Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 67: Direct insertion versus Overflow

"That surely took much longer than I anticipated…"

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From the time and effort Theo needed to actually build the whole thing, the few moments he took to solve the issue of his seemingly endless exhaustion, all the way to then… going straight back into the hole to connect all the generators to a single power grid and then extending it through the same tunnel Theo used to lay down the fuel belts…

"Still, for a power-oriented project, there were still far fewer complications than what one would normally encounter."

There was a limit to human focus, a limit to how long they could keep focused, build everything in the perfectly correct way, not miss a single element, a single connection, a single belt…

That’s why, in factory-building games Theo could remember, there were actually three phases to building any project that was even slightly on a bigger scale.

The first phase was to just build it and see if it worked in any capacity.

The second phase came right after when, by observing the flow of raw resources, half-products, and finally the output of the final set of machines, one could track down and fix the issues born from the momentary lapses of focus or small mistakes.

The final phase only applied to truly massive projects, ones that often employed building ideas that… took time to reach their full potential. The easiest example of this kind of building style was the overflow method of feeding resources with belts into the machines.

As opposed to the direct insertion method, where one would perfectly calculate the output of each machine before dividing and combining it in complex formations to produce any given number of belts that outputted a precise number of resources needed by the machines down the line…

This method was, by all means… just better. It had no delay, instantly pushing the factory to its designated throughput, never dealing with any of the thousands of issues that could arise in the overflow method.

And yet, against seemingly all the odds, it was the overflow that reigned supreme in the designs Theo used back when he was gaming or just a few moments ago when he completed the first engine for his factory.

When it came to the overflow method, one would simply line a single belt across as many machines as said single belt could feed into before stacking a divider per machine.

With dividers splitting a single belt into two belts with perfectly half the amount of the original one, the first machine would be fed a lot more resources than it actually needed, all the way to the point where it could accept no more items. Then, the majority of the resources would be forced to follow the main belt, repeating the process in the second machine, the third… all the way to the last machine, at which point the setup would reach its optimal throughput.

For that to happen, however, all the machines, all the belts between them… all of those had to fill up with the necessary products first. And while early on, when the number of processed items was still quite huge, this would happen rather quickly, in the late game, where a belt with ten products per minute had to feed into ten machines, each requiring a single product a minute while all of them were capable of holding a hundred or two of said items…

In those late-game cases, it could take literal games of playtime for the factory to start working at its designed rate.

Why would such an inferior design be so commonly used, then, one could wonder. The answer, however, couldn’t be more simple.

It was cheap, simple, and cost-effective, both in terms of materials necessary to set it up and in terms of the space the whole thing would occupy.

And that revealed the main issue of the last stage of building, a stage that only applied to the biggest of the factories. A stage that was pretty much a copy of the second one… just delayed by the time the factory needed to reach its full potential… and then repeated over and over again, given how every fix to the problem would once again need the factory to run its boot-up course, bringing itself up to full speed before a new series of problems down the line could reveal themselves by bottlenecking the production.

That’s why, standing back in his manufacturing cave, with just five moves left to complete the whole project, Theo couldn’t feel triumphant.

Not when he was pretty damn sure at least one sort of problem was bound to show up… but not before he would kickstart the whole process, turning the insides of his power plant into the most toxic place to be in this entire, damned world!

"He who doesn’t dare, doesn’t win," muttering to himself, Theo took a deep breath… before hooking the first out of the four belts, only to then watch how the stacks of long tubes of condensed biofuel slowly moved up the conveyor, setting off on their long journey through the narrow technical tunnel and towards the power plant.

’And now, we wait.’

Resisting the desire to just hook everything up right away, Theo ultimately decided to just take his shirt off and toss it directly onto the slow-moving conveyor.

By now, it was nothing more than a scrap cloth, with more dirt on it than fabric. And while he could try cleaning it up… once the adhesive power of all the filth on it vanished, Theo pretty much expected the piece of cloth to just… turn into dust.

"I really need to get some fresh clothes," watching how the biofuel line carried his discarded shirt away, Theo shook his head before focusing on his system as he searched through all the crafting recipes accessible to him, eager to find a recipe he could actually afford.

’Back on Earth, industrialization led to the massive boom of the textile industry, but in those sorts of games… isn’t this kind of an aspect rather overlooked?’

Shaking his head after finding nothing but some simple, straw-knitted covers, Theo nearly sat down, only to then jolt awake when something changed.

At first, he couldn’t quite place it, the source of this strange feeling.

Was it anxiety? Unrest? Anticipation?

He couldn’t tell.

At least, not until he realized that rather than a feeling, what alerted him was a slight noise, a silent buzzing happening right at the limit of the frequency Theo could hear.

A buzzing that Theo was already familiar with.

It was the buzz of electricity flowing through the power lines!

At long last, his power plant was not only completed… but also operational!