Vance dug a hole and planted the terminal seed. He walked over to the water and cupped his hand carrying over a bit to water his newly planted terminal seed. A +150 to farming and congratulations you have reached level 4 in farming. 0/1000 XP popped up as the seed immediately started growing it popped out as two leaves and then changed into a mini screen growing in size, after a minute of its rapid growth there stood a two-foot stalk with a monster four feet wide and two feet high.
When Vance went to inspect the monitor it came to life, playing an animated image of its growing process it just went through. When the monitor inside the monitor came to life, it zoomed in and a text appeared.
Player terminal tutorial, press play to begin.
Vane pressed on the play button and a trumpeting sound began playing, followed by a monotone voice explaining that he had just gained access to worldwide auctions, The terminal was a technology that connected all the players around the world. You could buy, sell, bid, and auction just about anything!
It popped up with tabs for the four actions and was currently on an auction tab with a list of weird seeds and names. A few entries down he noticed the chicken weed seeds being a familiar entry, and they were priced at 5g a seed. His gold, silver, and copper amounts were all zero at the bottom. Vance wondered how currency in this world worked at the sight of it. How much copper made a silver and so forth resonated from his mind as he clicked the sell button. The tab came up revealing the text; Please place the item in the transfer pod.
The plant came to life sprouting a bud that reminded Vance of blubasaurs back bud, then opened up. Vance looked around his surroundings, wishing that the buds didn’t disappear, then remembered the spicy stone that laid on the ground. He walked over picking it up, then dropped it down the transfer pod.
The screen lit up with spicy stone and a weight of 3grams. Price per gram was set at a five copper buyout and 1 copper bid, but he could adjust it with an arrow. He decided it must be the current market price and lowered the buyout to 4 copper. Hitting the enter button it brought him to the auctions page where a few bids marked it up to 3 copper within seconds and then it all said sold a moment later it showed a green checkmark and 12 copper showed at the bottom where his money must be.
Checking his interface, he noticed it was also on his stat page. He wondered if there was a way to extract it so he could have his physical coins, then decided it didn’t really matter since he had yet to meet a single soul and the only proper use he had for it was on his terminal seed. This was a total game-changer. He could grow and sell crops with the crazy way plants seemed to sprout.
Going back to the terminal seed he looked through all the current auctions, noticed that some items like armor, swords, and livestock were all priced in the gold amount. There were a ton of tabs letting him look through categories like seeds, livestock, eggs, weapons, armor, land, companions, mounts, and even weird ones like aspects, and tutors.
He did not know what they were but had awesome names like tiger or dragon and were priced anywhere from 5 gold to 5000.
Returning to the auction list, he noticed that moonstone was selling for two gold a gram and it reminded him of the moonstone he had found. He quickly went over to his signpost hammer and saw it laying right where he had laid it down. Pocketing it then wondering how much his sign hammer would sell for he brought it over to the terminal. He put it in hammer first and the seeded spit it out. The terminal showed it did not accept soul-bound items. How could he have missed that it was soul bound to him?
Looking at his status page as he held the sign hammer, sure enough, there was a description stating it was soul bound to him. Vance didn’t want to get rid of his only fire-starting stone and realized if he would have sold the hammer he might not have had a way to make his next fire anyway and looked at the auction tab one more time. He found a filter button and looked at the lowest auctions first. It had chicken ditch weed, chicken ditch weed seeds, chicken feathers, cilantro, and cilantro seeds all with bids starting at one copper and buyouts from 1 copper to 3. Vance had no interest in cilantro having hated it back on his own world, and couldn’t really think of a use for chicken ditch weed, seeing as he had a new plant of it growing already where he had previously planted a seed, and looked further down the list.
There were a few weird names like dragon root and frost snaps for what must be plants. Since the seed was also an option to buy. He eventually ran into some seeds he recognized. The bids started at 10 copper for carrot, wheat, corn, potato, onion, and cabbage. Scrolling down, he noticed a ton of real-life produce. From pumpkin seeds that were 20 copper a piece to apples and oranges priced at 1 silver.
Vance noticed nothing costing over 100 copper so assumed 1 silver must be worth 100 copper. He scrolled back up and picked out a carrot seed that cost him 12 copper. He pressed buy and a seed spit out of the terminal’s mouth. Vance looked at it for a second and remembered that they took two seasons to sprout seeds. What an idiotic choice, he thought as he went to find a nice place near his fire pit to plant it. After planting it, he was rewarded with another sound of +50 to farming.
He was still a bit away from leveling it up but was happy with his progress. Maybe he had a shot at becoming some powerful player in this game-like world. He watered the seed and noticed it popped up out of the ground ever so slightly afterward. The growth of stuff astounded him as he wondered if other things like animals aged just as quickly. It would have taken a month to see any sign of growth from a carrot in his normal world. Maybe the two seasons wouldn’t be as long as he originally thought it may take if carrots grew how they did in his old world. Minus the thousand times faster part, anyway.
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Vance was so in awe with this whole new world he foraged, creeping quietly, worrying about coming across anything living he tentatively started walking towards the forest. Sure, he had two lives left, but the pain of getting killed was not an ideal experience, and he did not know what would happen if he ran out of lives.
