Plant file · Mysterious Swamp - Center

Applayer

Plays homing notes on a fixed cycle that heal plants and dispel zombie buffs.

Sun200

Recharge30s

Durability400

Lore

Applayer lives in seclusion in Mysterious Swamp and joins the team after the A-route clears the “Swamp-3-A” level. She is both a performer and a herbalist: eighth notes heal plants and remove negative status, while legato notes remove buffs from zombies. Eighth notes do not remove hypnotism.

The almanac takes her name from the Classic of Poetry, Xiao Ya, Lu Ming: “You! You! The deer cry, eating the apple‐like leaves of the wild. I have honored guests; harp and flute are played.” The character “苹” is read literally as “apple” here. With her friend Artemisia annua she once developed a drug of great significance, earning her the respect of nearly all plants and even of zombies; Apple Mortar (PvZ1) is treated in her family lore as the ancestor who “broke rite and music by adopting foreign weapons.”

Mechanics

Role

Healing · Cleansing · Buff removal

Base data: 200 sun; 30s recharge; 2400 cs playing interval (300 cs per performance); 400 HP.
Eighth notes (A-type) heal plants and clear slow and freeze; they do not remove charm.
Legato notes (B-type) clear speed-up and Silver Chariot / Silver Chariot Requiem activations on zombies.
Note lifetime: 1000 cs; each valid hit spends one application.
The playing interval is fixed, so clustering Applayers is not always good.
Corchid increases the number of times notes take effect.

Advanced mechanics

The story and almanac only state that eighth notes heal plants and remove negative status, that legato notes remove zombie buffs, that the playing interval is fixed and clustering is discouraged, and that Corchid raises the application count. Spelled out, the mechanic has five segments: the playing cycle, A-type notes, B-type notes, application count, and edge cases. The cycle is a fixed 2400 cs; A-type filters candidates and restores to full HP plus cleanses; B-type filters candidates and clears buffs; each note's application count is raised by a Corchid platform from 2 to 5; Honey Bamboo special interaction and the Suzaku counter resolve outside the main flow.

Playing cycle

At present, Applayer does not respond on damage but enters performance on a fixed 2400 cs cycle, with each performance lasting 300 cs. At the moment performance ends, 3 A-type notes and 1 B-type note spawn simultaneously at random positions inside Applayer's own tile, drift along their initial directions, and then enter homing settlement.

Each note has a maximum lifetime of 1000 cs and disappears immediately when exceeded. Note lifetime is decoupled from the playing cycle: when a new salvo spawns, unspent notes from the previous salvo continue settling on their own remaining lifetime.

Because the cycle is fixed, multiple Applayers cannot stack to produce a higher single-frame healing burst; synchronized performances share the same target pool. Note: the almanac's “do not cluster” wording describes contention over the same legal targets, not synchronous firing itself.

S_{\text{per salvo}}=3A+1B,\quad T_{\text{cycle}}=2400\text{ cs},\quad T_{\text{perform}}=300\text{ cs},\quad T_{\text{lifetime}}=1000\text{ cs}

Each salvo spawns 3A+1B at random positions in the tile; each note's 1000 cs lifetime is decoupled from the next cycle.

A-type notes

A-type notes (unbeamed eighth notes) target plants. The candidate filter requires the target to be non-charmed and to satisfy at least one of: damaged, slowed, or frozen. A full-HP plant with no negative state does not enter the candidate set. Charm is not in A-type's cleansable set.

On contact, the target's HP is restored to full and slow and freeze are cleared; regardless of the target's max HP, a single hit refills it. Note: per Wiki version history, 0.16d nerfed Applayer's healing; earlier builds healed even more aggressively. The current 0.17p still settles on full restoration.

If the source Applayer itself is charmed, A-type polarity reverses: the candidate set switches to non-charmed plants and each hit deducts 1000 HP instead of cleansing.

A single hit refills to full; no proportional or delta scaling. Charmed source reverses polarity to −1000 HP.

B-type notes

B-type notes (beamed eighth notes) target zombies. The candidate filter requires the target to be non-charmed and to satisfy one of: currently sped-up; or a Basic Zombie activated by Archer Zombie into Silver Chariot / Silver Chariot Requiem. Zombies carrying other positive states outside this set do not consume a B-type note.

On contact, B-type clears speed-up and Silver Chariot / Requiem activations; it does not deal ordinary damage. When the candidate pool is empty, it drifts slowly like an A-type note, waiting for the next homing search or the lifetime expiry.

