Stats: HP, Sun & the Overshield

The stat line

• HP — how much damage you can absorb before fainting. Grows with your level and the plant's longevity.
• ATK — the multiplier behind every attack; a move's damage is a fraction of your effective ATK.
• DEF — diminishing armor, set by a plant's battle category, its mature height, and (for trees) its wood density. It rises in a straight line from a soft floor at level 1 to its full value at level 100: soft-bodied weeds and herbs stay low (~1–15), shrubs sit mid (~20–35), and trees are the hardest — a tree's cap is about 100 × its wood density (a dense oak reads ~63, an ironwood over 100), plus any curated armature. DEF is diminishing armor, not flat subtraction: your hit is scaled by ATK ÷ (ATK + DEF), so equal ATK and DEF halves it, and a bigger attacker punches through the same armor better. Every hit still deals at least 1, and poison ignores DEF entirely — the intended counter to a durable tank.
• SPD — your sustained tempo, from how fast the real plant grows. Against a wild plant it orders every exchange from turn 2 onward.
• INI — your opening tempo, from the real plant's seedling vigor. It decides who strikes first on turn 1.
• Sun — your energy bar, which pays for almost everything you do.

Damage lands as: round( (move power + 0.35 × your effective ATK) × [ATK ÷ (ATK + target DEF)] × type matchup ), floored at 1, then drained through the overshield before it touches base HP. A move's power is its own signature strength; your ATK sets how hard you punch through the target's armor.

maxHp vs baseMaxHp: your baseMaxHp is your buff-free ceiling; maxHp is what you're currently sitting at after buffs. Regen and persistence read the base value, so temporary swings never inflate your real total. Genetics (IVs and EVs) only shift magnitude, never the formula.

Quick vs fast

SPD and INI are two different questions, drawn from two different real traits, so they routinely disagree. Both are inverted with age: a plant is quickest as a seedling and eases off as it matures — youth reveals speed. The relative order never changes (a fast species always out-paces a slow one), but the whole field slows as it levels. A white oak is a vigorous seedling but a slow grower — it opens fast, then creeps (high INI, low SPD). Bermuda grass is the exact mirror: slower off the mark, relentless after (low INI, high SPD). Being quick and being fast are separate identities, and a plant can have either, both, or neither.

Against a wild plant, ties go to you, the defender, and a move carrying the initiative rider (see moves) jumps the queue outright, ahead of both stats, on whatever turn you play it. In the arena, INI decides who's on the play for round 1, with SPD as the tie-break — and SPD then leads every round after it, re-read at each round boundary; the initiative rider jumps nothing there, it pays off a knockout instead (see moves). See Combat Overview.

Unlike HP, ATK, SPD, and DEF, INI is not touched by genetics — it's a pure species trait, identical on every specimen of a species. Two clovers can differ in speed; they never differ in initiative. That's exactly why SPD breaks an arena INI tie — and why it, not INI, leads every round after the first: it's the half of tempo your training actually moves.

The Sun economy

Sun caps at 120. In battle it only ever goes down — there is no in-battle regen. Out of battle it trickles back at +1 Sun per 15 minutes (~4/hr; a full bar takes about 30 hours). Run dry mid-fight and that plant is attack-locked — it can still fire its free ability (and retreat if it can afford the Sun), but no more attacks until you swap in a fresh plant.

Action	Sun cost
Starter attack (strike)	2
Advanced attack	6
Heal	3 per 10 HP
Retreat	~5 at level 1 → up to 50 for a deep-rooted, mature tree
Ability	free (once per battle)

Retreat is its own axis now. The Sun price to swap a plant out grows with how rooted it is — root depth plus above-ground mass — and with level. Every seedling pulls out cheap (~5 Sun); a shallow weed stays cheap even when grown (~15–20), while a deep-rooted mature tree commits hard (up to ~50, near half your bar). The same rootedness also sets how many turns a freshly-swapped-in plant is locked before it can leave (0 for a seedling, up to 5 for a maxed tree).

The overshield

The overshield ("Native Strength") is a segmented fourth ring: up to 4 green HP segments (each ~1/6 of the active's maxHP, sized by the contributor's rarity) plus up to 2 gold Sun segments (each ~1/3 of the Sun cap).

Direct attacks chew through overshield segments before base HP. But it is not a full wall — poison, thorns recoil, seedRain, and haustorial-drain all bypass it and hit base HP directly. You can be poisoned to death through a full shield. Depletion carries across swaps, and there's no free refill.

Native vs Invasive

	Native	Invasive
Role	Buffer	Attacker
HP	×1.15 self-cushion	—
ATK	—	Wider ATK ceiling (introduced-breadth aggression), realized as it matures; dialed back if also toxic
Overshield HP	Projects segments from the bench	Contributes none
Downside	None	"Faustian" self-damage to its own lowest-HP bench ally each attack

Gold Sun overshield segments come from the network passive and aren't native-gated — any nativity can supply them. See Nativity for the full picture.

Type matchup

Damage is also scaled by the succession wheel: your category's group is strong (×1.5) or weak (×0.667) against others. That's separate from status immunities — warded, staked, Sulfur spore-immunity, and blight's heal-denial. See Statuses, Abilities, and Combat Overview for how it all fits together.