Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!

"And that's the coal stuff done," Theo muttered to himself as he placed the very last forge in the line.

By now, the output of coal ingots finally reached the level at which he could produce a satisfactory amount, easily capable of covering the requirements for all the production he envisioned.

The great majority of it would go towards the reinforced steel beams, the one material Theo believed to be most important in his current situation. After all, contrary to the other steel products that were mostly used for lower-tier stuff, buildings, or some higher-level parts, the reinforced steel beams had to be produced at a rate that wouldn't choke Theo's expansion and upgrade plans.

What's more, at his current level, just a small, makeshift factory would hardly be able to satisfy Theo's need for any particular resource. With the early-modern technology now coming into play, every factory would be considerably bigger than all the ones he built in the past—some of which would be bigger than all of the earlier ones combined.

That, in turn, meant the number of belts he would have to lay down for them would scale up not by a huge but by a massive margin. And combined with an even greater need for the basic resources that Theo would have to procure from further and further away…

Those reinforced steel beams became pretty much the main limiting factor to Theo's expansion and would remain as such all the way to the point where he would be able to unlock the tier five stuff…

'And if anything in the higher tier works just like it would in the game…' Theo took a deep breath before slowly exhaling it out.

Even now, he could still remember all sorts of issues that came up in the next, 'modern' tier. Namely, aluminum processing and how it took throughputs—something that could limit efficiency at most in the past—to an even higher level, dooming any inefficient build into a state of throughput lock.

A state where the by-products of refining aluminum, if not processed, could choke an entire factory and require the player to manually clean it up. A task that, in bigger builds, could easily appear far faster than one would even be able to run around solving it!

"Well, that's all in the future. And what's even the point of worrying about the stuff that's beyond the scope of my current promise?"

Theo shook his head before taking one last look at the steel-refining plant, sighing out and then starting to connect its outputs into a single, concentrated line carrying all the steel ingots to the next branch of the factory.

There was no use worrying about modern technology and the challenges that it offered, not when merely by reaching it, Theo would unlock the modern tools—the one thing he needed to cut through the valley's magical wall and fulfill the promise he made of rejoining Callane.

"Now then, should I try looking for an alternative recipe or just work with what I have?" Theo thought, glancing over to the parts of his system he had pretty much forgotten all about.

By now, the number of points he gathered was only matched by the variety of monster-born resources he looted without paying them any actual mind. And contrary to how it would work in the game, where he would have to get out of his cozy corner of the map and explore in search of researchable hard drives that could be turned into alternative recipes for his factory, in real life?

In real life, Theo could unlock any recipe that he currently had the means of using without all that exploration drag, without the need for waiting for the research station to take its sweet time dismantling the hard drive, nor would he have to be annoyed by the slight gambling system where the recipes a hard drive would offer would come at random, taken from the pool of everything he could use and thus hardly ever turning out to be what he was hoping to obtain.

No.

In his current situation, an alternative recipe was as cheap as twenty system points. A price that Theo could further decrease by slapping down one of the mansion rooms onto his home, bringing the price tag even further down to a mere ten points.

"There it is." With his hands and half of his mind focusing on laying down the logistic lines as he already mentally marked the area where the next branch of the factory would be, Theo finally locked in on the set of five recipes that could be of use.

The first one would allow him to use steel pipes rather than steel beams to construct reinforced steel beams. By simplifying the numbers a bit, it would decrease the steel-ingot cost per reinforced steel beam by roughly a third… at the cost of greatly decreasing the potential output of the crafter while raising its power usage by a considerable margin.

'I only have what,' Theo thought, turning his eyes over to the line of the forges he was about to finish connecting all up to a single conveyor belt. 'Four hundred steel ingots per minute?'

This thought only made him grit his teeth a little.

"I know that sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things?" He shook his head as he spoke to himself. "It really isn't."

Power, on the other hand, was something Theo still didn't have to concern himself with, not unless he bought and then used every energy-hungry alternative recipe he could use in his current plant. And even then, doing so would limit the use of coal so damn much, he would be free to just siphon the leftovers away and use them to set up and then power up coal-generator plants!

As one could expect, a coal-based generator not only could be automated—as opposed to the somewhat manual nature of Theo's current factory engine—but also produced considerably more energy—a jump from but fifteen megawatts per generator to as high as fifty per coal generator!

While efficient and future-proof, however, doing so would require the one resource Theo neither had nor was willing to waste—time.

'I guess that forces me to keep the energy usage in mind,' he thought as he discarded the rest of the alternative recipes, even ignoring the one he loved the most in the entire game back when it was all but a stupid game—a recipe that allowed him to create steel pipes… not from steel ingots but iron ingots alone!

It truly was a magical recipe.

Not only did it eliminate the use of coal, allowing one to construct most of the steel item-line without even a single bit of coal or a single forge… the finished items also came at a slightly lesser cost of energy necessary to produce them, a cost balanced perfectly by the insane number of production buildings necessary to get any proper number of said pipes produced.

And just like it was the case with coal power or some of the other recipes, Theo simply didn't have the time—nor space, even within the enormity of his factory cave—to set it all up!

"Just this one recipe it is, then," he thought to himself before outright ignoring the potential discount he could get by getting his lazy ass over to the manor and purchasing the mansion upgrade—once again, unwilling to waste the time on doing so—and opting to just purchase it as he stood.

[Alternative Recipe Unlocked]

[You can now craft: Reinforced Steel Pipe (Reinforced Steel Beam)]