The lone survivor of a crashed ship wakes up on a word that seems to be growing ever more hostile to his presence, this is the story of his survival on the world of navius, in factorio.
Fabricated Hazards (factorio fanfic)
- Created
- Status
- Ongoing
- Watchers
- 1,053
- Recent readers
- 0
- Threadmarks
- 235
-
Statistics (86 threadmarks, 240k words)
User Total snow eternal 86 Threadmarks Reader mode -
Loading…
-
Loading…
-
Loading…
-
Loading…
-
Loading…
Logs 1-10
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
Log #1
I woke up in the crashed remains of a ship today, it might have been mine but if it was I can't remember. In fact I don't seem to remember very much at all, much less why I'm on this planet or how I crashed in the first place.
The world i'm on seems to have a forest at least, so i can get some firewood, and the ship has some mining equipment and a furnace to process some of the scrap from the ship into something useful, I am planning on setting that up to make some tools, I also found a gun on the ship so I want to try and hunt some game, I don't know if it'll be safe to eat but as long as its carbon based I should manage.
Log #2
I got the furnace set up and worked some of the scrap metal into an axe, knife, shovel, and a pick, used the axe and shovel to make a lean to so I can have somewhere warmer to sleep, started thinking about how I knew how to make tools and a building and realized my brain is full of blueprints, maybe it was a colony ship that could download the info you would need to build a settlement into your brain? If it was then the crash must have messed it up as a lot of the blueprints are incomplete, I think I have a structure that can take those incomplete blueprints and remake them but I will need power and resources to fuel the thing.
I'm only thinking of doing this because I need to send out a distress beacon and I'll need to get the transmitter into orbit for the signal to be clear, definitely not because I want power and air conditioning, those are just side benefits, and the rocket and satellite blueprints are some of the most fragmented ones, so I will be here for awhile, I'll have most of everything else done by the time I have enough info to get the rocket blueprint, much less what I will need to actually build the thing, so I need to get power and a base of operations to start mining and running the decoders, shouldn't be too hard with all this info bouncing around my skull.
In a more ominous mood I went out to look for food, didn't even find animal tracks and while I was looking for those I realized that I hadn't seen any bugs either, there are plants everywhere I look though, trees, shrubs, vines, and thorns. I couldn't find any berries but the leaves and bark are something to eat at least, once I get power I can make a machine that will turn the plant matter and dirt into a nutrient sludge, it's not meant to last you long term but until I find some better food it will have to do.
The silence of this forest is starting to get to me though, there has to be something to pollinate here right? Maybe they only come out when the trees flower or something.
I woke up in the crashed remains of a ship today, it might have been mine but if it was I can't remember. In fact I don't seem to remember very much at all, much less why I'm on this planet or how I crashed in the first place.
The world i'm on seems to have a forest at least, so i can get some firewood, and the ship has some mining equipment and a furnace to process some of the scrap from the ship into something useful, I am planning on setting that up to make some tools, I also found a gun on the ship so I want to try and hunt some game, I don't know if it'll be safe to eat but as long as its carbon based I should manage.
Log #2
I got the furnace set up and worked some of the scrap metal into an axe, knife, shovel, and a pick, used the axe and shovel to make a lean to so I can have somewhere warmer to sleep, started thinking about how I knew how to make tools and a building and realized my brain is full of blueprints, maybe it was a colony ship that could download the info you would need to build a settlement into your brain? If it was then the crash must have messed it up as a lot of the blueprints are incomplete, I think I have a structure that can take those incomplete blueprints and remake them but I will need power and resources to fuel the thing.
I'm only thinking of doing this because I need to send out a distress beacon and I'll need to get the transmitter into orbit for the signal to be clear, definitely not because I want power and air conditioning, those are just side benefits, and the rocket and satellite blueprints are some of the most fragmented ones, so I will be here for awhile, I'll have most of everything else done by the time I have enough info to get the rocket blueprint, much less what I will need to actually build the thing, so I need to get power and a base of operations to start mining and running the decoders, shouldn't be too hard with all this info bouncing around my skull.