Note: per Wiki version history, 0.17f changed the charmed-source effect for zombie notes to “speed up the zombie.” In the current build, a B-type note fired by a charmed Applayer no longer clears buffs and instead applies speed-up to candidate zombies.

\mathcal C_B=\{z\mid \neg\operatorname{charmed}(z)\land(\operatorname{sped}(z)\lor\operatorname{silverChariot}(z))\},\quad z\mapsto\operatorname{clearBuff}(z)

B-type does not settle as ordinary damage. Charmed source reverses polarity to speed up zombies (since 0.17f).

Application count and Corchid

Each note carries its own application counter. On a normal tile the initial value is 2; when Applayer stands on a four-corner Corchid platform, the initial value rises to 5. Each valid hit spends one application; if applications remain, the note searches again by the rule of § A-type or § B-type as applicable.

This gives a theoretical per-salvo settlement cap: 4 notes × 2 = 8 on normal tiles, and 4 × 5 = 20 on a Corchid platform. Any of the following lowers the actual count: insufficient legal candidates, candidates already resolved by other notes in the same salvo, or the 1000 cs lifetime expiring before the application counter does.

Corchid only rewrites the initial value; it does not change candidate filtering, restoration amount, dispel type, or homing priority. The benefit peaks during waves with sustained damage, slow, freeze, or dense Silver Chariot activations; when the target pool is tiny, the extra (5−2)×4 = 12 settlements cannot actually trigger.

A_{\text{applications}}=2+3\boldsymbol{1}_{\text{Corchid platform}},\quad S_{\max}=4A_{\text{applications}}\in\{8,20\}

Corchid raises the initial value from 2 to 5; the theoretical cap moves from 8 to 20, but cannot saturate when targets are scarce or lifetime runs out.

Edge cases

Honey Bamboo special interaction: when an A-type note hits a Honey Bamboo whose HP is below max, the note spends all of its remaining applications, grants only 1 HP to that Honey Bamboo, and the new HP has its wear count fixed at 1. The net gain from one hit is at most 1 HP, and the unused applications cannot redirect to other targets.

Suzaku achievement: when an A-type note acts on a Wall-nut whose HP is at most 100, it adds one Suzaku marker to that Wall-nut; reaching 5 markers on the same Wall-nut unlocks the Suzaku achievement. This is an achievement counter and does not change the § A-type notes settlement.

Hidden trigger in Mysterious Swamp Center: once the upper-left fog is dispelled, an A-type note arriving at the upper-left removes the stone there; this is a required step for the hidden stage. SP Majorist's summoned hostile beamed eighth notes can be removed on contact by Applayer; see the SP Majorist entry for details.

Three edge rules settle outside the main flow; the Honey Bamboo case caps the gain at +1 HP while still consuming all remaining applications.

Story and design role

Applayer joins the party after the A-route clears “Swamp-3-A” in Mysterious Swamp Center and introduces herself as a recluse. Hurriclover's dialogue explicitly identifies her as a plant skilled in both medicine and performance, the developer of an anti-plague drug with Artemisia annua, and a figure respected by nearly all plants and many zombies.

Her name is taken from the Classic of Poetry (Xiao Ya, Lu Ming), “You! You! The deer cry, eating the apple-like leaves of the wild. I have honored guests; harp and flute are played.” The character “苹” in the original poem refers to a wormwood-like plant, but the almanac reads it literally as “apple,” giving the name an intentional double reading. Apple Mortar (PvZ1) is framed in her family lore as the ancestor who “broke rite and music by adopting foreign weapons,” pulling the lineage back into a Chinese medicine-and-music register.

In the Gatling Pea pond duel, the seed card Health belongs to the Applayer branch: 200 sun restores Peashooter according to missing HP. This is her “healing supply” mechanic compressed into a single-plant resource option, sharing the same restore-to-full logic as § A-type notes.

Interactions & counters

CorchidOn a Corchid platform each note's applications rise from 2 to 5; per-salvo cap rises from 8 to 20.
Honey BambooWhen an A-type note hits a Honey Bamboo whose HP is below max, it spends all remaining applications for +1 HP with wear remaining 1.
SP MajoristA-type notes can remove hostile beamed eighth notes; the hidden trigger also requires an A-type note to clear the Mysterious Swamp Center upper-left stone.

In-game tooltip

Applayer sends out notes. Notes will heal a plant and remove negative effects from it or remove the positive effects from a zombie.