You are Defiant. Through the miracle of technology you have been brought back from the dead! Invested with the power of ancient heroes! Forged as one of the greatest warriors Telara has ever known! Sent back through a rip in the very fabric of time itself!
Now in the past, you must fight in order to save the future!
But first! Farmer Barleymow wants you to plant eight seeds, water them, then stand around a bit, tapping your foot and picking at your finger nails, while the plants grow.
Apparently technology doesn’t stretch to agricultural automation.
The silliness of tasks (I refuse to call them quests) in games knows no bounds.
“The fate of the world rests on your shoulders! But if you have a minute, could you run this basket of tasty muffins over to the next town? That would be delightful!”
“Apparently technology doesn’t stretch to agricultural automation.”
Well, it *does*, it’s just that the results aren’t necessarily desirable. Or have you already forgotten the Giant Mutant Killer Boars that cropped up (pun intended) last time they tried that?
(And yes, the quest in question is rather silly in world-context. In game-context it’s there so that people who haven’t run the dungeon can grind up some extra rep with the local zone faction.)
…though faction rep grinding makes total sense too, right? ;)
It’s the equivalent of the ground breaking ceremony where the mayor digs up a shovel of dirt. It is absolutely useless and objectively-speaking, a total waste of his time, except people like the photo-op.
You do a bunch of tedious, repetitive tasks for an organization and they reward you with social recognition and some form of token that can be redeemed for things you want. In MMOs we call it “faction rep grinding”. In what laughingly passes for the real world we call it “working for a living”.
If you’re talking about the quest I think you are, there wasn’t much thumb-twiddling when I did it. By the time I’d planted and watered the fourth seed, the first one I planted had already sprouted and I got to run back and harvest it.
Considering how fast these plants grow, I’d have to assume that some kind of high technology IS involved, they just haven’t managed to automate it yet. Making plants that can grow to maturity in about 30 seconds is the first step, automating the planting and harvesting is another matter entirely.
Gosh Melmoth, everyone knows that any change in the timeline can have massive consequences for the future. Maybe — just maybe — the future you’ve been sent back to stop started right here, and by preventing Barleymow from turning to Dangerous Technology to help him automate his labor-short farm, you have altered the future for the better. I daresay that helping him plant those seeds is the only quest you really need to do.
/writes on palm of hand
‘Lot of horticulture fans in our readership, don’t diss the gardening quests.’
@Melmoth: indeed. I was looking for KiaSA, but I appear to have wandered into Gardener’s Question Time.
On the other hand, this could be a useful resource if ever I want to grow sunflowers again, this time without them being eaten by slugs.