In a more ominous mood I went out to look for food, didn't even find animal tracks and while I was looking for those I realized that I hadn't seen any bugs either, there are plants everywhere I look though, trees, shrubs, vines, and thorns. I couldn't find any berries but the leaves and bark are something to eat at least, once I get power I can make a machine that will turn the plant matter and dirt into a nutrient sludge, it's not meant to last you long term but until I find some better food it will have to do.
The silence of this forest is starting to get to me though, there has to be something to pollinate here right? Maybe they only come out when the trees flower or something.
Log #1
My ship crashed today, I don't really know what happened, actually I can't remember much of anything, I think the crash rattled my everything. I woke up outside my ship, laying naked in a crater with a splitting headache and spots in my vision, so a concussion is basically a certainty.
It took me a while to hobble my way to the ship and the news isn't good, the thing is totaled. There's absolutely no power, meaning no life support, heating or communications, the thrusters are just gone, and the reactor is leaking toxic gas into the air, nothing that'll kill me quick but it does mean I can't sleep in the ship.
There is a bit of good new though, the ship has a basic furnace in it, which I can run on anything burnable, and with the ship utterly totalled I have a lot of scrap metal I can turn into tools, nothing advanced without better components but it should be enough to get a shelter up.
You'll note that I was A. outside the ship without a suit, and B. that the ship's life support is off, that's the second bit of good news, the planet I crashed on has a breathable atmosphere, a forest, and hopefully food to eat, considering the ship didn't.
Log #2
I got the furnace running using a bunch of sticks and worked a few of the smaller pieces of scrap into a few basic tools. I am now the proud owner of an ax, crowbar, and a shovel. Using these most advanced tools I chopped down a few of the smaller trees and dug a hole to sleep in, the furnace keeps the area somewhat warm while its running but the thing eats fuel like no tomorrow and I can actually keep enough fuel in the thing to keep it running all the time, so a nice warm hole in the ground, truly I am a master of engineering.
That "master of engineering" brings me to something I noticed while making my tools and building my hut, they are actually well built, you'd think an ax made with a piece of scrap metal, a tiny furnace, and my bare hands would be kinda low quality, but it isn't, I mean I wouldn't call it amazing but I genuinely don't think I could build a better one with more practice, at least not without better tools, and it was so easy and intuitive, it didn't take me more than an hour to make all my tools and I just kinda of flew through the motions.
My heads still throbbing and my memory is still worryingly blank but It doesn't feel like these are things I used to be able to do, it's more like the knowledge was downloaded directly into my brain, and once I noticed the knowledge on the tools I could see more, It isn't just tools it's everything I need to build a functional factory, basically a step by step guide for how to build each and every machine, and while its concerning that so much of this "downloaded" information is so clear while nothing else is it isn't unaffected by my head trauma either, right now the only parts of it that are clear are some basic mining equipment, a few larger smelters to replace my furnace, and a machine that can apparently put these "blueprints" back together if I feed it resources.
So that's a plan of action, get a source of food and water, then get a basic factory running to get more blueprints so I can get to some of the more advanced stuff.
I'm only thinking of doing this because I need to send out a distress beacon and I'll need to get the transmitter into orbit for the signal to be clear, definitely not because I want power and air conditioning, those are just side benefits, and the rocket and satellite blueprints are some of the most fragmented ones, so I will be here for awhile, I'll have most of everything else done by the time I have enough info to get the rocket blueprint, much less what I will need to actually build the thing, so I need to get power and a base of operations to start mining and running the decoders, shouldn't be too hard with all this info bouncing around my skull.
In a more ominous mood I went out to look for food, didn't even find animal tracks and while I was looking for those I realized that I hadn't seen any bugs either, there are plants everywhere I look though, trees, shrubs, vines, and thorns. I couldn't find any berries but the leaves and bark are something to eat at least, once I get power I can make a machine that will turn the plant matter and dirt into a nutrient sludge, it's not meant to last you long term but until I find some better food it will have to do.
