Amethelis Flower Guide
By the time you've entered Tier 3, you will have amassed a considerable pile of Seeds. You've just unlocked your Planter Box and you've been challenged to "grow flowers".
The flowers in question are Amethelis Flowers, and they're formed of flower stalks (Vines), topped with a flower made up of a Gold center surrounded by Amethelis petals - another valuable source of Gold, and those Amethelis petals are going to be useful too. So, how do they grow?
Preparing Your Seeds
As any gardener knows, seeds need water to grow. So the first thing you need to do is to add water to your Seeds, which results (unsurprisingly) in Wet Seed.
You're familiar with this process from Sand, but things are quite as simple here - Wet Seed is lighter than Seed, so it will rise to the top of the pile. But worse than that, Wet Seed are exactly the same density as water, so you can't just drop Seed into a pool and let a conveyor pull them out at the other end.
As with every process, there are a thousand different approaches to this - Launchers throwing everything up and Filters to pick out the Wet Seed, dripping Water onto a pile of Seed, dropping Seed slowly into a pool of Water. It really is up to you.
Personally, I prefer the simple "pool of water" approach. Because Wet Seeds float rather chaotically, I use Clearing Frames to slowly push them over to the exit Launcher. It's not the fastest or most elegant solution, but it mostly keeps up with my Seed production, and it's easily duplicated if that becomes an issue.
Planting Your Seeds
Now you have your Wet Seeds, you need to sow them. The first thing to do will be to drop them onto Planter Boxes, where they will sprout and grow a length of Vine stalk, eventually forming an Amethelis Flower on top. At this point, the plant growth stops.
When a plant is growing, if it grows into another Wet Seed (if, for example, you've just thrown a big pile onto your planters), it will absorb that seed, growing another vine and eventually producing another flower. There's no limit to how many seeds a growing plant can absorb, so if a large amount of Wet Seed is dropped together, your plants can end up growing for a long time - and across a large area!
If you don't want to be chasing flowers all over the world, box your planters in - plants won't grow through any building (even Wall Lights!) so you can control how far they grow this way.
To keep things easier to manage, you probably want to develop a way to thinly scatter seeds across your Planter Boxes - just like real gardening!
Harvesting Your Flowers
Once your plants have flowered, it's time to harvest them. They are like any terrain in the game - you can dig them, shoot them, or blow them up. Because Vines are flammable, you can also burn them with Fire which is the best method; the fire will spread along the vines and jump from plant to plant, clearing the whole growing area in very little time.
The Vines don't drop anything. The flowers, however, are a Gold centre surrounded by Amethelis petals, and these will drop once the flowers are destroyed. The Planter Boxes will allow both of these materials to fall through them, so you will get a rain of Gold and Amethelis cascading from beneath the planters.
Amethelis is light and blows around in the wind; you can move it as normal with conveyors and launchers but its wispy nature makes that complicated.
Gold, of course, is the heaviest element in the game and is easy to catch.
Catch the Gold and send it to your Collectors.
And as for all that Amethelis... well, that's a whole new process!
