Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 62: Back and forth [Bonus Chapter: PS last week]

"I knew I would soon face the very problems I’m trying to solve in advance… but to think I would reach that stage already…"

It’s been an hour since Theo finalized the last build back at his copper place, allowing him to finally move on to the next most important step of his plan.

Yet, contrary to how simple it sounded when thought out, bringing back every last item produced at two of his extraction and processing caves over to his main mining base…

Normally, it wouldn’t even be all that hard or annoying, only requiring Theo to steel himself for just long enough to lay down all the necessary conveyor belts.

The problem was, by the time he finally managed to create a new, sizable cave just next to the main one and then route the iron ingots and iron plates there…

He ran out of the conveyor belts.

At first, fixing the issue was quite simple, with just a simple task of getting more of the already processed resources back from where they would be crafted. Yet, in the time Theo took to lay down all the belts he had crafted the materials for in advance, his machines had only produced a fraction of the amount!

As such, rather than just making the same path once for every item that he would want to bring over, Theo ended up going back and forth whenever he would run out of the necessary items, endlessly stretching what should be a rather simple task.

"Next time…" taking a momentary breather to ward off the exhaustion caused by all the walking he did, Theo leaned down and rested his hands against his knees as he tried to catch his breath, "next time, I’m just going to bring raw ore all to one place and then only bother with processing it all then!"

In theory, it was still possible for Theo to switch to this seemingly more efficient manner of building, one that was supposed to save him quite a few conveyor belts in the long run… Or so it would, if those belts could carry an infinite number of items per second.

A detail that, quite obviously, wasn’t the case.

"If my calculations are correct, this primitive belt can only carry what… sixty items per minute?" Theo muttered to himself as he stared at the belt he just finished laying down, with a line of iron rods stretching all the way up the tunnel he had long since excavated and then widened to a desirable width. "With that, it would already be a pain to bring all the ore in, so I might as well move some of the early production out of the way and out of sight!"

Normally, Theo would much rather just keep everything in one place, making it easy to work on some minor details or fix throughput issues whenever they arose, allowing him to efficiently remove all the bottlenecks that could thwart the productivity of his production lines.

But once again, this wasn’t a game where one of the main objectives of building a factory was to make it as visually appealing as possible so that the nice, interesting sights would only reinforce his desire to keep playing the game.

No.

This was real life.

A scenario where just the throughput of the iron ingots alone was endlessly more important than how things looked, given how each of the iron ingots his machines produced was likely to fetch quite the nice price on any market he would ever bother selling it to!

It was an option Theo obviously didn’t have for now, but with the prospect of potentially getting his tool upgraded once he completed some sort of a current objective… If luck and the system would have it, getting to the next tier of this industrial path would be the easiest way for Theo to escape his confinement!

With all of that said, however, what mattered to Theo right now wasn’t the extreme convenience of keeping everything up in one place, a convenience that didn’t come at the predictable cost of losing framerates whenever the number of buildings in one area reached the level impacting the ability of his computer to properly process it all.

What mattered to Theo the most was the elimination of risks. And by keeping most of his production underground, the biggest risk was one Theo couldn’t even see—the potential of the exhaust gases created by all of his machines accumulating to the point where they could either directly poison him… or replace all the natural air in the caves, making it impossible to breathe while underground.

This 𝓬ontent is taken from fгeewebnovёl.co𝙢.

To a degree, Theo could manage this risk by building proper ventilation shafts… but it was quite a lot easier to just put his machines quite some distance apart, making it hard for said harmful gases to accumulate in the first place!

"The one thing that worries me is whether or not the pollution will affect the monsters nearby…" Theo muttered to himself once he finally dragged the third belt all the way over to his new, underground processing plant, only to then sigh out as he turned back and started the return trip to the iron mining and processing area. "What will I do if the pollution makes the monsters evolve?"

This question… to say it lived rent-free in Theo’s head would be quite an understatement.

Yet, it was also a question that Theo had already found an easy solution for.

’To think I could buy more blueprints directly in my ability shop…’ Theo thought, browsing through the system menus to make the most out of the time he would spend walking anyway. ’And while I can recognize some of those as necessary for leveling up beyond my current stage of growth…’ his eyes glanced over the molecular analysis center that supposedly allowed him to analyze the foreign materials of this world to find proper use for them, skipped over the project delivery portal most likely used to complete goals and advance over to the next stages of industrial growth…

Only to lock on to the set of two blueprints that would render most of Theo’s monster-related worries obsolete.

"Machine-gun turret, machine-gun itself, and then ammo compatible with both," Theo muttered as he read out loud the content of the one blueprint package that he had the most interest in.

This package came at a hefty price of a whopping fifty ability points, pretty much a third of all the points Theo had accumulated ever since he first awakened his system.

But how could an investment ever be wrong if it was all about investing in one’s own safety?

"Yeah, there’s no use waiting…" muttering to himself, Theo went ahead and bought the package, only to sense the familiar twitch of reality that surged to a seemingly random yet extremely precisely picked part of his brain. And right as it happened, two new icons appeared in his crafting window, reminding him of yet another issue.

"Well, great, now I have two more uses for the copper," Theo muttered as he confirmed the crafting requirements for both the live ammo and the automated gun turret. Yet, rather than looking for ways to build and thus test this thing right away, Theo’s eyes locked on yet another icon, one he had mostly ignored thus far.

"I guess it’s as good a time as any to see what this equipment crafter is all about, isn’t it?"