The silence of this forest is starting to get to me though, there has to be something to pollinate here right? Maybe they only come out when the trees flower or something.
Log #3
Found an ore patch and got the mining equipment set up, and I also found a stream so i could get some steam power going, I'm using it to run some lights I took from the ship and an assembler making some gears, I was watching the assembler work and it is just weird, it molds the metal like its clay, and I don't know how that works, which is odd because I built the thing and I remember moving the metal to make some of the more fiddle bits, didn't even need tools, it just kind of flowed into place.
I'm also going to see about automating the mining and smelting, moving all of this ore by hand is annoying as hell. Running conveyor belts to move the ore around is making this place hard to walk through though, but if there is a belt going in my direction I can just ride the thing. Is it odd that I find the inserter arms adorable? Probably.
I finally got the food machine working but it tastes awful. It's like you covered a tree leaf with mud and then ate it, and it's not even easy to run the thing, so I have decided that I am going to go look for some more food.
The blueprints in my head are shockingly easy to follow, I just go into a sort of trance and when it ends I am holding the finished product, which is why I don't know how I made bullets without gunpowder.
I've decided to file this with the metal shaping thing, I'm calling it the weird shit I don't want to think about folder, long name but I won't be thinking about it so it's good enough.
Log #4
It's been a while and I've gotten most of everything automated, conveyor belts running absolutely everywhere but i've gotten good at walking on them so it's not really a problem, I even got the first decrypting machine up and running, it takes this weird red liquid and glows a lot then after it processes enough of the red liquid I walk up to it and it injects me with a fixed blueprint, gives me a killer headache, most of this stuff seems to be defensive or working toward making more stuff, so maybe it wasn't a colony ship? Don't know why I would need a man sized sentry gun on a civilian colony, or why I would know how to make an assault rifle by hand for that matter, maybe to guard all the valuable resources I would mine with all this gear? So moving my guess to a mining ship.
Once I had everything set up so that it wouldn't fall apart without me for a day I decided to go out and explore, I walked for about a mile before I hit the edge of the forest, and I still didn't find any animals, no bird, bugs or mammals not even any tracks, this planet might actually just be made of plants.
outside of the forest was a large field of tall grass, it came up to about my chest height and I could see large boulders sticking out of the field. I'm kinda curious as to how they got there. If I'm lucky I could find some geodes or fossils.
Log #5
Remember how I said I couldn't find any bugs in the woods, well the bugs found me, I woke up last night to 3 giant beetle things eating my furnaces,I'm talking 3 and half feet long and 2 feet tall, and from the way they ripped apart those furnaces they were strong too, naturally I screamed and shot them, it took 5 bullets to the head for the first one to go down, which is a lot considering I was not using a dinky little pistol, I had an assault rifle, and when the other 2 rushed me I ran and blind fired at them, while screaming, it took 2 clips but they died.
I spent the rest of the morning rebuilding everything which was annoying, a few of the conveyors were broken which caused a bunch of raw ore to pile up everywhere. I had to turn everything off for a bit to actually clean it all up. The silence was deafening, it just felt wrong for everything to be so quiet after all that.
I have decided that I am done exploring until I have a tank and more means to defend myself, and that I'm not sleeping until I have at least one turret set up and an armored bunker to sleep in, which means that I'm still going to get too sleep tonight as that's only like 5 hours of work to build a tiny bunker and some big guns, maybe 2 turrets? One on top of my bunker and one on the side of the camp the bugs came from? That sounds better, it's always better to have too much rather than too little in my book.
Log #6
Finished my bunker, which is probably to grand of a word for a concrete tube that I can't even stand up in but it makes me feel safer to have a foot of concrete and steel between me and the outside world, the turrets were a great idea too, I woke up from the sound of gunfire and found 5 dead bugs just as large as the first 3, I'm building walls and am going to decode some better armor, it didn't feel necessary before but that has definitely changed those bugs have huge mandibles, especially if the bugs keep coming.
I cut up one of the bugs to see if it was edible but its blood turned my skin red and itchy, so I am going to stick with my plant sludge. I think I hate this planet.
