One might wonder why I, Blackguard, a fearsome and most dangerous pirate, am talking to you about botany. Botany is a precise art. It can be extremely rewarding, and it is a wonderful counter to my daily activities of plundering booty and pillaging enemy ships. It's also really easy to give plants the light they need aboard a ship, which is truthfully the only reason I even have any plants.
My reasons for practicing the careful art of botany aside, I write to you to reveal some of the secrets I have discovered through experimentation and no lack of personal pain. I'm here to talk about the carnivorous plant. This plant is quite unique in that it has a sentience of its own yet can be moderately domesticated.
The first hard part about caring for a carnivorous plant is actually acquiring one. I happened upon one after gaining access to the Kingdom of Sky, as they call it. They say you too can get a carnivorous plant simply by, how did the sage say it, "purchasing the retail version of Kingdom of Sky ." I'm not sure what a retail version is, but my guess is that it's some alternate dimension of the Overrealm. You can figure the rest out for yourself.
The first thing you must understand about your carnivorous plant is that it is no mere plant, nor is it a mere pet. It is rumored that the shock of a plant becoming sentient can generally result in one of two outcomes: First, the shock can be so utterly shocking that the now-sentient plant simply loses its sentience. This is the more common outcome. Second, the plant can develop a superiority complex over other common plants and may be rather aggressive toward plant life and other sentient beings alike.
The moral of the story? Treat your carnivorous plant kindly. It is a carnivore, not a herbivore, and you yourself can serve as food for carnivores. You may have seen recent pictures of me. I'm bald. I divulge to you one of my many secrets: I wasn't always bald, and I didn't lose my hair from aging. The carnivorous plant has highly acidic saliva. Put two and two together, and you will realize how important this advice is, unless you like looking particularly dashing as a bald mine like me.
The next interesting aspect of owning a carnivorous plant is that depending on what you feed it, you may be rewarded by the plant regurgitating some lovely rewards. I have experimented fairly extensively to discover what exactly you can be rewarded with, and I will reveal to you my findings so far.
To begin, you must find something to give the carnivorous plant. You will usually find these items on creatures throughout the world, and they tend not to give them to you unless you kill them first. I find that killing someone makes them highly more likely to give you an item they hold dear to them. Without fail. The three types of items you will discover are fertilizer, water, and bone.
Feeding your plant in different combinations will yield different results. More potent fertilizer, water, and bone can be found in more difficult regions of the world on more difficult creatures. Such is life. So feeding your plant the appropriate combination with a difficult to acquire series of plant foods will produce a better item.
There are, additionally, three different types of resulting rewards from feeding your plant these combinations: fruit, rotten fruit, and roots. I have found that rotten fruit has little more use than taking up space in my backpack, so I generally either toss it away or feed it to a friend as a joke. Fruit, so far as I can tell, is most useful as something to eat. And finally, roots can be used to provide a variety of different effects for the user. Those are what we want. Let's look more at my findings...
First, if one doesn't give their carnivorous plant at least one of each type of food, it will nearly always produce a rotten fruit. Giving your plant one of each type of food seems to sometimes give rotten fruit, and other times give regular fruit. Beyond those combinations, it gets a bit more complicated.
When I give my carnivorous plant 2 fertilizer, 2 water, and 2 bones, I tend to get rotten fruit, fruit, or sometimes a root that provides me with a haste effect. When I give my carnivorous plant 1 fertilizer, 2 water, and 3 bones, I generally get rotten fruit, fruit, or a root that provides me with the ability to run faster. Finally, if I give my carnivorous plant 3 fertilizer, 1 water, and 1 bone, I either get rotten fruit, fruit, or a root that provides me with restored health.
Those are the combinations I have personally discovered so far, but I have heard rumors of many other types of roots. They say you can get roots that refresh your power, roots that do damage to your enemies, and roots that make you invisible to prying eyes. There are even tales of roots that have even more beneficial effects, but I think of those simply as rumors because it seems silly that a simple root could make you larger or send you to a different area of the world. Completely ridiculous claims, I think.
Well, there you have it. You now know very nearly as much as I know about the secrets of the carnivorous plant. Enjoy the art of botany, but be careful and, most importantly, be kind to your plants and they will be kind to you. If you have any secrets of your own, I would be quite interested to hear about them.
~ Blackguard
P.S. YARR!!!