Creeping plant

A **creeping plant** can randomly grow and spread over background blocs made of earth, raw stone, or stone wall, that do not have any torch or lamp nearby.

## Types

### Harmless

Harmless creeping plants use to appear if these conditions are met on a space that is reached by the sunlight.
If it wasn't for the mobility problems they can create, these plants in general are not bad.

In order to farm them, players can easily create their favorable environment by ordering dwarfs to dig only the foreground blocs of the stone fields generally found on the surface of the world.

### Predator

Predator creeping plants on the other hand use to appear if the same conditions are met on places untouched by the natural light.
These species will randomly harm back dwarfs when being removed.

When dealing with the predatory species, the more hits a dwarf has to perform against the plant to cut it down, the more damage they will potentially receive.
For effectively removing them, with less hits, and thus less damage taken back, see: § Cut & drop.

## Pathfinding

Creeping plants block the path of creatures, including dwarfs and imps, but dwarfs and monsters ignore them when on their pathfinding process.
This means that they will never try to deviate from a path, not even a couple of blocks, to avoid clearing creeping plants.
They chose their path completely disregarding the plants, and then, as they pass, they remove the plants that are blocking their way.

This can cause minor annoyances, like slowing down the overall movement of dwarfs, as they have to stop now and then to remove the plants while they're doing more important activities, or while they're simply not in need of leaves.

And this can also be a serious problem if dwarfs are in panic, with low health, trying to get away from stronger monsters.
This can lead to a situation where they will stop to cut the plants, fatally giving the monster the opportunity to kill them.

## Permeable

Creeping plants stop falling items, but let water pass.
They can also be fully submerged (occupying the same space of five portions of water), and they survive on there indefinitely.

## Cut & drop

Dwarfs should cut creeping plants just like any other natural vegetation, with their axes—or with their knife, if they have no axe.

However, when assigning this kind of task, the game treats it as a task requiring the mining skill, and will chose miners before loggers.

If dwarfs were assigned to a mining task, they usually imediately show their pickaxes on their hand.
And if they have to remove plants on their way to the mining spot, they will do so with the pick.
They won't bother to switch to the most effective tool for chopping plants.

Being more frequently selected by the game to cut down creeping plants can cause miners a bit of trouble.
Even more when they do so with the "wrong" tool.
If they're not equipped with a good axe, or if they simply don't use the axe they're equipped with, they will hurt themselves more when dealing with predatory bushes.

To avoid the wrong usage of picks to chop down bushes, before marking a block to be dug, players can check the path to that spot and mark the bushes.
They don't even need to mark all bushes, to avoid all dwarfs coming, one for each block of bush.
They can mark just the last block in the path.
The dwarf assigned to that task will then clear the entire path with their axe.

On the positive side, their miner skill helps in this task, just as having a good axe.
A mildly skilled miner with a stone axe, or a low skilled miner with an steel axe shouldn't need more than one hit per block of predator.

When cut, both types of creeping plants drop one "leaves", being along with birch trees and berry bushes, the only other source of this item.

## References

1. ↑ In game files the harmless version is called *`plants`*, while the other is called *`predator`*.