Project Overworld

Admiring the fruits of his labor, Keith stood before his finished base.

From the exterior, it resembled a small mansion made out of stones and wood. A small tower came out of the roof on the left side of the building.

It was Keith's office where he would draw designs and patterns. He made it so that the desk would be turned towards the lake.

He never tired of the view.

However the main part of the building was not visible from the exterior.

He made a giant bas.e.m.e.nt where he built various workbenches and machineries. A large pump routed water from the lake to the machines as a cooling system.

It took him almost a week to finish this base. He wanted to have a comfortable environment before starting to develop more complex crafts.

Hence, he decided to on electronics from now on. Thanks to the drilling process, he discovered various metal deposits such as gold, copper and silver, so he theoretically could develop advanced devices.

However, he currently lacked quite the knowledge as well as an important resource, petroleum. In fact petrol was very unique and could be refined into materials such as plastic or into strong fuels such as gasoline.

For electronic parts, petrol was really useful as a support because plastic would not transmit current, hence would not disturb the electricity from transmitting as intended.

...

Three months has past since Keith started working on electronics.

He improved his machineries and his energy production quite a bit during this lapse. He also found some petroleum and manager to automate some of the crafting processes.

One of such was a giant furnace that could regulate its heat to the d.e.s.i.r.ed temperature. This improved the refinery process a lot.

Keith also modified his pump so the warm water would flow back into the lake, meaning it would never dry up.

Finally, he worked on a giant drill that would regulate its power according to the material it was drilling in.

This last project was not totally finished, but it work quite well already. Overall, his base was like a giant factory working all day. This also meant that his time spent outside of the game would not be totally wasted.

During this time, Keith also watched quite a lot of stream of the game.

It seemed like the situation was pretty chaotic and people were fighting each other almost every day, either for fun or to control territories.

It did not mean it was a bad thing because they were having fun battling with medieval weapons, but Keith could not comprehend their behavior since the game offered this much possibilities.

'There are several other games on the market that could satisfy their d.e.s.i.r.e for battle... Why would they waste their time like that?', was one of Keith's reasoning.

However, Keith paid little attention to those types of player. Instead, he preferred to watch streamers who were exploring interesting ideas.

Some players started developing vehicles, others were experimenting with energy production.

Keith also caught a glimpse of a streamer exploring caves using explosives. It was not really efficient, but it seemed interesting to Keith nonetheless.

The hype surrounding Project Overworld increased by every day. Even more so since "Advanced Simulations" increased the available space on their first server to one hundred thousand and announced that they would launch another server in the following months.

In 2032, the internet connection between countries was not a problem anymore. The optical fiber connected everyone with broadband.

That was why the company "Advanced Simulations" did not restrict their server to a unique country. They wanted cultural mix in their game, and the only limitation was the capacity the servers could hold.

Over the millions of people interested by game, Keith was one of the lucky ones to get into the initial launch of the game.

His friends at the university started talking about Project Overworld and how they would like to join a server.

Even the medias started talking seriously about this game, as it offered some sort of a simulation of human history.

It was to Keith's liking because it valued the efforts he put in his creations. However, he did not want to brag to his friends about it, so he kept quiet.

Also, he did not want people to find out how advanced he was.

Thus, until he was not certain of his safety, Keith decided to keep focusing on his projects which are becoming more and more imposing and demanding, both mentally and in terms of time.

Only, things could only get more complex from now on and Keith worked hard to not feel discouraged. He could not give up after all the time he put into this game.

After all, he had a lot of things to accomplish if he wanted to move towards his ultimate goal.