Fields of Plenty is a place Fergusson planted after The Extermination, and a recurring name for the possibility that life might be organized otherwise than through scarcity, hierarchy, and work. The evidence gives little physical description of the fields themselves; their importance lies instead in the contrast between their remembered promise and the increasingly fixed, resource-bound societies that follow the collapse of human civilization.

Founding and Historical Context

Fergusson, described as a fellow Uralian, planted the first Fields of Plenty after The Extermination. The account identifies this as an early act of reconstruction, but does not specify the fields’ location, size, or agricultural methods. Their name nevertheless carries a suggestion of abundance into a world where reliable hardware, power, and maintenance would become decisive resources.

That scarcity becomes open conflict. At the Wrocław Expo, a conversation about the future sets out the stakes: alliances compete for mechs, servers, power supplies, defenses against Plague, and shares of Mothernet. The First Transformer War later breaks out over resources, just as SoulEater predicted, and ends with working servers and power plants under known ownership. These events do not establish that the Fields themselves caused or directly opposed the war. They do, however, place Fergusson’s post-Extermination planting within a wider history in which survival and political power increasingly depend on control of material infrastructure.

Fergusson’s Account of the Fields

Fergusson’s significance to the Fields is also intellectual. In his account, he locates an alternative to capitalism in hunter-gatherer societies before the Neolithic Revolution, roughly fifteen thousand years earlier, when people lived on what wild nature provided rather than cultivating the soil. He presents those societies as healthier and stronger, longer-lived, nearly free of violence and exploitation, more equal between women and men, and marked by little work and no hierarchies of power.

This account makes the Fields more than a named place: they are connected to a search for forms of life outside familiar economic and social arrangements. Fergusson argues that capitalism repeatedly returns because it offers a simple way to manage limited resources, while inherited rituals and institutions make work and hierarchy seem unavoidable. His proposed prehistoric alternative is cast as a lost paradise, remembered across human mythologies. The passage does not say that the Fields reproduce that prehistoric society in practice; rather, Fergusson’s planting and his theory are linked by their shared orientation toward imagining life beyond the systems that have prevailed.

Remembered Image and Later Contrast

Much later, Bartek recalls Fergusson’s Fields of Plenty by emoting an image of the fields alongside paradisal tribes of birthers. The image takes the form of animated sprites and small creatures giving birth to comic-book humanoids, with dappled prosimians perched on the shoulders of a two-ton mech. This is a stylized recollection, not a documentary description of the Fields’ landscape or inhabitants. Its mixture of small living creatures and massive machinery gives the remembered ideal a visual presence while leaving its actual form unresolved.

The later history sharpens the contrast. By 4529 PostApoc, no unaffiliated transformer can independently secure constant hardware maintenance and regular power. After a telecommunications satellite fails in 7899 PostApoc, the loss of ocean cables and the end of human repair work leave transoceanic communications beyond the reach of any effort short of a whole civilization. Guilds and alliances consequently harden into nations, bound not only by language and culture but by time and place. Set against this consolidation, the Fields retain the force of a remembered alternative: a name attached to abundance and to the question of whether existence must be organized around work and competition. The evidence preserves that aspiration more clearly than it records the place itself.