In better news I have expanded production of everything and automated turrets and wall segments, they are kinda like the giant brick version of lego, they just slot into each other, the walls are only like 4 feet tall but if they were much taller than that then the turrets couldn't shoot over them, I might make the wall higher and just put the turrets on stands though, don't know yet.
I've been cutting back the trees so that I have a larger killing field and I have gotten turrets set up all around my base. I don't have it all walled in yet but that should be finished soonish, once that's done I'm planning to set up a conveyor belt to feed all the turrets ammo and to build a mini factory to make said ammo, probably overkill considering there haven't been that many bugs but there is no kill like overkill and Im not going to die because I was lazy.
If anything is going to kill me it's going to be workplace hazards, not some damned insects.
The decoder has decided that it wants green liquid now and I've made it a friend to decode with, I don't know what's different about the green liquid or why its made of melted down inserter arms and conveyor belts but its going into the I don't want to know folder along with the fact that that i can melt them into a glowy green liquid in the first place.
Log #7
So the bugs have been attacking more often and there are more of them, this is a problem, I'm running out of room to build within my cozy walls, this is another problem. I'm going to have to go out and find another ore patch because this one is just too small to feed all my machines and the decoders are hungry bastards, this is a third problem. The solution to the third is surprisingly simple though, I'm going to make a car, strap a turret to the back of it and find a bigger ore patch.
The other problems will take more work though, I will need to expand the wall to make room which means more turrets, which need more power and more ammo, well less the latter because it's still just that one side being attacked but I am worried that is starting to change, the bugs are just sitting out of the range of the turrets right now and only occasionally will one charge in to get gunned down, so I made grenades (once again without gunpowder or any explosives) and blew them all up. I am going to get to work building a bigger wall before they come back.
The fun life of needing more resources so that I can get more resources and not die to giant bug attacks. Definitely hate this planet
Log #8
I have made a massive concrete square lined with turrets. It's about 500 feet per side and I shall call it The Cube, it makes me feel warm inside. In other maybe good news, the bugs are once again just throwing themselves at my walls, though they are charging at the corners now, and never the same one twice in a row, this is concerning because I kill all of the bugs each time yet the next ones know which corner they attacked last, pheromones? Please be pheromones and not creepy bug hivemind. It's definitely going to be a creepy bug hivemind.
Finished the car and went out, there was an ore patch not 2000 feet out and twice the size of the one at my home base which is kind of embarrassing as I could have built here but more other ore patch is closer to the river anyway, I'm going to build up some supplies so that I can get a perimeter and a conveyor belt running all the way back to my base, it should pay off as long as the bitters don't destroy it. And fitting in more conveyor belts and furnaces to actually process this ore is going to be fun.
This ore patch has way more copper than iron which is great as that's what was slowing me down in the first place. Going to have to expand copper smelting and the conveyor that moves the copper plates.
I've made a blue assembler. It's blue because it can do liquids and water is definitely blue, it makes things faster but takes way more power so I'm not using many now, they're just making the science liquids.
I have also remembered that I can make radars, which can apparently find ore patches, somehow, they can also find where the bugs are coming from, it just looks like a big red square that has smaller red squares come out of it, but I now have a location to avoid like the plague, b it's not like I wanted to leave my nice safe walls anyway.
Log #9
The bugs are becoming a bigger problem, each attack is 20 or more bugs and I saw some spitting acid at my wall yesterday. It melted part of the concrete and I had to replace that part of the wall.
I also think they are getting bigger, and they are definitely taking more bullets to put down, so I'm making the wall thicker and adding more turrets,this is a short term solution but I am beginning to think I will actually need to put together the stuff i'll need to make a tank, Im nowhere near ready for that though, I'll need to find oil first so that i can make explosives for the cannon shells, which is odd considering I don't need it for normal bullets but more boom is always good, I cant wait till I have a minefield and a bazooka, it'll make me feel better to watch big chunks of bug go flying everywhere.
