Project Overworld

'Hopefully, this should do it.' Keith thought for himself.

He activated the drilling unit before him and kept watch it as it navigated in the tunnel. Keith's goal was to create a completely autonomous drilling system revolving around these machines which would be exploring the underground while looking for various ores.

Keith had already built a large hub where all of his resources would be gathered before being routed to his factory. This hub would also be acting as an access point to electricity, charging up the drilling units he would be producing.

With that out of the way, he has been focusing on making an efficient design for those machines in the past few days. In that regard, it needed strong batteries while being as light and small as possible so that the tunnel it would dig up would not collapse from being too large. Finally, it also needed a large storage capacity to be truly autonomous.

Unfortunately, those requirements were mostly parts of Keith's dreams and were not necessarily all achievable on the same machine.

In fact, he has thought of making both a drilling unit and a gathering one. This was the most practical and easy-to-complete solution at his disposal, although requiring more electricity than a single machine.

Still, he did not want to think about it that much and he started working on implementing this dual-machine synergy.

'Okay, the the drilling unit seems to run as intended. It should come across a vein of copper in a bit so we'll see what it does.'

In fact, the machine eventually reached the vein and started drilling around it. In a matter of seconds, all that was left was the intact ore, trapped inside layers of rock and dirt. The drilling unit then raised an antenna on top of it and stopped for a second before processing through the tunnel once again.

'That's nice, there seems to be no bugs in the program so far. One of the gathering unit should have been notified by now, let's go and see.'

Keith followed the tunnel back in the direction of the 'Hub', as he simply called the area where his drilling machines would be gathering. However, halfway through it, he was met with the three of the gathering units he had been making so far. They were one behind the other, on their way to the spot where the drilling unit excavated the copper ore.

'That's too much!' Keith exclaimed. Unfortunately, the tunnel was only as large as one of those machines and he could not get through the moving wall which got closer by the second. While backing off in the tunnel, he was trying to think of a way to deactivate these machines before they bumped into each other and potentially took some damage. He suddenly remembered that he had a handheld drill in his inventory and thus started digging up one of the sides of the tunnel.

His goal was to access the back of these gathering units to deactivate them using the emergency stop button. Albeit his work was slow, he eventually accessed the back of the third machine and stopped it at once.

Keith then ran after the other two and managed to stop the second one before the first got to the copper ore area. He let the machine do its work before deactivating it in turn, leaving him with three unmoving machines. He resetted all of them, leaving them with the only order to go back to the 'Hub'.

Since these machines were as large as they were long, it was easy for them to do a complete u-turn while inside the tunnel before taking the way back.

'Okay, I'll have to correct the notifying part of the program. By the way, how is the drilling unit doing on its own?'

Keith plunged into the tunnel until he finally reached his drilling machine. It seemed to be accomplishing its job well. The tunnel was being extend at a slow, but steady pace. After half an hour of intense drilling, the machine stopped at once leaving Keith dumbfounded until he noticed that it did had a power shortage.

'Mhh, it should have been going back to the Hub before lacking in energy. Is this problem related to the fact that it was not fully charged when it started drilling?'

Since the testing for both the drilling unit and the gathering ones has been done, Keith noted in his head several adjustments to be done. Overall, the drilling system seemed to be quite promising and Keith was finally seeing the end of the tunnel with this project.

Amber oversaw the people working down the hill. Some of them were famous constructors hired by the municipal team of Midgard while the rest of them were volunteers. She did not even have to say a single word about the need of manpower for the construction of the city of Niflheim when groups upon of players started to introduce themselves before the town hall.

Their goal was the same as her own : building a prosperous city. It seemed like Midgard's citizens loved the idea of having another city and rushed in to help with its construction.

Anyways, Amber has been quite busy with her team to make plans for Niflheim. Since Midgard as been a huge success thanks to its well-planned pathways and the organization of its buildings , she wanted to the the same for this harbor city. Albeit, it was a much more complicated planning to realise since there was a port to take into account, and a big one at that.

The volunteers had been briefed at the same time as the hired constructors, so they knew the overall shape that the city and the port would be taking. This project was huge, but they already did something similar in the past so she was confident about the outcome.

This was only the beginning, though. With that harbor city, she hoped that exploration would be taking a large place in the citizens of Niflheim's heart. She already knew that some players had built small boats and were waiting for the port to be completed to park their vehicle there.

With that, she hoped to develop overseas and have cities installed over the world. This would hopefully fix the overpopulation of Midgard as well as expand Project Overworld's popularity to another level. Innovation would then be prioritized and space colonization would not stay as just a dream.

'The construction of Niflheim seems to be going well. I should leave for now and ask another municipal member to take care of overseeing the project.'

She then returned to Midgard to complete today's paperwork.

After several more days of working on the drilling system, Keith finalized each process. He even made sure the 'Hub' would be able to move a bit by equiping it with wheels and connecting it to an overly long electrical wire. As for the resource transportation, he made sure one of the gathering units would be routing everything directly to his factory.

He was not entirely satisfied by this entire process since it was still limited by the length of the cable, but he should be out of trouble for a while.

For now, Keith wanted to focus on 'Orbital Two' and make it all the way to orbit. Most of the rocket's parts had been produced before the resource shortage. He also already fixed the automated balancing system of the structure and made a few improvements here and there. For now, only the assembling part was left for him to do while his crafting machines would produce the rest of the required parts. With that in mind, he really hoped he could be launching into space by the end of the following week.

Fortunately, Keith did not have to wait for the train since there was not enough resources in the factory to start another journey. Thus, Keith climbed onto it and manually activated the controls.

'Let's see, where did I leave this project on hold?' Keith tried to remember as he traveled through the familiar landscape.