the boss is dead.
• Lesser of Two Evils:
  • Tulland throws himself into a very nasty Hades Briar patch in order to escape from a Razored Lunger goat. The thorns rip his skin apart and make him pass out from blood loss, but they don't eat him like the goat would, so on balance it's a very painful win.

    He had no choice.
    Tulland jumped out of the frying pan, and immediately began screaming as the briars provided their own sort of fire.

  • He also figures that if he's going to have a chance of outwitting the Ouros System, his best hope is the separate system that runs the Infinite Dungeon, which seems to be more impartial and less hungry to devour his soul.

    It wasn't anything he could count on, and The Infinite hadn’t provided him with the rule book it used to mediate those kinds of things, but it was better than having a hostile entity in cahoots with his arch-nemesis.

• Level-Locked Loot: Tulland's widespread cultivation of Lunger Briars earns him a new skill that he can't receive until he raises his mental stats further. Fortunately he has some points to spend and wanted to increase his magic regeneration anyway.
• Lured into a Trap:
  • Tulland uses rigged thorns and pit traps to immobilize the Razored Lungers and let him kill them while they're helpless, sometimes baited with fruit, other times using himself.

    From what he had seen, there was no chance of him beating one of those Razored Lungers in normal combat. But he had some ideas of how he might take one in an unfair fight, given enough time.

  • He later provokes a rogue who goes around killing other delvers into following him through prepared ground, then activates a swath of briars and Acheflowers.
• Man-Eating Plant: Fertilising a Hades Briar seed with monster meat and enhancing it with Tulland's skills turns it into something more. Instead of a simple stationary menace, it becomes an active hunter, a Lunger Briar, entangling prey that comes nearby with thorny vines and then devouring it. Due to Tulland's involvement in its creation, it is considered "Subjugated" and will ignore him on command.
• Morph Weapon: Tulland's starting equipment kit includes a "Farmer's Tool" that can dissolve its head into fog and reform it, becoming a shovel, hoe, pitchfork, or scythe. The transitions take several seconds, which limits the usefulness of mid-combat shifting, but he does at least try out its different forms, finding that a pitchfork doesn't achieve much against the toughened skin of Razored Lungers, but the shovel can kill them with repeated headshots.
• Mushroom Samba: Inhaling even a tiny amount of dust from an exploding Acheflower will momentarily burn, then turn the world brighter colours and make you see butterflies out of the corner of your eye.

  Tulland: The wooooorld. It's just so pretty.

• No-Sell: Tulland's spiked club does nothing to the Forest Duke except delaying it for a second while it dismissively snorts.
• Not the Intended Use: Looking at a plant in the wild, Tulland can get a general intuition of how useful it would be be and what it needs. It's supposed to help him grow things better. However, it also means the ninth floor, full of all manner of hostile plants, is pretty much a cakewalk, as he can instantly tell which plants spray poisons, which ones have razor-sharp leaves or entangling roots, which ones are mobile.
• Planimal: Tulland fertilises Swamp Ache trees with wolf corpses, then empowers them with his skills, and is lucky enough to trigger a useful mutation, where the trees start growing wolf-like fur that can be carefully peeled off and used to make things like a carrying pouch. The Infinite recognises it as a new species, the Wolfwood Fur-Bark.

  The Swamp Ache was a useless, low-quality tree. This is a useless, low-quality tree that also grows a moss that closely approximates wolf-fur. It is not, as you might expect, a wild difference.

• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Licht figures that only superior functionality could motivate Tulland to wear pieces of stonefruit shell threaded together into a suit.

  Licht: That is, by a wide margin, the ugliest armor I’ve ever seen. It must be good.

• Support Party Member: Tulland teams up with Necia on the basis that she'll provide him with monsters as fertiliser, while he'll provide her with food. Their conversation confirms to him that the System isn't going to let him be very effective in a fight, but purchasing food costs a lot of XP, so his contributions will be very valuable.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: The system description of Hades Briar fruit mentions that they are very nutritious, but taste awful, "as the animals stupid or desperate enough to look to it as a food source simply do not care about that kind of thing." Sure enough, when Tulland tries one, the flavour is "like a mouthful of sand mixed with bile," and the fruit later turns his stomach as if it were rancid. He eats them anyway, because his Vitality-based Healing Factor requires calories.
• Try Not to Die: A simple admonition to "Be safe, okay?" after weeks of no human contact, breaks down Tulland's stoicism and reduces him to tears as Necia walks away.

  It was a boring thing for someone to say, but felt really nice under the circumstances.

• Verbal Backspace: When Tulland first opens Licht's door, Licht fires a crossbow at him, diverting the bolt at the last second as a warning shot, then bluntly says he doesn't like Tulland or Necia and that they should go away and stop wasting his limited time. Tulland then pulls out a bag of grain.

  Licht: Would you like a chair, sir? Ma'am? Let me know if there are other honorifics I should use. I'd be glad to use them. Or do whatever else you might want.

• Zerg Rush: Individual Lunger Briars are effective against Razored Lungers, but greatly outmatched by the Forest Duke. However, when they've been planted in dense patches, with dozens of briars having overlapping fields of fire, then they start to have more impact.

  While both the Forest Duke and Tulland fully agreed that it could take on as many individual briars as it wanted, this wasn't a one-on-one duel.

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