Bioshock > Bioshock Levels > Arcadia
Arcadia introduces you to these:
You clamber around crates and climb a long flight of stairs while Atlas demands Ryan's death and Ryan complains that you are sponging off him for the very air you breathe. Then you smash the chains of a double door. Beyond them is a world of flower and fern.
Arcadia has been described as the Central Park of Rapture. But Central Park does not provide New York with its food, its drink and its oxygen. Arcadia provides Rapture with all three, but a quiet place for its citizens to get away from it all … if they can pay for it. For Ryan insists, with the most greedy and pedantic of excuses, on charging for the use of Arcadia.
Not that it matters: Arcadia is as much a splicer-infested ruin as any other quarter of the city. What is worse, some of the aggressors are members of a nature cult called the Saturnine, who sacramentally drink the type of plasmids that turn them into flame-spitting teleporters.
Here you will go hunting for Saturnine to research and then to despatch into the beyond. Because from your researches will come the tonic Natural Camouflage, the next best thing to being invisible even if you have to stand perfectly still. The SportBoost tonic from researching thugs helps, too, if you are into knocking aggressors on the head. You will also get bottles of chlorophyll solution, more on which follows.
Arcadia introduces you to the U-Invent crafting stations, where you make antipersonnel bullets, exploding buckshot, autohack tools and other goodies from scattered components you scrounge off containers and dead aggressors. You also get the chemical thrower and its ammo of napalm, liquid nitrogen and electric gel.
There are also two Little Sisters here. If you are in the habit of saving them, rescuing one will win you another gift from Dr. Tennenbaum. Stock up on slots at the Gatherers Garden station.
As you enter the Rolling Hills, Ryan tells you a tale of how he burned down a forest of his rather than surrender it to the United States government. As you approach the metro station, you witness the point of Ryan's story as he pumps herbicide into the air, killing the trees and other vegetation. Atlas freaks out, for those trees supply Rapture with oxygen. He sends you to see Julie Langford, the botanist who planted Arcadia.
Dr. Langford sends you out to gather the bloom of a plant called the rosa gallica, which she left next to a waterwheel as she fled to her labs as the war broke out. The bloom confirms the efficacy of an Adam-derived chemical she calls the Lazarus Vector, which has the power to regenerate the vegetation of Arcadia. But as you approach her office, Ryan gasses her to death … but not before she writes on a window the combination to her safe which contains the recipe to the chemical.
The Lazarus Vector consists of seven units each of chlorophyll solution, bee spit enzyme and distilled water. The chlorophyll you will have gathered already from the Saturnine, who stole most of it from Dr. Langford. The remaining ingredients are at the Farmer's Market. Don't forget to hack the security devices in her office.
Although it is treated as a separate level, the Farmer's Market sells the produce of Arcadia and can be considered a part of it. As aggressors do not eat, and have not left alive anyone who does, there is a lot of decayed meat, moldy cheese, and rotten vegetables lying about. And, as the Market is a place of commerce, there are a lot of security devices watching over the decay.
The Market has three sections: The Market proper, the Silverwing Apiary and the Worley Winery. You need to go to the Apiary for the bee enzyme and the Winery for the distilled water.
The Market proper with its shops and stalls is patrolled largely by pigskins, splicers which used to be football players. Their cries are the most honest and pitiable of any aggressor.
You will also find one Little Sister and tapes about them: Both from Ryan, who refused to see anything wrong about the Little Sisters, even though he found them repulsive; and from Tennenbaum, who slowly realized the horror of what she created.
At the entrance to the Market you find the remains of the Apiary's proprietress, who holds your first enzyme sample and a tape implying that she did not get along with Dr. Langford. The remaining samples are in the hives of the apiary. The bees inside are very angry. To walk in unscathed you must use the smoke control to pacify the bees. Each hive you open in search of samples summons an aggressor; so if you have the Decoy plasmid, use it to keep them busy.
There is distilled water in the Winery because the vintner was a corrupt fellow who put water in his wine. Down in the cellars among the plentiful bottles of wine and pure water, and among the angry aggressors, is the crafting station where you will make the Lazarus Vector.
Hint: There is a cache of mines and auto-hack tools in a cleverly hidden crawlspace in the Padden meat market. The turret there guards the start of a wooden path, broken in the middle, that leads to the crawlspace door above the door to the fruit vendors.
You rush back to Dr. Langford's office and the central misting control under the window overlooking the Rolling Hills. You load the ingredients into the device and immediately dash to Langford's desk to lock down the front entrance as you prepare for a mass attack of aggressors sent by Ryan to stop you. If you remembered to hack the security devices before leaving for the Market, they will help thin out the splicer population.
Once the last aggressor falls and the bell on the control dings, you throw the switch. A blue mist settles over the grounds, restoring the trees and plants to their old green and floral state. As Ryan vents his frustration that you are still walking, you enter the metro station to that bathysphere that will take you to Fort Frolic.
The tomb on the other side of the cemetery has two torches. One of them is not lit. Light it with your Incinerate, and the doors will open. Smugglers have stored lots of goodies inside.
The gravestones all mark the passing of Faith, beloved daughter of Jennifer and Horace Farthingworth
. She comes from a cheap family, evidently, as a farthing is a quarter of a British penny. More surprisingly, she died as a teenager before Rapture was even built! Also buried: John Maynard Keynes, beloved son of Adam & Ada Smith, who died May 26th 1919 aged 36 years.
. The 1919 was when Keynes' first book was published. It's possible the tombstones are merely decorative.
The tape left by the male half of the loving couple in the hallucination implied that despite Adam, sickness — venereal and otherwise — was still common in Rapture.