Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 55: One Small Step for Me

[Miner (level 1) crafted!]

For a moment, Theo just sat still in perfect silence, his eyes closed as he pondered over this one moment.

’This is but one small step for me,’ Theo thought as he slowly opened his eyes and locked his eyes with the nearby, exposed parts of the mineral, iron vein. ’But it’s the first major breakthrough for my growth. As of now…’

Theo gulped his saliva down as he slowly approached the place before summoning his building overlay.

On one hand, it felt extremely ordinary. On the other hand, though…

Resource acquisition. Automated craft of everything necessary to keep expanding. Then, automating the building process itself.

Those were the three major steps that permeated through every kind of factory game.

First, one had to take the task of getting resources removed from the equation of what had to be done by hand, for it was the biggest time sink of all, one that was also easiest to completely abolish.

Later on, once resources would no longer pose any challenge, it would be all about automating everything necessary to expand the factory, to remove the annoying cooldowns and the limitation of what one could craft on their own.

It was a lot easier to go and grab everything one needed from several boxes rather than pick just the bare resources and craft everything from scratch.

Finally, there was the step of automating the building process itself, allowing the player to fully dedicate their time to just progressing through new steps rather than mulling over minor details of every plan and schematic.

’The question is, which kind of factory-building game does my system follow?’

Theo asked himself as he stopped above the vein, ready to make the very first step on the path to proper automation. Still, he just… waited, his thoughts too heavy to allow him a moment of decisiveness.

’Because depending on which kind it follows, there might be one more additional step to this entire process.’

Theo sighed before taking a few steps back to remove himself from where the building projection now stood tall above the mineral ore, turning the hologram from red to green.

"But that’s for the far-off future. Now, let’s just focus on the first step."

As opposed to the cooldown placed on its crafting, Theo planted the house-sized machine down on the ore patch with but a sliver of his thought. He just… willed for it to appear, confirming the design overlaid directly over his vision.

"And now…"

Normally, the first step would be to somehow fuel the machine, be it by connecting it to the active grid or by filling it up with some kind of fuel. And while Theo had a nearly infinite supply of biomass by now with an extremely easy way to get more…

There was still one part of the system, a part even later mentioned in his tutorial quest, that Theo had yet to put to use.

[Construct a miner (level 1) on top of an unoccupied resource vein: 1/1]

[Construct a miner (level 1) on top of an unoccupied resource vein: Completed!]

The first… no, the second objective of Theo’s other tutorial lit up. Its first instance already came in pre-completed, as it was pretty much the repeat of the second-to-last objective of Theo’s original tutorial.

In both cases, Theo had to locate a resource vein. The one difference was how in the first tutorial, he had to just find one of any kind… When it came to the opening of his second tutorial, he had to locate an unoccupied one!

And in the short window between Theo clearing out the mining guild and placing down the miner, he already managed to get that part of the quest.

"Getting to the next part is going to be tough, though…" Theo sighed as he looked back at his quest line.

[Construct a smelter: 0/1]

The next logical step. Or so it would be, if it was preceded by creating some sort of power source for the place.

Something had to move the gears in both the miner and the smelter for it to work!

And yet, the quest only referenced that two whole objectives later, with the very part of this new subsystem that Theo now had every intention of using.

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’Let’s assign… two workpoints to the miner…’

[Assigning 2 workpoints to Miner (level 1, Simple Metals)]

[Producing 60 iron ore/minute]

[Workpoints: 2/3]

’Finally…’

Seeing the numbers, Theo’s eyes flared up.

From thirty pieces of blocky ore an hour, he just made a leap to a whopping one piece of this much chunkier, industrial unit of ore per every damned second! A number that he then instantly brought up even further, filling in the last slot of the machine’s workpoints.

Still, regardless of the numbers in the notification, the miner itself still had to properly start up from a perfectly idle state.

The miner itself loomed high over Theo, reaching nearly the eight-meter-high ceiling of the excavated cavern. Its massive main tower stretched conveniently close to the bottom of Theo’s vent, making it rather easy to isolate whatever fumes it would produce.

But there was still one rather vital element that Theo now had to complete, even though it was never really mentioned in the list of his quest objectives.

’Now, let’s hope it won’t take all that long…’

Turning his attention away from the four massive drills—each kept still in a cage mounted on the four corners of the miner’s main tower—as they started to spin, Theo looked back into his crafting menu instead.

And while only one of two buildings Theo could still craft, it still served a role that couldn’t be underestimated.

’Craft storage unit.’

It was that simple.

Without it, Theo’s reserve of anything would only amount to what meager numbers the machines themselves could hold while forcing him to make inconvenient trips between them to gather up what he needed.

By putting everything into storage, however, Theo would forever gain easy access to all that this miner would produce!

And as the machine’s drills dropped down to the ore in the floor and started to cut into the stone and vein alike, Theo finally moved on to the one test he couldn’t help but feel curious about.

A test that started as soon as the storage unit finished its crafting time, allowing Theo to set it down right by the entrance to this mining cavern.

’I want to assign three more workpoints to the logistics between the miner and the storage!’