Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 53: Exploration is a perfectly valid part of the gameplay loop

Back on the surface, Theo’s greatest concern when it came to digging out the dirt was about leaving the space altered too much.

What use would he have of his land if it was all littered with empty holes, eight by eight by eight deep, wide, and long? That’s exactly why, rather than just picking random spots one after the other, he kept digging out the dirt in a row, with a distant thought of one day bringing all of the ground within the outer courtyard of his claim to the same, perfectly even level.

Down in the mines, however, Theo’s concerns couldn’t be any different.

In the underground, he couldn’t care less about leaving an uneven, complex maze of half-random holes, for he neither had any use for keeping this area clean and orderly nor would he have to suffer the sight of such ragged terrain anytime other than when he would go underground to mine more.

No.

Down in his mines, Theo’s biggest concern wasn’t with the effects his system would have on the world around him… but how the world around him would react to the big changes introduced by his system instead.

Updat𝓮d from frёewebnoѵēl.com.

After all, there was nothing in any of the system prompts Theo received that gave him any assurances against cave-ins!

"I guess I could just mine straight down, then…" Theo muttered to himself as he walked some distance down his mining shaft, as if he was heading straight for the ore patch occupied by his mining guild.

Yet, rather than risking the integrity of the part of his manor that was already set up and working, Theo simply used the tunnel to walk away from where his base already undermined the integrity of the underground.

And a random spot roughly in the middle of Theo’s horizontal mining shaft was as good of a place as any.

’Half press to select, press and twist to start, wait a second for the process to complete.’

Just like that, roughly a thousand metric tons of stone suddenly evaporated…

Only for Theo’s quest to fill up its gauge all in one go!

[Mine out ten units of stone: 100/10]

[Mine out ten units of stone: Completed!]

Theo raised his eyebrow… before taking a look at the massive, house-sized hole his tool just created in the face of otherwise solid rock.

’Ugh… while I remember the tool of that extremely satisfactory game working pretty much the same way, seeing its effects with my own eyes in the real world…’ Theo gulped his saliva.

’But if it can just… remove a thousand metric tons of stone within a second, why can’t I… just point it at the enemies to get them removed?’

In reality, Theo couldn’t even ask this question, for it already came with an assumption that doing so was actually beyond the scope of what his universal tool could do. An assumption disproved by how Theo’s iron sword, an item he created solely to try to hunt for some more achievements, was now grayed out just like all of Theo’s other tools!

Yet, for the young man to test this theory, he would have to either wait for the next wave of challengers to appear… or seek out combat himself!

"Either of those options sounds pretty damn insane, don’t they?" Theo muttered to himself, only to put a sour look on his face as he glanced over to the next two objectives in the list.

[Use the basher’s resource scanner: 0/1]

[Locate the nearest unoccupied resource vein: 0/1]

While the first part was merely quirky, forcing Theo to take his sweet time to figure out how to actually activate the scanner function of his tool… the other part instantly put him in a foul mood.

’So I will have to go on a trip to find it, huh?’

Ever since the time of picking his claim, Theo knew there were more resource veins dotted around the place. Heck! The presence of one of those was one of the damn requirements for him to get his manor going in the first place!

But now that he was tasked with finding a new one…

’Not only am I going to leave the relative safety of the manor, but I will also have to somehow wire the resources back here anyway…’

While already a part of the second tutorial, it was but the natural evolution of progress, something Theo inherently knew even without the system spelling it out through the quest for him.

The only reason why he would seek out more resource veins was to actually exploit them, to get his hands on whatever goodies could be dug out from said veins.

And in all honesty… this was all perfectly in line with that rather satisfactory gameplay loop from Theo’s beloved 3D factory-building game, where for one to actually build up an area and progress through the list of objectives… they had to go exploring first.

Sure, in that game, the first exploration came with only the mildest of dangers, designed more to get the player accustomed to what he or she could expect out in the wild of the massive map…

But the place Theo found himself in was, by every means possible, an end-game zone. As such, rather than encountering just some slight dangers, he was more than just likely to encounter bosses of a level the Internet would go crazy about!

’Should I just… remove the mining guild, then?’

Theo squinted his eyes, staring down the mining shaft in the direction where his mining guild currently continued to endlessly produce iron ore without actually affecting the vein from where it came, a fact he had already confirmed several times.

On one hand, it would be a massive loss, to risk something that was already working and working well just to minimize the risks…

"On the other hand, do I really want to go out into the wild, seeking more resources, when I’m pretty much vulnerable to even the tiniest mosquito swarming the swamps of this place?"

Theo heaved a long, heavy sigh before shaking his head and then turning back, intending to go back to the surface and dismantle the mining guild… only to then stop after walking a measly few meters.

’Do I even have to go up?’ Faced with quite the vexing question, Theo simply raised his eyes in the direction he judged the main area of his manor to be.

’System, would you mind dismantling the mining guild for me?’

By now, Theo had enough iron ore saved up to go about his tasks for quite some time. After all, the ten hours he spent doing nothing but letting his system evolve also meant ten whole hours of his mining guild operating!

[Mining Guild: Dismantling - 5:00]

[4:49]

[4:48]

"So it comes with a timer all on its own, huh?" Baffled, Theo muttered to himself, only to turn around and then move right back to where he had just extracted a literal thousand metric tons of stone, only to just sit down on the original path and then let his feet dangle out of the resulting square hole in the rock’s face.

’And now that I have to wait anyway,’ with his thoughts already locked on the next set of objectives, Theo brought his universal tool closer to his face before whipping out two torches to get some proper light to look at it.

"Little tool," he whispered as he caressed the tool’s button and stroked the strong, chiseling knife attached to its bottom, "what secrets do you hold, and won’t you share those with me?"