Author's Note
I've been wanting to do something like this for a while. Part tutorial, part tips and tricks, part humor. Been too long since I've done anything with the original story. Hopefully that'll change here soon. Don't know how often I'll make these but I can think of a few that I wanna make for sure. Also it's not wanting to let me indent the paragraphs when I write it on here. If anyone can tell me why I'd appreciate it.
Farming
Alright, I've got a house and my friends live nearby. Well, my friends in wherever this place is anyway. Being blasted away from Equestria has been a strange experience from the beginning all the way until now. That purple portal was weird, but all these perfect cube shapes are even weirder. At least the portal was round. Somewhat. It was elliptical. That's irrelevant. The point is that I'm stuck here and nothing is really how I remember. I even get hungry here. Legit hunger.
And this is why I'm trying to understand how to plant...plants.
"Com," I said to the Player I've befriended while stuck here in this place. "What am I doing wrong?"
"Did you use the farming hoe on the grass?" Com, the Player just barely taller than me, which puts him at about two of these cube-things tall, said while standing in the door frame.
"What's a farming hoe?"
"How have you survived this long without farming?" he asked me, chuckling to himself.
"Apples, fish and bread," I responded, turning to him. "It's worked this far but I'm getting tired of them so I want other things. So what's a farming hoe?"
"It's a tool that tills the land so that you can plant seeds and grow food over several months."
I looked at the ground, staring at the grass below my hooves. "You mean it'll last me several months, right?"
"Actually it'll take several months to grow and you'll have to live off of what you have until they grow."
I turned around to him so fast I thought my neck was going to snap. My face was twisted with such fear of having to eat bread and apples for so many months that I almost wanted to find some villagers and just mug them. It honestly sounded easier than this. I guess I'll have to-
"Except that in this place it usually takes only a few hours at most for any food to grow."
-kill him for scaring me into thinking I'd have to keep doing fish and bread for an eternity.
I sighed at the slingshot of an experience my emotions and mental state just went through at my expense and asked again, "So what's a farming hoe? How do I make one?" I stood up and turned around. "And why aren't you helping me?"
He scratched his back and looked at the sky, "Honestly I just find it funny that you're doing this at all. I wanna see where this goes."
"Again, how do I make a hoe?" I repeated my question, growing tired at his lack of an actual answer.
"Alright, I'll help you," he said with a smirk on his face. He was enjoying this far too much. "Get some sticks and a couple blocks of wood planks and use the crafting table, you'll probably figure it out from there."
Taking this as all the help I'd get at the moment, I walked into the house and sat down at the table with the items in my magical space that I store stuff somehow and focused on the items that I could make with what I had.
Wooden sword, no. Wooden ladders, no. Flint and steel, no. Ah, there it is.
I grabbed the tools that came with the table, metal tools that came from wooden blocks...please explain this to me, anyone...please, and made what looked like a wooden knife that was bent near the end. Kind of like a scythe, but not as cool. I wondered if these came in different materials. An ice one would be cool.
"Pff."
"What's up, you alright in there Craft?" Com asked having heard my laugh at my pun that I thankfully hadn't said aloud.
"It's nothing, I got the hoe, I think," I equipped it and walked outside to where I had dug a hole and placed water earlier. "It's this thing, right?"
He looked at it from where he was floating in the lake nearby and nodded, "Yeah, that's the one. Now you'll want to use it on both sides of the hole. The grass should just disappear and the dirt should get really dark."
I looked at the hole and then to him and back again, shrugging and doing what he said. I smacked the ground on both sides...I think I did something wrong.
"Aren't they supposed to be dirt and dark? Why are they still grass?"
Com got up and walked over to me, a confused look on his face, "I don't understand. How?"
I shrugged and tried again. Still grass. "Weird."
"Oh, wait a moment. I think I get it. You're hitting it wrong."
A moment passed. "What?"
"Just trust me. Look at it and think 'I am hungry' and it should work.
"What?" He looked serious when he said that. "Okay."
I'm hungry.
?
It...it worked. "What" I said. I snapped my neck toward him cause I was sure I heard Com say the same thing, but he had a casual look on his face.
"As I thought, that was all you needed to do," Com said with a straight face before walking back to the lake where he laid back down and continued to float.
Anyway, I guess now that it's ready I should plant my seeds. I sifted through my mind and found the pumpkin seeds I wanted to try out and planted them one at a time in the tilled ground. One green shaft appeared near instantaneously when I put them in; I just rolled with it, this place was just weird enough for me to do it at this point.
Walking away from the seeds for now, I decided to check out something else that Com had mentioned before about water in this world. He had said it'd be useful to learn if I was going to start farming, said something about how I could have a literal infinite amount if I used a couple buckets full of it in a certain way. Guess I'll figure out how that works.
"Hey Com," I called out to him, watching him just float around the lake listlessly. No response. "Com," I called a little louder. Still nothing. I walked out to him only to notice he was sleeping. On the lake. Floating around on the lake, sleeping.
What.
I turned around and just left him alone. He shouldn't die from something like this. Probably.
I walked back to where my pumpkin stems were and noticed they were a bit bigger than when I left them. I turned my back to them and dug a hole three blocks long and placed my first bucket in the far end and watched it flow into the other two spots I had dug out, nothing special. Apparently it got interesting when you place the other at the other end, so I did. For a moment the water in the middle looked like it was getting flooded on both sides before it evened out to be the same as the two I had just placed.
"Okay, so it's supposedly an infinite source now, but how to test it," I wondered out loud to myself. I already knew from previous water experiments that a "source" of water is the only one I can grab with a bucket, everything else that flowed from it was just a little extra bit that could move stuff but not get picked up for some reason. So I tried picking the center spot up with a bucket and, to my surprise, it let me take it and then filled up like it had never been taken in the first place. "Weird."
I turned around to shout to Com about how it worked for me but screamed instead because there was an orange face sticking out of my pumpkin stems that scared the tartarus out of me.
"Ah!" I heard a splash, followed by a fair bit of coughing coming from the lake and saw Com standing up and gasping as he breathed in large breaths of air after nearly drowning. "What's going on? Are we under attack again?" he asked while the object in his hand switched several times before settling on an iron sword.
"No, a freaking face popped up where my pumpkin should've been," I shouted back to him. "I thought I was planting pumpkins, not faces."
He walked over and had finally gotten his breathing under control when he stopped in front of this face plant, "Oh, that's just what a pumpkin looks like in this world, got me at first too actually," he said, smacking the plant with his sword until it popped off and floated there for a moment, spinning until it popped into his body. He grinned, "Watch this." After a moment his head had the pumpkin on it, which freaked me out for a second. "You can wear them as a helmet."
"Is it useful?" I asked, rather confused as to what purpose it could even serve.
"Well, I'm actually not sure, but it looks funny," he said before taking it off. "I know you can make a pie with it though, they're pretty good actually. I'll go make one real quick." He went inside for a minute before coming out and throwing a pie over to me.
I closed my eyes and looked at the pumpkin pie, thinking about what kind of taste it would...there was a hair sticking out of it.
I think I'll pass on the pie.