You know those cute little glowing floaty guys you've seen in Rune Factory Frontier screenshots? Late last week, I got my hands on a tool that can suck them up into my inventory, so I can go trade them in—effectively, turning them into currency—for "Rune Wonders" such as a rainy week, more fruit on trees, or little stones that are actually required in dungeons. I ran around sucking them out of the sky for an in-game day or two and seeing what I could do... and found out that I had become Death, destroyer of Runey ecosystems.
You see, there are four types of Runeys: water, rock, tree, and grass. They exist in a food chain whereby water eats rock and so on (nobody eats water, strangely.) I'm still exploring the system, but it seems that growing crops spawns more grass Runeys and several areas of the map are prime real estate for certain types of Runey, meaning their numbers will naturally increase, given no external action.
Cue Mr. External Action. While it was raining all week (hooray for not having to water crops, right?), I pulled up the Runey Distribution map to look at what havoc I had wreaked. Water Runeys were up across the board and preying on rock Runeys, and to this day they're still not as recovered as I hoped they'd be. The little floating dudes are a sub-game of their own; keeping them in-balance and reproducing at good rates yields something called "Prosperity" which can make your crops grow faster. Perhaps more ominously, letting them die out (complete with adorably horrible graphics of Runeys crying) en masse will apparently eventually lead to your farm becoming useless.
It's a system I wasn't expecting, and it's already got me scheming as to how I can hopefully maximize my Runey-growing potential to cash in more of the little buggers down the road... as soon as I restore the rock population, of course. It's a cool little addition to the already-fun Rune Factory systems. There's also hints that they'll eventually figure prominently into the story somehow (I guess, as you'd expect.) This game just keeps getting more and more interesting.
Cue Mr. External Action. While it was raining all week (hooray for not having to water crops, right?), I pulled up the Runey Distribution map to look at what havoc I had wreaked. Water Runeys were up across the board and preying on rock Runeys, and to this day they're still not as recovered as I hoped they'd be. The little floating dudes are a sub-game of their own; keeping them in-balance and reproducing at good rates yields something called "Prosperity" which can make your crops grow faster. Perhaps more ominously, letting them die out (complete with adorably horrible graphics of Runeys crying) en masse will apparently eventually lead to your farm becoming useless.
It's a system I wasn't expecting, and it's already got me scheming as to how I can hopefully maximize my Runey-growing potential to cash in more of the little buggers down the road... as soon as I restore the rock population, of course. It's a cool little addition to the already-fun Rune Factory systems. There's also hints that they'll eventually figure prominently into the story somehow (I guess, as you'd expect.) This game just keeps getting more and more interesting.