Welcome to WanderQuest!

 After a long day at work, Kyo enjoyed nothing more than to lock himself in his room and play video games. And as every day was a long one, tonight was no exception, and Kyo found himself trudging home the two blocks between the convenience store where he worked and his apartment. The walk felt impossibly long, even if he knew it took the same eight minutes it always did, but finally he was at his apartment door. The process of unlocking the door, entering, relocking it, and immediately crossing the room to his gaming chair was a familiar one and something that Kyo did fluidly.

His incredibly old gaming PC took several minutes to boot up, the pale light illuminating the dark room, but finally Kyo was looking at the login screen to his favorite game, WanderQuest.

Kyo had been playing WanderQuest ever since its launch; back in those days, nobody had heard of it, and he was able to play without ever running into another player. Kyo savored his alone time, and the huge boom in players recently was quickly destroying his peace.

Kyo didn’t play WanderQuest the way most people did; he found the monsters repulsive to look at and the high quality graphics were not doing him any favors. He much preferred the botanical aspect of the game. When the game first launched, players had a more diverse approach to the game. Unfortunately, once the game gained popularity, more and more people came for the violence because of how “life-like” it was and the huge array of attack styles which made it infinitely harder for people like Kyo to enjoy their peace.

Kyo typed in his login credentials and, after another round of staring at the loading bar, a beautiful valley appeared on the screen.

When Kyo first started playing WanderQuest, he didn’t really know what he wanted to do. He spent most of his time running from monsters, mainly because he couldn’t figure out how to kill them—when a game like WanderQuest is advertised as a place where you can do anything, that extends to combat, which meant there were way too many options and Kyo couldn’t hit them fast enough to successfully kill a monster. Whenever he came across a monster, Kyo sprinted until his stamina was completely depleted, which usually carried him far enough away for the monster to despawn or give up on him.

It had been an occasion like this a few years ago when Kyo was running from a monster whose name he did not know but had a few too many claws for his liking, that he came across his valley. It wouldn’t become his valley until he spent countless hours making it his, but he didn’t know that at the time. The only thing he was concerned about in that moment was the fact that the monster chasing him had suddenly stopped following him. It was still visible on the screen, and it looked like it was running in place, almost like it had hit an invisible barrier. Eventually, the monster gave up and turned around but the moment left an impression on Kyo. He had never seen that in the game before.

Open meadows were one of the most common places a monster would spawn—even Kyo knew that. They seemed to prefer areas away from big cities where players tended to congregate and instead stuck to fields that only a few players would travel through; that way they could kill a few players but didn’t have to worry about a big group coming to kill them. A valley like this should be teeming with monsters, and yet there wasn’t a single one to be found. Kyo had spent the next few days scouring every inch of the meadow before finally coming to the conclusion that it must be some glitch. There was a radius that encompassed the entire valley where monsters couldn’t spawn or enter.

Kyo almost cried with how happy he was.

Finally he had found a place where he could enjoy the game without having to worry about dying and losing all his stuff every five minutes. This could be Kyo’s safe place. A haven.

The first thing Kyo did was mark out the radius so he knew where the barrier ended. Then, he started farming.

Kyo didn’t know anything about farming in WanderQuest when he first started, but he took to it like a duck to water. The controls were so much easier than combat, these ones only requiring one or two keys to till the ground, place seeds, and water crops. Days turned into years and Kyo meticulously took care of every detail. He began by planting every packet of seeds he came across which slowly morphed into an incredibly planned out layout, organizing plants by appearance and any abilities they might grant or have. Once he was feeling a little braver, Kyo attempted to complete a few quests—all of them plant related, of course. Most of the time, it involved finding rare plants no one else had heard of or helping an NPC with their farming. Sometimes it involved perilous journeys into the terrifying woods that surrounded Caspia, the country’s capital, but it was worth it when Kyo got to add a one of a kind flower to his gardens.

Even more years passed and his garden grew bigger and more ostentatious. Cobblestone walkways created smooth paths to every part of his valley; huge sections of the valley were sectioned off to grow pretty flowers, ingredients for potions, and a large bulk of incredibly rare plants that he slowly sold in the Caspia marketplace so he could keep the price high; small waterfalls and ponds full of rare fish dotted the lowest parts of the valley; sprawling fields were left untouched so that Kyo could recline in the long grass and wildflowers; and mythical animals occasionally roamed or accepted Kyo’s petting.

WanderQuest’s graphics were so lifelike that Kyo sometimes wondered if what he was seeing was actually a video of a real place and not something people programmed. These graphics were the real reason Kyo came back everyday, even when there was nothing else he could think to add to his valley. Seeing his gardens in such beautiful graphics made it feel like his utopia actually existed; a quiet little place where no one could bother him.