Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 69: The raw resources are on!

"First," Theo allowed a wide smile to appear on his lips, "let’s bring the scale up to speed!"

Before, he was limited by the number of workpoints he could assign between his machines. Workpoints he had to distribute between miners, smelters, and then all the constructors and combiners, just in hopes of getting a minimal trickle of the items he required.

But now?

Sure, he was nowhere near the true scale of things that he wanted to, one day, reach, but…

With nearly four hundred megawatts of power, and up to fifteen hundred megawatts if he were to fully unlock the potential of his engine… all the limits that constrained him before were now gone.

Which forced him to face another issue.

The problem of a goal.

’What do I actually need this factory to produce?’ Theo thought as he casually walked down his mineshafts, making his way all the way back to the iron ore vein that he had already tapped into.

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’On one hand, I need to make sure I produce all the ammunition I might need for my turrets to work efficiently during the invasion, even if they were only to rely on what’s produced live rather than tapping into the stockpile.’

This was a reasonable thought. For if his guns were to consume more ammunition than he could produce, then his defenses, from permanent, would turn to just temporary. And that would mean it would no longer be the question of whether or not those gun emplacements did enough damage to stop the attacks… but whether or not the invaders could either dodge, block, or just soak enough bullets for Theo’s supply to end.

That, however, forced him to face yet another issue, one that he, quite regretfully, noticed a bit too late.

’As good as guns might be, they are definitely not the ultimate weapon I would like to employ. That…’ he smiled at his own thoughts as he finally reached the vein and dismissed all of the system windows while switching over to building mode, ’that honor goes to automated rocket launchers!’

While not from the same game as the normal gun turrets Theo had already unlocked, they were there to serve the same purpose—ward off any and all attacks on their surroundings. However, in the different settings of the game those rocket launchers came from… said launchers, despite being merely tier 2 level of defense, were quite commonly abused to bully the locals of the planets the pioneers would set out to exploit all the way up to the latest stages of the game!

All of that was because of one quality that those defenses alone had.

All of that because, for as long as they were connected within the same power grid, and as long as the enemy came within the massive range of a beacon…

Then, rather than defending the area around them, those rocket launchers would shoot their ammunition whenever the enemy dared to step into the detection range!

’I still remember setting up a huge battery of those, only to then move around with nothing but power poles and several beacons, only to place one or two beacons near the enemy base and then watch how it goes up in flames as the salvo from the other end of the planet decimates everything in the beacon’s range.’

Theo smiled at his own thoughts as he continued to place one miner after the other, trying to cram as many of them as he physically could over the singular vein.

In the end, the limit proved to be twelve miners… a number that wasn’t all that big when taking into account how, when connecting them to the power grid as opposed to using workpoints, Theo could no longer push their productivity to the limit!

In other words, the same work that a single miner with three workpoints would do, Theo now needed three separate miners to replicate. And between the three already existing ones and the nine miners he added, he only managed to quadruple the possible ore output from the vein.

"Only quadruple…" Theo muttered as he finished setting everything up, from belt combiners stacking the output of every two miners onto a single belt, to making sure every machine was properly hooked up to power, all the way to arraying the output belts into a nice, orderly line. "To think I would be as shameless as to utter such words…"

With so many miners crammed into one place, Theo ended up having no other choice but to expand the smelting area, making sure that the bulk of the harmful gases would be produced and vented from this particular cave rather than adding up to all the pollution that would soon cover his production center.

Thanks to all of this, by the time Theo was finally done, the twelve miners would have their output combined onto just six belts, each of which would then feed directly into a smelter, turning a belt full of ore into a belt full of iron ingots. Then, despite his great desire to go and replicate the whole process over at the copper vein, Theo ended up taking his time to drag the iron-full belts all the way over to the production floor, leaving them unfinished right where the passage met with the massive cave.

"With this, I can now use what…" the young man took a moment to calculate, "three hundred and sixty iron ingots per minute," he muttered, only for his smile to then widen, "in other words, six ingots per second!"

Taking a deep breath, Theo dropped his hands down on his hips before taking in a deep breath as he looked up to the cave’s natural, now reinforced roof dotted with ventilation holes. "Not bad for how quickly I made it!"

Still, the work wasn’t over yet. In fact, Theo was merely making the very first few steps necessary for his factory to properly grow. No matter how much work was left, however, he could now enjoy the fruits of his labor in the form of the orderly stacks of ingots now slowly advancing over the belts, moving quite a bit slower than Theo’s speed at which he laid those belts down.

"Anywho, with this, I’ve got all the iron I might need. All that’s left is to replicate it with copper and then the richstone, and I should be ready to move on to the next step."

Shaking his head before even going as far as to clasp his hands against his cheeks, Theo took another deep breath before casting one last glance at the now six full belts stacked to the brim with iron ingots.

’Six of those per second,’ Theo smirked while giggling in his thoughts. ’And all of that for a small price of what…?’

This time, rather than calculating, Theo simply touched the shaft of the nearest power pole.

’A measly eighty-four megawatts of power?’

At this point, Theo’s inner laugh grew to the point he could no longer keep it on the inside, leading to his laughter reverberating through the massive, open space of his production-center-to-be.

"Doesn’t that mean that even with all the other basic resources added to the play, I will still fall short of making use of all the energy just a fourth of my engine can provide?!"