The only profession in this magazine that costs nothing. Not one skill point, not one trainer fee — just a bowl, a seed, some water and the patience to come back tomorrow.
Here is the astonishing part, and it is the reason this page exists: gardening uses no skill at all. There is no Gardening skill to train, no trainer to pay, no grind. Any character you already have — the knight, the tailor, the eight-year-old's first mage — can keep a garden on the side, starting this evening, for the price of a bowl and a seed.
What you're actually doing is running a small, slow, extremely satisfying machine. You plant a seed in a plant bowl, you keep it watered, and you treat whatever goes wrong with it. Each real day it moves up a stage: seed, sprout, young plant, full-grown. A healthy full-grown plant then gives you seeds of its own — and that's where it stops being a houseplant and becomes a project.
Because you can cross-pollinate. Take the pollen from one plant, put it on another, and the seed you get back can carry either parent's colour or species. Do that deliberately, over generations, and you can chase colours that nobody on the shard has — which is how somebody ends up with a black rose and an entire town talking about it. It is the closest thing Britannia has to a quiet, generational hobby.
You get 700 skill points in total, which is seven skills at 100 (Grandmaster). Here is a sheet that works, and why each line is on it. You can load this exact spread on the hero sheet in the magazine and slide the numbers around.
| Skill | Points | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|
| Alchemy | 100 | The one line that genuinely serves the garden. Plants need greater potions as medicine, and buying them is far more expensive than brewing your own. |
| Tailoring | 100 | Your cotton and flax become thread, then cloth, then the family's clothes and bandages. The garden feeds this directly. |
| Cooking | 100 | The other end of the harvest. Things you grew, turned into dinner that actually does something for the people eating it. |
| Carpentry | 100 | The loom and spinning wheel the cloth needs, plus the furniture and planters that make a garden look like one. |
| Tinkering | 100 | Tools, scissors, dye tubs and your own kit, forever. Every homestead wants one tinker in it. |
| Magery | 100 | Mark and Recall, because seeds and reagents come from shops on the other side of the map. |
| Meditation | 100 | Mana for the travel. Trade both of these for Fishing and Herding if you'd rather never leave the farm. |
| Total | 700 | of 700 |
The garden itself is free. This sheet is the answer to a different question — what should a gardener's character do with their points? — and the answer is the cosy trades that the garden supplies. You could equally put a garden on a Grandmaster knight and lose nothing at all.
Plants get sick, and the cures are greater potions. A gardener who buys them from NPC alchemists will spend more on medicine than on everything else combined. Brewing your own turns the running cost to roughly zero.
Skills go up by using them, and they go up fastest on a task that is just barely hard for you. Climb the rungs in order — each one stops paying off, and that's your cue to move up.
Buy a plant bowl and a few seeds from a provisioner or an NPC gardener, and a pitcher for water. Plant it indoors where it's safe. Then — and this is the hard part — leave it alone until tomorrow.
Click the plant and it tells you what's wrong: dry, infested, diseased, fungus, poisoned. Each has one matching cure. Check every plant once a day, fix what it asks for, water it, walk away. That single daily habit is the entire skill of gardening.
Plants grow in parallel and cost you only a minute each, so ten plants are barely more work than one. Run a row of them. This is also when you start keeping the seeds you harvest instead of selling them.
Now the real game. Take pollen from a plant with a colour you want, apply it to another, and keep the seeds. Write down what you crossed with what — on paper, genuinely — because you will not remember by generation four.
Rare colours come out of patient, deliberate breeding over many generations. There's no shortcut and no grind, just a few minutes a day and good notes. The payoff is a plant that is unarguably yours.
The cheapest profession in the magazine, and the only one where the main cost is a daily minute of attention rather than gold. Most of this list is a one-time purchase that lasts forever.
| What | Where | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Several plant bowls | Provisioner, or an NPC gardener | One per plant. Buy more than you need — you will absolutely want more by next week. |
| A handful of seeds | NPC gardener, or from loot | Your starting stock. Cheap, and every healthy plant you grow hands you more for free. |
| A pitcher or bucket | Provisioner | For water. Fill it at any trough, well or water tile. This is the single most-used item you own. |
| Greater Strength, Cure, Heal and Poison potions | Alchemist, or brew your own | The plant medicine cabinet. Each one cures a different ailment — carry a few of all four before you have Alchemy up. |
| Mortar and pestle, plus reagents | Alchemist or mage shop | Once Alchemy is going, the medicine becomes free. This is the purchase that makes the whole hobby sustainable. |
| A house, or a corner of one | House deed, or a friendly relative | Plants are safest indoors and a garden wants somewhere permanent. A shelf in somebody else's house works perfectly well to start. |
The right room makes training three times faster. These are the spots worth a rune.
Indoors, safe, and where the plants can't be disturbed. A garden needs permanence more than it needs space — a single room will hold dozens of bowls.
Seeds, bowls and the occasional unusual species. Check the stock whenever you pass; the interesting seeds come and go.
Water, free, forever. Put your garden within a few steps of one and the daily round takes a minute instead of five.
Not strictly gardening, but the same instinct — free raw material for the Tailoring half of the sheet, growing wild in a field.
Plants advance on a daily cycle and neglect compounds — a plant left dry for days can be unrecoverable. Build the habit of a single pass through the garden each time you log in and nothing will ever die on you.
The game does not track your breeding lines. By the fourth generation you will have no idea which cross produced which colour. A scrap of paper next to the keyboard is, genuinely, the professional tool for this hobby.
Each problem has one correct greater potion, and pouring the wrong one in wastes it without helping. Read the plant's menu first, every time, rather than guessing from the colour of the leaves.
A bowl left in the open is at the mercy of passers-by and of anything that wanders past. Indoors, in a house, is the only safe long-term home for a breeding project you've spent three weeks on.
Britannia runs on favours. These are the people you want in your party and on your friends list.