Project Overworld

For the last few minutes, Eric has been pacing the main hallway of his and his friends' base. Since they last successfully produced electricity on live, they all have been working on making a base with various electrical devices.

It looked like a giant mansion with lightbulbs on the ceiling and stone as its main construction material. They also have been digging up tiles for the roof of their base and overally, this player band was quite proud of their work up until now.

During this time, Eric has been streaming a lot and and his popularity rose as people noticed how big of a project they were working on. Not to mention those guys were using electricity like it was nothing to sweat about.

Unfortunately, popularity also came with less desirable effects. Some Project Overworld's players discovered their base's coordinates thanks to the recognisable landscape and soon infiltrated the mansion. Those invading people all had separates objectives, ranging from joining their team to harassing Eric and his friends.

Some even came with barrels of explosives to blow up some parts of the mansion.

Thus, Eric has been trying to think about a solution for the past hour but nothing substential came up. For now, all they could do was to keeping watching over their territory and get rid of unwelcomed players.

'I now understand why someone would go as far as to build automated turrets. I think it is a valuable mean to protect ourselves from griefers and other trolling players.'

Eric then gathered his friends together to set forth his new idea. Most of them nodded as their approval, but some voiced out their skepticism :

- "That may be a good idea, but how would we even come in and out of the base with turrets threatening our lives?"

Eric then replied tit for tat to their questions :

- "Those wouldn't have to be activated 24/7. We could deactivate them when one of us want to go for a trip outside."

- "What about when we want to come back home?"

- "Then you would have to contact a player who stayed inside the mansion to deactivate the turrets for you."

- "Still, that would be quite the hassle." Someone mumbled.

Eric could not immediately reply to that as he too knew they would be having a hard time with automated turret.

- "Well, in the grand scheme of things, those lost minutes would amount to nothing. We have much more projects to take care of and we cannot waste too much time thinking of the perfect solution to prevent other players to get to our base."

Everyone agreed to his last explanation. Some of them once got killed by a turret and knew that it would be worthwhile to install some near their base.

- "Well then, who volunteers to develop automated turrets' prototypes? At first glance, we'll need three players to work on these while the others continue on with the main projects. Also, we'll continue the guarding duty for a while until we have functional turrets."

- "Wait, that only leaves us with like four to five persons for the other projects. Shouldn't we assign only one or two people to the turret's developement?" A girl asked.

- "The faster we take care of this matter, the faster we'll be secure. Plus, if we finish the turrets' installation, the guarding job will be freed at the same time.

After deciding upon their assignments, everyone then got back to working without complaints.

'Ahh, finally back in this game!' Keith rhapsodized.

After leaving for a whole week, he had quite a lot of things to take care of. First, he did a base tour to check if everything was in order. Since his turrets did not activate even once, he concluded that nothing too shabby happened while he was away.

Afterwards, he went to his production room to check whether his machines worked as intended or not. However, when he sticked his head inside the room, he noticed lots of parts being scattered everywhere.

'Wait, what happened in here? Did I order too much parts off of the machines?'

Keith tidied everything up before checking the data related to the production on his base's main computer.

'Let's see... Mhh... Yeah this quantity seems quite abnormal. Did I make a mistake or is it a bug?

After trying to find a clue for a whole hour, Keith concluded that he must have been too much in a hurry when he left the game last week, and he that he had done a mistake.

Completing the thorough inspection of his base, he finally entered the spatial room and studied his designs and annotations to remember what he had decided on improving.

First priority on his list would be to revamp the automated balancing system of the rocket. After the initial launch, the program soon turned out to be utterly useless as it did not seem to take manual inputs into account. For the rest of the flight, Keith had to manually balance the trajectory of the rocket, leading to some really poor optimization on his part and some overall fuel losses.

He even thought that he would have made it into orbit if the program did perform properly.

Then, Keith would be improving the whole shape of the rocket so that it stabilizes a bit more easily. Also, he noticed that some part of the staging did consume a lot of fuel and that he needed to solve these problems.

Finally the solid propellant used in his boosters, the blackpowder he made, was of poor quality and one of the boosters almost broke during the launch phase. He got quite lucky as it stabilized afterwards, but it led to some losses in power.

In fact, if Keith had not purposefully made his rocket that small and that light compared to the amount of fuel that he had been using, he would have never make it that far into the skies.

This amount of optimization would never be enough for a real flight, one that would be transporting a part of the spacial station that he wanted to create. Or even a satellite.

After making a schedule on what he would be working on, Keith reordered some parts out of the production process of his base. Meanwhile, he would be programming on the computer of 'Orbital Two', the second test rocket he would be making to reach orbit.

'Mhh... Ok this line is never being accessed. What is that condition being used for?'

While going through the code used for the balancing system, Keith noticed quite a bit of typos and obvious behavioral errors. It was to the point of letting him embarassed by looking at his old code. For such an important project, he should have reviewed the program again and again to find any unworking lines of code.

In fact, all the other programs being used to show data on the rocket's main screen did function properly, albeit really slowish, but he did not know why he had not gone through this one a bit more.

Regardless, the job of correcting the balancing system took him the rest of the evening until he was satisfied.

The next day, Keith noticed that some parts of the crafting process were on hold and wondered why that was the case. He noticed that his storage rooms lacked of copper and decided that he would be visiting his drilling area.

He took his motorbike and drove through the landscape until the large factory could be seen in the distance.

Since the drills had been going for quite a while under the mountain, Keith realized that this area was now lacking in resources. Some parts of the landscape even collapsed under here and spoiled one of his drills.

Keith first thought that relocating his drills would be the best idea but he soon realized that he needed to make a train routing the resources collected to his factory. This project would be taking a full month and putting a large break in his other plans.

The other solutions was a bit more complex, especially regarding the approximate security of the holes that has been dug under here, but it consisted in making the drills automatically spread out explore on their own.

They would be equipped with an advanced artificial intelligence that made them drill in a direction until they were full. Then, they would be coming back to the factory and depositing the valuable resources there.

As for the dirt, he would be stocking it in another area for the purpose of fixing some holes in the mountain. Besides, he already had some spare dirt to reinforce the mountain's underground before it was too late.

Albeit not as long as creating another trainway, working on the programs and the overall shapes of these drilling units would be taking quite a bit time off his schedule. He estimated that he would be finished with this project in at least a two full weeks

In fact, he had to think of their power autonomy and other design problems, and that would require a lot of focus and preparations. Especially now that he lacked quite a bit of resources.

With his schedule being fixed for the following months, Keith disconnected of Project Overworld for the night. It was almost two in the morning and he had classes to attend to in a few hours.

'Well, I'm quite happy to be back in this game. Though, I will try not to immerse myself as much as I did in the past. I need to think about my future as well.' Keith thought while going to sleep.