Vance broke a branch off a dead tree and staked parts of it into the ground to mark the way back. A few minutes into the forest he found a mushroom. When he inspected the green mushroom it showed a text saying it was a Murklurker mushroom. He went to grab for it, but as he did the whole thing disintegrated, turning into fine dust, and a notification popped up that his harvesting had failed.
A few more tries on other mushrooms scattered throughout the area and a +50 to farming popped up again and he had a Murklurker mushroom with unknown properties in his hand. He popped it into his pocket and harvested four more successfully gaining another +200 to farming. Vance decided he didn’t want to press his luck anymore as a growl roared out from far away and lightly jogged back to his camp.
Vance was surprised he didn’t have a stamina bar but knew that he wasn’t much more athletic than he was in the old world as he broke into a sweat. He walked over to the terminal, adding the Murklurker mushrooms to it. Finding the suggested price was 10 copper apiece. He listed them for 8 copper starting bid and a 12 copper buyout.
The auction time was set for 24 hours, but they were bought outright almost immediately. He was 60 copper richer when he noticed the carrot had already grown to what appeared to be full size. He wondered if he should try to harvest it now, or wait for it to bloom flowers. Deciding on the latter he went into the auctions and selected a potato seed, a corn seed, and an iron pan. The pan was the most expensive at 40 copper. He was broke just like that but figured with the way things grew, he would turn a profit in no time. He planted the two other plants, filled the bucket, and watered all three.
Hell, this world must never go hungry, he thought as the corn almost instantly popped up from the ground as he was trickling water down on it. He walked over to the chicken ditch weed and stripped it of its buds. Gaining ten Chicken ditch weed buds he pulled the seeds out of them, planted them, and tossed the buds into the terminal’s mouth. He priced them as 1 copper buyout each, but this time, nobody seemed to buy any of it. Sighing, he went over to the lake and started looking around.
A few feet out from where he stood was some kind of algae or something as he eased out and inspected it. Freshwater spinach was the description as its name came into view as he got within grabbing distance. He harvested it on his first try, gaining 100XP to farming, and looked around for more. Seemed like this plant didn’t have any more growing near it.
He made it back to the terminal plant and deposited the spinach, 1gram of it started at one silver, so he posted it for that. After waiting a few moments and not seeing a bid, he looked more into the other tabs. The land tab immediately caught his attention and as he clicked it, a notification came up letting him know he was one of the land’s first players and was allotted one staking kit for free.
He immediately thought of clicking the accept button and the terminal tentacle spit out a bag with a zipper on it. He opened the zipper and immediately grabbed a small book out. It was made of brown leather and said player manual and instructions. Fucking finally, thought Vance as he set the bag down with a clink from what Vance assumed were actual stakes to stake his land, and flipped to the first page.
Welcome travelers, this is a quick guide to staking your land, and how this land’s economy works. Congratulations on finishing your first achievement! Staking your land!
If you were hoping for a know-all guide, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we will give you the basics of how things work around here. First off, there is no “log out” or “quit” button. This is your real-life now and you may have multiple, but they are finite.
Dying once you have run out of life tokens will cause an ultimate death. For some, this may be the best option to opt-out of our program. If you do decide to keep on living though, like most, this guide will teach you how to use your ledger, the terminal seed to some extent, and how to stake your first property!
The first step to staking: grab your stakes and plant one in a position you want the corner of your property to extend to, doing the same for the other three for whatever land you want to claim.
Caution! Making your property too big for its tax or maintenance will affect your leader score. Starting off with easier to manage areas and growing a team to help manage it is the first piece of advice I’m going to give out. If you fail to pay for the tax each week, the property will be forfeit, including everything on it, including your terminal seed. Failing to have a positive leader score also affects things like tax, and may make it so certain aspects are unavailable to you.
The second step to staking: after you have placed your fourth stake, you're going to want to open the next page’s ledger and approve the action. Congratulations! You now own your first piece of property! You can buy single stakes at the terminal to add to your property lines or create a new one. Minimum of 4 stakes required for a new property.
Last piece of advice: buy some type of housing seed and be cautious. There are many aggressive creatures and players, I never meant it to be like this. When you give power to others with blind trust, however, worlds like this are created. Be vigilant, and if you ever want to learn more, come find me in Terminal city. I love some epic or better pipeweed and will trade you a story for a pound.
Vance flipped the page over, and a blinking text appeared. It said user I’d and vanished as he went to try to touch it. Wondering if this was going to be his permanent in-game name, he took a second before he thought Vance. Confirming it with a thought, the page came up with error 404 page not found.
Refresh thought Vance and to his relief, the same page popped up with the blinking username text willing in Vance he mentally accepted again. A red text came back with username unavailable.
Is this some sort of hell he thought as he got back to the page to enter his name and took a moment to decide? Maybe it would let him use his last in-game name. It was just an uppercase X as he got invited to its launch, and it didn’t have any rules on the naming. Vance grew really aquatinted to it throughout the years as the game grew to be an enormous success.
Vance had offers for thousands of dollars just for the name. He accepted and to his astonishment it registered the lowercase x he had put in. He never really thought it was going to be accepted, so didn’t take the time to make it uppercase. Now his book had a lowercase x on the top left and a spot with 00gold00silver00copper in the bottom right.