heptopus

now, your computer inside the bunker has a game-inside-a-game on it which is a charming farming sim of undeniably greater quality and scope than the survival game you're playing. therefore, the object of the game becomes to keep your bunker secure so you can play the farming game more.

now, once you achieve the highest rating in the farming game, a secret shop inside it unlocks, and one of the novelty items you can purchase is a game console, giving you access to games-inside-a-game-inside-a-game. most of the games for it are typical mobile shovelware, but one of them is a highly polished, extremely brutal precision platformer with amazing level design and production values exceeding that of the survival game and farming sim combined.

Can just imagine all the girlies on tiktok going "I know this is a bit controversial but I honestly love using limestone as a gastrolith. Not only can you readily forage it but they are just so pretty when smoothed out after regurgitating them"

I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that.

So, for non-SDV players, in most farming sims you can get married to certain characters and have children with them, however this is typically a permanent choice that can't be undone, so if you want to marry someone else or not have kids you would have to start over with a fresh save.

But SDV is different. The game has a witch's hut you can eventually unlock that lets you use...black magic, basically, to soft-reset marriage/children choices without starting over. There's a divorce option so you can ditch your spouse, but that's the only normal one. It also adds an option to turn your children into doves to get rid of them, hence OP saying they "birded" their kids. You're not...technically killing them...but only barely.

(It also adds an option to mind-wipe your previous spouse so they don't remember being married to you and thus don't hate you, and you can even remarry them then if you want, but I don't think that was needed for this, just figured it was sinister enough to warrant a mention.)

All that to say, the reddit OP married a character, progressed to the point that they had a child with them, and then used black magic to "kill" the child and divorce their spouse before moving on to the next marriage candidate and doing the same, over and over until they had gone through all twelve marriage candidates, resulting in a collection of twelve "dead" children.

is some uniquely unhinged

behavior indeed.

When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.

To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as “crop rotation.”

So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, don’t beat yourself up for “quitting” that project. Give yourself permission to practice “mental crop rotation” to maintain a healthy brain field.

It’s important, though, to understand that during the fallow period, no nutrients are removed from that ground, and nothing is expected of it. Whatever the land grows then, it keeps, and it gets tilled back in or decomposes in place, to return its energy to the earth.

We’re not allowed, in our current society, to just let our minds be fallow for a bit, to produce nothing for export, to make nothing that can be sold. But it’s part of good land stewardship, to give every field time when it doesn’t need to give you anything back.