Corchid

Corchid is planted on tile vertices, not on tile centers. Four neighboring vertices outline one tile; when all four vertices are occupied by valid Corchids, that tile receives platform support and becomes a legal deployment cell.

Vertex legality itself has a condition. The in-game advice reads, “All tiles surrounding this plant must be land,” meaning the four tiles meeting the vertex must all be non-water and non-void; a water or off-grid neighbor causes the vertex to reject planting. Platform support therefore extends only into swamp, not directly across water or off-grid.

Because a vertex sits where adjacent tiles meet, one Corchid is counted as a corner by up to four adjacent tiles at once. Continuous paving therefore shares corners naturally: one isolated tile needs 4 Corchids, while a continuous m × n block needs (m + 1)(n + 1).

Platform support is not a separate plant entity. The four corner Corchids still exist individually, take damage and resolve removal on their own, and the platform state is simply what their combined corners produce.

Platform support is treated as an available platform during the planting check, bypassing swamp, liquids, and some special terrain restrictions; the upper plant deploys on the platform tile, and the rest of its rules still follow its own mechanic. Decamp Dodder landing points and tiles made illegal by fluid spread can both be re-checked through this path.

Platform support is not a permanent terrain rewrite. The instant any corner Corchid is removed, the corresponding tile loses platform support and the plant standing on it is checked again against the current terrain; if landing legality no longer holds, the plant exits the tile along with the lost support.

Note: Lily Pad and Corchid handle different properties. Lily Pad provides an aquatic carrier layer and applies only to water tiles; Corchid provides terrain rewriting and a swamp-support flag and is not limited to water. Their checks are independent, but because Corchid vertices refuse water-side land, the two rarely stack on the same tile.

The batch entry is gated by two conditions: at least one Corchid is already on the field, and the Corchid seed packet has finished recharging. The in-game advice “Batch planting requires a fully recharged Corchid seed packet” describes the second condition specifically. Once both hold, left-dragging marks a region and dispatches one planting request against the legal empty vertices inside it.

What settles is the number of legal empty vertices actually added inside the marked region, written as N. Existing Corchids are reused without re-billing; illegal, occupied, or non-vertex-legal points are excluded from N. Each new plant settles at 35 sun (versus 25 sun for ordinary single-tile planting), and packet recharge accumulates linearly with N.

The swamp-support flag is not a range aura and does not depend on distance to a Corchid. The target swamp plant must itself stand on a tile completed by four corners, then read the swamp-support flag on its own tile through its own mechanic; the nearest Corchid outside the platform tile triggers nothing.

Corchid writes only one flag, “this is a supported platform”; the payoff is defined entirely by the reader. Adding more Corchids or changing their condition does not deepen any existing platform's bonus; it only extends or sustains platform coverage.

In the story, Corchid arrives in the Mysterious Swamp with Opti-caltrop and is responsible for tile scheduling across muddy ground and for the support links among swamp plants. Her quiet temper is set against Opti-caltrop's louder one, framing swamp-support around “substrate rather than output.”

Within the chapter's current design, swamp-support is the shared upgrade entry point for every new swamp plant (Hygro Plantago, Lorus, Opti-caltrop, Lightning Reed, Applayer, CocoBottle Shine). Platform support is uniformly provided by Corchid, but the reading and settlement path is defined independently by each reader's own mechanic.