Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 63: While the machines work...

When it came to the construction of the equipment crafter, Theo faced exactly the same issues that made what could be a quick building process into a drag of constantly moving back and forth between where he was building and where he was getting his resources from.

Which is why, as soon as he was done bringing over all the items to one place, rather than investing in the equipment crafter or the higher levels of production right away…

Theo left the mines, putting it all behind himself.

’It’s time to do something else.’

This was the secret to keeping the factory-building games fun. A secret that Theo had to put aside as he worked to get the earliest possible set of items all automated. And it was all about… knowing when to put a stop to all the building and go do something else.

By the very nature of how it worked, the factory would continue to pour items into infinity… Or, until the accessible storage would last. And while this growth was too slow to satisfy Theo’s immediate needs as he worked, with how he could build quicker than those items could get produced… Once left aside for just a little bit of time, they would accumulate, finally removing at least one kind of delay from the picture.

"And it just so happens, there’s one project I had in mind for quite a while…"

Stepping out to the surface brought Theo the kind of surprise he was slowly getting used to, even though he had long since stopped making the same mistake back in his original world. For by the time he reached the end of his stairs… The world was already dark, with just the very last rays of the sun fighting a losing battle against the shadows of the night.

"Ugh…" Rising up in the near total darkness of the place, Theo suddenly came to face one issue he didn’t expect.

’How am I going to do the remodeling I wanted if I cannot even see what I’m doing?’

Unable to see, he wouldn’t be able to properly judge the distances, shapes, or directions.

Or so would be the case if Theo’s building overlay didn’t come with a convenient night-vision feature!

Sure, it only applied to an area within which Theo could directly craft things and only ever provided him with a faint outline of his surroundings… But for all intents and purposes, why would he need anything more?

"First, safety," Theo muttered to himself as he climbed up the wooden wall and then used his building overlay to get a grasp of his surroundings.

By design, the space between his outer and inner wall was supposed to be for him to develop, with the outer wall guaranteeing safety while the inner one served as a last-resort defense.

But right now, with his factories hidden underground, what was the use of all that open space?

’It’s only making it harder for me to defend during the invasion. But, if I do it like that…’

After focusing for a bit before whipping out his universal tool and changing its settings around, Theo combined his building overlay to not only precisely see what he was trying to excavate… but also see it in relation to the blocky subroutine leftover in his building overlay—the world’s grid!

Despite its grand name, all this world grid provided was a simple, perfectly even mesh of squares stretching as far out as Theo’s building overlay could. What was so great about it, though, was how this grid… would be the same no matter where Theo used it, allowing him to keep all of his builds perfectly in line even if they weren’t connected together!

Normally, that kind of thing would be used mostly to keep the aesthetic of one’s world, allowing for nice, right angles and perfectly efficient cubes. In Theo’s current situation, however… All this world grid was good for was helping him orient himself when it came to precise distances and measures he was trying to excavate!

"That far should be enough…" Skipping over the land directly attached to the walls, Theo moved his attention ten meters away… before turning his excavation zone into a massive patch twenty meters by ten meters and just a bit more than two and a half meters deep.

’Twenty meters long ditch dug out in a straight line for ten meters, two and a half meters deep…’ Theo thought as he stared down at the freshly made gaping hole in the ground, the mere first step of his grand defense plan.

A defense that wouldn’t come to be for quite some time yet, but one that would turn all those challengers into nothing more than easy prey for him!

"Still, for a good thing to happen, I need to work hard for it!" Screaming out into the air, Theo then… removed another layer from the bottom of the ditch… and then another… and then just one more. In the end, this turned the ditch from a moat slightly deeper than an average man would be high into a formidable hole, stretching a whopping ten meters down into the ground, just a few meters away from reaching the layer of rocks.

"Whew…" Jumping down from the wall directly to the outside, Theo moved over to the hole before looking down while resting his hands on his hips. "That sure is deep…" he muttered before shaking his head and then moving along the edge of the hole, all the way to the point where it randomly ended. "Now, I just need to do it how much… a few hundred times more?"

The universal tool already in his hand, Theo quickly removed the next stretch of the ground, adjusting the angle just a little bit to make the middle of his hole perpendicular to the circle of his wooden wall. Three excavations later, both holes matched in depth, allowing Theo to move on to the next stretch.

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’By the time I’m done, I should have enough materials to make all the other machines I need, the equipment crafter, whatever equipment is there to craft and maybe… maybe even a few of those gun turrets,’ Theo thought, excavating away as he allowed his thoughts to wander to the not-so-distant future.

"And once there’s a ring of those turrets on the inside marked by this ditch…" Whispering to himself, Theo momentarily stopped as he looked back at the three stretches reaching as far as sixty meters to the back that he unearthed.

Then, rather than moving along, he looked down into the ditch, imagining a monster like the Wrathhound from the last attack falling into it… only to find itself within the cross-fire of several automated turrets at once.

An image that would be terrifying to that Wrathhound yet quite impressive from Theo’s perspective.

"I guess this will finally allow me to graduate from the fear of those challengers, huh?" Staring down the hole for just a little bit longer, Theo sighed before moving along and pointing his universal tool at the next stretch of forested land he was more than eager to turn into just an empty ditch.

’Later on, I will still have to go and reinforce it with something. But rather than using stone… I’m going to excavate enough richstone to go for days, so why not fill it up with concrete instead?’

Thinking about the steps ahead, Theo continued to excavate half a thousand cubic meters of dirt, stone, and trees, one after the other, with as much effort as one would need to use the remote to change the program on their TV. And as the numbers in his inventory grew and the ditch expanded further and further, Theo’s eyelids started to grow heavier and heavier.

"That’s it…" he muttered, soon struggling to keep himself awake. "As soon as I’m done here, Imma screw it all and just go get some well-deserved sleep!"