Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 58: One cooldown away from completion!

"Come on…"

Standing in front of the wall of furnaces, Theo could do nothing but tap his foot impatiently as he waited for the copper he had just recovered from the mine to smelt through.

Just like iron alone allowed the young man to take his first few steps into industrialization, doing so properly simply couldn’t be done without the help of the copper… and all the different items it could be crafted into.

The main problem, however, remained the same.

While crafting, even if Theo ultimately would want to automate it, was something that he could still do directly in his inventory, turning the ores into ingots… actually required him to use a proper smelter.

This downside, something rarely ever introduced to factory games and, if even, often only for much higher grades of materials, was now his greatest limiter when it came to expanding.

One that he could still circumvent with the blocky-era furnaces, but an obstacle nonetheless.

’In the end, though, I can still tell why that is the case,’ Theo sighed out as he thought, imagining the scenario when even the smelting of ores could be done out of his inventory.

’It’s all so I have an actual pressing reason to move beyond smelting everything by hand,’ Theo thought, smiling lightly as he recalled the countless times when playing factory games when, rather than automating things that he needed, he would resort to crafting them by hand, simply because it was often cheaper and faster to do than setting up a whole factory just for this one or two items he needed.

It was a way of thinking that often came back to bite Theo in the ass once those seemingly simple and unimportant parts would turn out to be crucial for some higher-tier goal. In his current situation, however, this limiter was nothing but a source of rather extreme mental anguish, for it felt like nothing else but a loosely covered alternative version of a cooldown.

No matter how much he hated it, though, Theo had no other choice but to abide by the rules set by his system.

’No matter how annoying it might be at times, it’s not like I have it bad, is it?’ Thinking back on all that he could do and all that he had to endure, Theo couldn’t help but shake his head in silent defeat.

Those cooldowns, those delays… If they were the sole price Theo had to pay for all that his system enabled him to do, he would have to be the most ungrateful son of an ass to keep whining about it!

Still, while nothing more than a bucket of cold water constantly poured on anything Theo could get excited about, those cooldowns were exactly why he was in such a hurry to pretty much get rid of them.

For that to happen, however…

’Just how much longer do I need to wait?’

Gritting his teeth in silent frustration, Theo impatiently collected every last smelted bit of copper, only to quickly turn it into copper wire that he would then stash away before going back to doing nothing but watching the fires crack in the bellies of his furnaces.

And in this boring way, bit by bit, Theo continued to gather all the items he needed to finally make the push for completing the rest of his tutorial.

First came smelters, each costing twenty iron plates, ten ingots, and then forty units of copper wire. Yet, while only having two miners, Theo made sure to craft enough wires for a total of four of them.

Then, before he would have a chance to place the first of the smelters down, Theo already set up the crafting of four constructors.

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Those, however, would take quite some time to craft through, given how rather than simple iron plates and ingots or copper wire… they each required a total of two higher-tier items and then just a bunch of iron plates to top it all off.

Those higher-tier items… were nothing but a simple recombination of various amounts of various lower-level items. Reinforced plates could be made with just a bunch of iron plates and then several packs of bolts. A pack of bolts could be crafted out of a unit of iron rods which, in turn, could be crafted directly from the iron ingots.

The same schematic applied to copper cables that were just a bunch of wires put together and then recrafted. The only item that actually required both iron- and copper-sourced items, however, was a dynamo, taking both half a dozen reinforced plates and then half a stack of copper wires, making them the biggest pain to obtain out of all the other crafting materials required for the crafter buildings.

Annoying to make or not, however, as soon as Theo housed all the required ingots and parts in his inventory, rather than bothering with crafting each specific part in the necessary amount, he simply queued the constructors up. In this way, their initial five-minute crafting time stretched to over eleven minutes when the system accounted for all the part-crafting required before.

Either way, before the first of the constructors could be crafted, Theo already went ahead and moved to the iron patch, where he broke the logistic chain between the miner and the iron ore bin, only to then put down two smelters, each supplied with one unit of workpoints, and then connected them to the miner with the one last thing he scheduled for crafting before queuing up the crafters—simple belts.

’Now, I can save a workpoint each on every connection I make,’ Theo thought as he started the belt at the miner and dragged it over to the first of the smelters… only to notice quite the obvious problem with such a setup.

"Ugh…" Holding back a curse, Theo forced a simple, empty smile on his face. "Right, I don’t have splitters to divide a belt into two."

Sighing out, Theo ended up removing the other smelter as he opted to move its assigned workpoint to the first smelter instead.

[Construct a smelter: 1/1]

[Construct a smelter: completed!]

As the notification popped up before his eyes, Theo glanced over at his crafting queue.

’Still seven minutes, huh?’ he thought before turning his eyes over to the list of the requirements for his tutorial quest.

Normally, this would be the point at which Theo would venture out to his copper mine, where he would place down a smelter and then drag a belt all the way back to his mining base so that he could centralize where all of his resources would gather…

But that’s what Theo would do in a game.

In real life, however, as all the walking, all the excitement, and all the pressure started to mount up and turn into exhaustion, when faced with the prospect of another nearly half-a-kilometer-long stroll…

Theo opted to just sit down by the working miner and watch how the fires in the smelter’s bellow started to light up, all the while just… waiting for the first of the constructors to finish.

’While that might be lazy of me, I think I’m going to take a nap as soon as I get this tutorial thingy out of the way,’ Theo thought, curling up under the stone wall of his iron-working room, trying to use whatever was left out of his prison clothes to keep as much of his internal heat from escaping. ’I’m working with heavy machinery, so doing so while in perfect control should be a must! If anything, this earliest period of industrialization is exactly when most of the workplace-related accidents started to show!’