Boss file · Distant Pond, pond follow-up

Gatling Pea

A plant on vacation at the pond can become a boss too.

Get ready, Peashooter. I want to witness your gene power.

Lore

Gatling Pea visits the Distant Pond on holiday and gets drawn into a friendly match after stopping to help another plant. The interruption seems ordinary enough to the visitor. For Peashooter, meeting a long-admired senior is very different: even speaking becomes difficult.

Honey Bamboo asks Peashooter to represent the team, while Sunflower encourages him to remember the genetic abilities gained at the falls. Gatling Pea agrees to take the match seriously and looks forward to seeing that power. There is no invading enemy's hostility, yet admiration makes the encounter more than casual practice.

The familiar image of rapid fire carries other plants' ideas about strength. Hearing descriptions and standing before the actual plant are different experiences. The meeting beside the pond allows room for learning, admiration, and self-understanding as well as an energetic duel.

This is also a plant who takes holidays and pauses to answer a request for help. Remembering only the dense stream of peas would miss the plain manner of speaking to a junior. What each participant makes of the match belongs to the unfolding story, beyond its result.

Mechanics

Role

Special duel boss · Peashooter one-on-one

Drag and move Peashooter to confront Gatling Pea.
Use seed cards to upgrade sun production, restore health, or gain genes.
The battle focuses on Peashooter's gene power rather than normal formation defense against zombie waves.
Major Spoilers · Reveal this content
The fight has three phases of pressure; the 0.17p "Gatling Pea in the mind" variant increases durability, action speed, and final-phase projectile density.

The duel reads the current Peashooter’s position, HP, sun, and traits. Cards modify that plant; phase transitions read both boss HP and offensive score. Difficulty d ranges from 0 to 4.

Pursuit, evasion, and collision

Gatling Pea jumps between tiles rather than walking. Let B and P denote the boss and Peashooter, and r and c their zero-based row and column. Within one row and 0–2 columns ahead, the boss first tries to evade two columns right. If that would reach column 9, it instead jumps near the target.

Collision requires similar height and overlapping hit rectangles. Peashooter takes 80 HP damage, then is pushed toward a nearby empty tile according to the difference between their centers.

\text{near}=|r_B-r_P|\le1\land0\le c_B-c_P\le2,\qquad c'_B=\begin{cases}c_B+2,&c_B+2<9\\c_P,&c_B+2\ge9\end{cases}

Adjacent tiles alone do not establish a collision.

Sun, healing, and gene cards

Level comes from the Sunflower branch. Its four purchases cost 150, 250, 350, and 450 sun. At current level L, each 100 internal timer units yields 5(L+1) sun; L rises from 0 to 4.

Health comes from the Applayer branch, costs 200 sun, and heals according to missing HP. Other cards grant ice head, fire head, large peas, wings, three-lane fire, or repeat fire. They modify the current Peashooter rather than create a replacement.

C_{\text{Level},L}=150+100L\quad(L=0,1,2,3),\qquad S_{\text{tick}}=5(L+1)

Income uses current level; purchase cost uses the level before buying.

Offensive score and phase conditions

Before the final phase, offensive score starts at (1+0.25L), multiplied by head and acquired-form factors. Fire head contributes ×1.5 and ice head ×2.5; large peas ×2, repeat fire ×1.2, three-lane fire ×3, and wings ×2. An absent trait contributes ×1.

S includes current sun and uncollected sun on the field. Its correction is S/200 at S≤200, 1 at 200<S<400, and (S−300)/100 at S≥400. P≥8 or P≥16 can trigger the corresponding phase flash at the next idle check; boss HP below about 90% or 40% is an alternative trigger. The score is not a damage multiplier.

P=(1+0.25L)\cdot M_{\text{head}}\cdot M_{\text{size}}\cdot M_{\text{repeat}}\cdot M_{\text{lanes}}\cdot M_{\text{wing}}\cdot R(S),\qquad R(S)=\begin{cases}S/200,&S\le200\\1,&200<S<400\\(S-300)/100,&S\ge400\end{cases}

Bursts, snow rain, and big-shot direction

Normal bursts contain four shots, emitted with the stem animation and travelling left. The mind variant increases this to 4, 5, and 6 by phase, with most non-big-shot actions about 20% faster.

Snow-pea rain samples columns to the boss’s left and rows from the upper five rows, rather than locking to Peashooter’s row. Counts are approximately d+6 in the ordinary duel and d+7 in the mind variant.

Ordinary big shots spawn in a vertical band near the boss and travel horizontally left at approximately (−3,0). The mind variant’s third phase uses a leftward ±30° fan. Final-phase big-shot cooldown is about 100(10−d) internal timer units.

Phase three also adds electric-pea bursts and a strong leftward advance. Electric bursts normally contain four peas, or five at d=4; after reaching the left boundary, the advancing boss jumps back to a valid tile.

N_{\text{rain}}=d+6+\boldsymbol{1}_{\text{mind}},\quad (c_t,r_t)\sim U([0,\max(c_B-1,0)]\times[0,4]),\quad \vec v_{\text{mind phase 3}}=(-3\cos\theta,-3\sin\theta),\quad \theta\in[-\pi/6,\pi/6]

Snow rain samples destinations; big shots use launch directions.

Interactions & counters

Peashooter
The boss fight is a Peashooter duel built around movement, genes, and resource upgrades.
Seed cards
Used to upgrade sun, restore HP, or gain genes.