Citrus australasica
An edible finger-lime shrub that plays as a neutral card but earns its keep as a coin engine.
The Australian finger lime is a shrub with an unusual profile: it is on no region's native or invasive list in the game, so it plays neither role and fights as a plain neutral card. What makes it worth catching is off the battlefield — it is an edible whose fruit part is on record, so it earns coins.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Tick Tumble, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Shakes the tick load loose onto the foe. It lands for 29 damage. The free once-per-battle ability, Thicket Formation, comes online at level 25: Closes into thicket — Bind, and the foe can't heal. The advanced attack, Coppice Comeback, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 23 — Cut it down and it returns — heal 35%.
This card keeps two always-on traits, drawn from its category pool and read straight off its schedule (the rest of the pool is dropped for good). The first is live for most of the card's life; the second stacks on late.
It is not a climber, so no Moss Pole. A Calcium/Magnesium amendment adds flat DEF on top of its shrub cover; a Cloche wards it from chemical recoil when it dives onto a defended plant. See field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 103 HP with 13 DEF, 16 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 32 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 34 SPD (every turn after). It is on no region's native or invasive list, so in practice it fights as a neutral card — no native health cushion, no invasive attacker edge — and the numbers above are its native-stance readings. Damage is diminishing armour — a hit scales by its attack over attack-plus-DEF, so a big attacker punches through cover a small one cannot, and poison ignores DEF entirely. See stats and the overshield.
By level 100 the floor-to-cap law has carried it well past that snapshot: health rises to 190 (native) / 165 (invasive), attack to 40 / 56, and retreat stiffens to 33 Sun as it roots down. DEF firms to 28, a mid-band shrub's worth of cover, and the inverted tempo has sunk to about 1% of cap. It keeps getting stronger as it levels; the speed it sheds is only a minor turn-order edge.
Roughly USDA zone 7b — it should come through winters that bottom out near -13 °C. Colder than that and it wants shelter, a wall, or a winter indoors. In its own terms it runs from a cold edge of 7.8 °C to a warm edge of 25.9 °C, a Subtropical band. Somewhere near the cold edge it will want a sheltered spot or a wall; below it, protection or a winter indoors. Treat the zone as a rough guide, not a promise: it comes from a regression whose error runs a little over one full zone, which is why the card hedges it as roughly.
The card's climate chip is the player-facing form of all that — it reads your current location, not the plant's homeland, so it changes as you travel.
| Chip | What it means | Battle XP |
|---|---|---|
| Thrives here | your local winter low and summer heat both sit inside its range | x2 |
| In range | it survives where you are but sits near one of its edges | x1.25 |
| Colder than its range | your winters drop below what it tolerates; outdoors it needs protection | no bonus |
| Hotter than its range | your summers run past its warm edge | no bonus |
The chip's only effect is on battle XP: a card that thrives or sits in range banks a multiplier when it fights, and nothing else — damage, stats, growth speed, catch rate and the coin economy are all untouched by climate. A reading of colder than its range is usually just a fact about the winter outside your window, not a verdict on the plant.
On the succession wheel this is a Competitor. It strikes Ruderal cards — annual forbs, grasses, aquatics and bulbs — for ×1.5 damage, and takes ×1.5 in return from Specialist cards — succulents, conifers, ferns and epiphytes. Every other matchup is neutral.
With no native cushion and no invasive edge, it is a modest battler — a shrub-band body with a chip-back trait early and a bench-protecting taunt late, but nothing that wins fights on its own. Its real value is economic: feed it its matching fruit fertilizer (Phosphorus) and it pays ×1.25 coins, and as a fruiting citrus it is a natural coin engine and a family-tree piece. Keep it on the bench past level 68 and its Sapromyophily taunt earns its keep by pulling single-target picks off your fragile cards.
Leveling trades speed for power. A plant’s tempo (SPD + INI, the turn-order edge) fades as it grows, while its power (HP + ATK + DEF, net of the rising Sun cost to retreat) climbs. The crossover is the level where power overtakes tempo: below it the plant is a fast skirmisher, above it a heavyweight. Shown for each stance this plant can actually hold — native adds a HP cushion, invasive an attack edge, neutral neither — with the card at its crossover and fully grown at Lv 100.