TruthScape.com - About Reseeding

Those who have played Minesweeper know that it is a start-to-finish sort of game. You begin with a fresh board and are charged with figuring out the whole puzzle; at the end, win or lose, you start over from scratch. In contrast, Vinesweeper is a rolling, continuous game played by many people at once. As such, it is not designed so you can figure out the entire board; rather, after each flag you find, a portion of the board is reset with additional seeds for you or other players to find. Jagex has no official name for this; since you can see the farmer wave his hand in what looks like spreading new seeds, I call it simply reseeding.

The fact that the board is constantly reseeded is a big annoyance to many players, because whenever it happens, any indicator numbers in the area are removed. However, once you learn the ins and outs of Vinesweeper, you can actually turn this reseeding process to your advantage.

Some people get confused about when reseeding happens, but it’s actually quite simple. It will occur in only two situations: first, when you dig up a seed by mistake; and second, when you properly plant a flag over a seed. In the second case, reseeding will happen regardless of what occurs after the flag is placed. If the farmer gets there first, he will reseed the area after giving you your points. If a rabbit gets there first, it will eat the seed, destroy your flag and then reseed. (Don’t ask me how a rabbit does this—I still haven’t figured out what it does with the flags!)

Note that reseeding does not occur if you flag a hole that has no seed in it. You lose your flag and the field is not touched.

The reseeding covers an area that extends out three squares in each of the four compass directions from where the flag was planted. This means that the total area reseeded is 7x7 squares, or 49 total. When reseeding is done, this entire area is reset to show undug holes, and of course, any floating indicator numbers are removed from squares that had them. It will not clear any flags you have planted in the area, though.

New Vinesweeper players—especially those who have been told the game is the same as Minesweeper—are alarmed when a farmer arrives, clears a flag and then resets a big chunk of the area around them. They think that this whole area has now been randomized and they have to start over from scratch in figuring it out. Fortunately, that’s not the case.

The rule to remember about reseeding is this: reseeding may add seeds to an area, but will not remove them. This means that any seeds that were present before the area was reseeded will still be there afterwards—there just might be some new ones as well.

This has two important implications. First, it means that if you have planted two flags near each other, the farmer reseeding over the area will not cause the seed under the second flag to be affected. If there was a seed there when you planted the flag, it will still be there when the farmer checks it.

**Figure 297: Reseeding Does Not Remove Flags**
On the left, a 2-3-2 pattern that indicates seeds above each of those numbers. On the right, you see what happened after the farmer cleared the left-most flag I planted; the other two flags remain, and I still got points for them.

Second, it also means that you can still plant a flag in a space where you know there’s a seed, even if it has been reseeded over and there are no longer any indicator numbers around. If you can remember where the flag was supposed to go, you can still plant it and get points for it, as shown in Figure 295.

While it can be annoying to have your progress in an area (in terms of revealed numbers) be erased, the truth is that reseeding can actually help you get points faster! There are two main reasons for this. First, by covering over an area you have mostly cleared away, you get the chance to dig it up again and get more digging points. And second, if you plan your gameplay properly, the outer edge of a reseeded zone gives you several places you can dig without having to worry about hitting a seed.

I mentioned in the preceding topic that reseeding doesn’t shuffle existing seeds, but may just add new seeds in the area. In my experience, I’ve found that when an area that was mostly empty space is reseeded, the majority of the time it is still primarily empty. By digging again on one of the new holes created by the reseeding, I can get quite a few quick and easy points—since you can get 10 or more points with one dig in a large empty area—and also reveal both new and old seeds I can flag.

You can also take advantage of your knowledge of how empty spaces work. Remember that an empty space is equivalent to a zero, and so, any holes adjacent to one cannot contain a seed. That means that every hole on the outer edge of the 7x7 square reseeding area that falls next to an empty square is automatically safe to dig!

To understand what I mean, suppose that, theoretically, I had a huge empty area 10x10 squares in size, except for a single seed in the middle, surrounded of course by 8 “1”s. If I flagged that seed and a farmer cleared it, he would reseed a 7x7 square area centered on the flag. Some of those new 49 holes would contain seeds, but none of them could be along the outer edges, because those edges were next to empty space. That means 26 holes I could safely dig.

Making use of this simply requires that you open up good-sized areas before planting flags, and be careful not to flag seeds that are too close to the area’s center.