Libidibia ferrea
An ironwood legume tree: a control-resistant wall that often arrives with free nitrogen in the soil.
Brazilian ironwood (pau-ferro) is a dense-timbered legume tree native to South America and invasive in Oceania and South & Southeast Asia. As a broadleaf tree it walls on DEF, and being a legume (Fabaceae) gives it a distinctive economic perk.
The kit unlocks in three stages, so most cards below the level-40 snapshot are still filling it in. The starter, Deathshadow, is there from level 1 at 2 Sun — Casts a shade nothing recovers in — the foe can't heal. It lands for 23 damage as a native buffer and 25 as an invasive attacker. The free once-per-battle ability, Nurse Log, comes online at level 25: The fallen feed the next: heal 25%, even the bench, and call back the lost. The advanced attack, Out on a Limb, arrives at level 40 for 6 Sun and hits for 34 native / 38 invasive — Two swings from the same limb.
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 stacks flat DEF on its already-hard body. See field gear.
Read at the level-40 snapshot, where every slot is unlocked, it shows 103 HP with 24 DEF, 14 Sun to retreat, and tempo pips of 47 initiative (which orders turn 1) and 45 SPD (every turn after). As a native it takes a +15% health cushion (103 vs the base) and, while benched, projects a green overshield bar onto your active; as an invasive it swaps that for reach — attack climbs to 20 against its native 15 — at the cost of Faustian self-damage to its own bench on every damaging attack, and it concedes 2 prizes when knocked out. 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 25 / 38, and retreat stiffens to 27 Sun as it roots down. DEF climbs to 55 — a genuine wall, the reward for being a tree — while the inverted tempo has sunk to roughly 1% of cap, so it wins fights by outlasting, not by moving first. It is monotonically stronger the higher it levels; the tempo it loses is only a small turn-order lever.
Roughly USDA zone 9a — it should come through winters that bottom out near -6 °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 12.3 °C to a warm edge of 29.7 °C, a Tropical 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.
A well-defended dual-role tree with two immunity traits that make it hard to control: Buttress Roots (immune to Bind) early, and from level 68 Canopy Gap (immune to bench-reaching splash and spread). Play it invasive for a higher attack or native as a wall and buffer. Its legume perk matters off the battlefield: about one in four caught in the wild arrives with the Nitrogen soil amendment already applied — a free head start worth roughly 300 coins — though that nodule stock decomposes after about a month. Inedible, so any fertilizer you add banks XP.
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.