Project Overworld

'Feels good to get busy around this base again.' Keith thought. He just landed a few miles away from his land base and walked the remaining distance by foot.

It has been more than a month since he last laid his feet on the ground and the feeling was quite different. First, he reallized that he was really limited in movements compared to the freedom that the lack of gravitation force gave off.

On the second hand, the whole environment was buzzing with life and Keith finally grasped how lonely he has been for the past few weeks.

After deactivating his defenses using a very particular key on an hidden keyhold under a nearby tree, Keith entered his base and started inspecting every machine to get a hold on what has been produced while he was away.

He had planned to come down from space at some point so all the parts needed to build a large rockets were already waiting for him. For now, he decided that he would be building his next automated crafting process. This one would be designed directly inside the spatial room and would be used to produce more specialized rocket parts. His goal was to ultimately be able to automatically assemble rockets onto the launching pad and control them from a distance.

However, although making the overall structure would be quite an easy task to automate, the core components of a rocket such as its computer and all the electronics needed to control everything would be near impossible to make without his intervention.

There were a lot possibilites in that regard, like crafting the computers beforehand, but connecting all the different electronical parts altogether would be a real challenge to automate. There was also the possibility of using newly recruited engineers to do the work in his stead, but this was a really short-lived solution that would become quite inconvenient in the future as he would need his subordinates to start helping him on large-scale projects in space.

'It basically takes weeks just to automate a simple task that would normally take only a few minutes to manually carry out. However, when this single task is repeated over a large period of time, it could very well exceed a total of months, nay years of time spent doing it. That's why automation exists.' Keith meditated. 'Regardless, I should go and investigate those applications I did receive.' He concluded while disconnecting from Project Overworld.

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- "How is it going on the Shyram continent?" Amber asked to her secretary.

- "The construction of Lionheart has just begun. Regarding this matter, the architects are asking for more manpower as well as some smooth stone."

- "I understand but we're currently a bit short on construction materials. Tell them they'll get what they want by the end of next week, though." She responded. "Hmm, this is getting pretty hard, everyone is asking the same things. It should have been expected..." Amber thought out loud.

Her secretary then left the office to attend to other matters.

'On the other hand, Keith is developing his influence all over the world. Not only did he win that Moon race, he's also recruiting engineers to work on rocketry. I just hope he won't become a direct competitor to Starise in the future.' She meditated.

Recently, the whole Playerbase knew a lot of advancements in terms of technology. Both Midgard and Niflheim were now entirely criss-crossed with asphalt roads to let cars easily travel around the cities.

Fortunately, their early planning prepared for this kind of development and they did not have to destroy a lot of buildings in the process.

On another note, several power stations were built in some special district of the cities so that all their power needs could be fulfilled. Overall, Midgard nor Niflheim could really distinguish themselves from modern day cities, excepting from the materials being used.

Most of their houses within the game were built out of stone and it gave off a nice medieval feeling. The roads also lacked traffic lights at the moment, and a lot of infortunate accidents over the most popular places.

During the last few months, however, Amber organized several Inventopias leading to some really interesting discoveries. Their current goals were to create a lot of electronical devices that could facilitate community life. One of the most urgent needs in terms of electronics were, in fact, traffic lights.

Amber could not really ask people to manually turn on and off the light to regulate the traffic, so they had to develop computer that could control the lights in their stead. That was not all, however, as literally every electrical device around the cities needed this kind of automation.

Their community also needed ways to communicate and travel around the world more easily than by using sh.i.p.s. That is where the Starise group and all the other inventors Amber partnered with came into play. While most players were developing the cities, those genius engineers would come up with designs that would revolutionize the way they approached current matters.

All in all, those were the current goals of Amber, and of the whole Playerbase to an extent.

'This fast development feels kinda nice. We might catch up to the real world in no time with such a pace.' Amber thought. 'Let's see how we can fare.'

_______________

'Holy moly, the amount of applications is quite substantial.' Keith realized. Though, he could only rejoice that he posted this form onto the official Project Overworld forums. Thanks to this, people who were not actively playing the game would not be able to apply to his company.

The form also contained a lot of filtering options so Keith could investigate everyone in more details.

It has only been a few hours since he last posted this message onto the forums, but there were already several dozen of thousands applications. Thankfully, the week-end was just around the corner and Keith would have a lot of free time to probe it all.

Also, he has progressed a lot in computer science thanks to Project Overworld. In his free time, he did code a few program like a simple snake game. Using his new knowledge, he would certainly be able to code a program that could eliminate all the incoherent applications.

It was not that hard, actually. Those who did not put their heart into it would not really be suited to join his team anyways. Thus, he could throw away the applications which did not reach a certain amount of words and so on. He could also categorize the applications based on the same principle so he would not actually lose out on interesting people just because they had one missing word from reaching the anticipated amount of words.

Anyways, Keith was fairly certain that he could manage it in some way or another. He had a full two days off of work for the occasion after all.

'Well, let's get to work.' Keith decided.

It took a bit more time than he initially expected. There has been two days before the week-end that he has been working on his program, trying to figure out how he would be doing it. There has not been a lot of progress during these first two days but with all the free time he got during the week-end he managed to code something worthwhile.

The program worked as follow : by using an external library, Keith checked whether an application was written in english or not. Since he could not really read any other language, on top of the fact that he did specify at the beginning of the form that it should all be completed in english, he eliminated all the ones that were not.

As an added benefit, this would also eliminate the applications that were filled up with random string of characters of people smashing their keyboard over the mandatory questions of the form.

This simple process cleared off about fifty percent off the total. The second part of the program used the official Project Overworld forums to check the amount of posts this person has participated into as well as the date at which they joined the game.

It was a bit unfortunate, but Keith could not really mind the newish players nor the ones who did not involve into the community. Actually, he was not even that vicious with this last part as he only disregarded the players who did not post a single comment throughout the entire forums. This meant that players who only posted a comment under his own post would still be considered.

With all of this, Keith reduced the total amount of applications to a mere few hundreds. It still was a lot, but manageable nonetheless. Although, people might send more applications during the next few days so this number could still increase severalfold.

'Let's see... Is there any popular player among all of this?' Keith questionned himself before searching through the applications for known names among the community.

'Oh! There's a few known streamers and other content creators!' He realized. 'Wait... Leyla? She wants to join Spacol too? Talk about a turnaround. Well I guess she should be among the best candidates since she has already done some spatial engineering.' Keith decided. After gathering of all these applications, he actually planned for a really large event which would help him in determining the best candidates among these players.

'I wonder how they'd react to a surprise Inventopia.' Keith mediated while a mischievous smile stretched his lips.