In good news the radars found an oil well relatively nearby. In bad news bug nests are in all directions and they seem to be making more bugs, so I'm expecting the attacks to increase, if one cluster was this bad I don't want to think about how 5 will be, good thing I'm making the walls thicker! I am also going to begin to tunnel into the ground. My bunker is feeling inadequate even if the bugs haven't gotten past my wall yet. Why have 1 foot of concrete when I can have 5 feet and another 6 inches of steel behind that.
In best news! There are fish in the river! I finally have real food! There weren't very many and I just threw a grenade and grabbed them, but real meat! I was going to go insane from the sludge and I was losing a bunch of weight so this should help with that. I'll have to check the river more often for fish to supplement my diet.
log #10
Fuck the bugs and fuck getting oil, my car is gone, melted into a puddle and I would have been too if I didn't have my armour and a fuck ton of grenades. I had waited until after a bug attack to leave and secure the oil, but somehow the bugs knew that I left and once I was at the oil field they attacked in mass, they went between me and the Factory and hit the car with acid, I had to drive around them to get back and by the time I was halfway back the acid had melted through to the engine, I threw grenades behind me every few feet and ran like hell, and they still managed to hit me with acid and one of the melee ones almost got my damn leg before I shot it off. When I finally managed to get back to my base my armor was in tatters and I could feel the acid burning at some of my skin. The turret wall managed to gun down the rest of the bitter behind me while I ran through the gate and started to strip all the armor off.
I don't know when I last took it off or when I got so pale, but as I watched the small pockmarks the acid dug in my skin just vanished, which is going straight to the file of not thinking about it.
I decided to make a new car with heavier armor and a bigger turret, needed to make the ammo special for it but this isn't happening again, it drives slower now but it's still faster than those damned bugs and it made me feel somewhat safer. I also made heavier armor, my old set was good but the acid got through the gaps in the metal plate and burnt the cloth and skin under it, i've decided to have the assemblers make a fine mesh to cover the cloth between the plates, it adds 15 ish pounds but the acid should take longer to eat through it than the old one. This will have to do until I can make some of the more advanced armours.
I grabbed more turrets and went back out the next day, made a quick defensive line and secured the oil after surviving the attack. There weren't as many this time. The bugs were definitely bigger too, some were 4 and a half feet, I'm running the oil underground now along with a power cable to actually run the damned pumps.
In less interesting news I'm adding onto the main base, I'll need the room to actually use the oil so that means more walls! While I'm at it I am going to make the walls taller, that double height with the turret platforms I was talking about, it'll need steel supports to stay sturdy but I don't want a wall the bugs will be taller than, and it will also give my turrets more range.
They need to outrange those spitting bugs more, they keep melting parts of the wall and it's annoying as hell to fix it, though I've started making a concrete paste to apply rather than just replacing the wall outright, and I can make it different colors! I've started decorating the bunker with colorful concrete when I'm taking a break. I'd decorate the wall but when I did that those damned bugs aimed for it and melted it off, it just feels weird to only paint the inside of the walls like I'm admitting the bugs can make me do something. Those damned bugs already have me trapped here.
edit- now also posting on Royal road.
And if I am making this base look nicer I want to build a moat, i can't really build a castle yet but a moat would be useful and look nice, I can probably just divert the river or something. It will be a lot of work though so I'm not doing that for a fair bit, but it will be done eventually.
My ship crashed today, I don't really know what happened, actually I can't remember much of anything, I think the crash rattled my everything. I woke up outside my ship, laying naked in a crater with a splitting headache and spots in my vision, so a concussion is basically a certainty.
It took me a while to hobble my way to the ship and the news isn't good, the thing is totaled. There's absolutely no power, meaning no life support, heating or communications, the thrusters are just gone, and the reactor is leaking toxic gas into the air, nothing that'll kill me quick but it does mean I can't sleep in the ship.
There is a bit of good new though, the ship has a basic furnace in it, which I can run on anything burnable, and with the ship utterly totalled I have a lot of scrap metal I can turn into tools, nothing advanced without better components but it should be enough to get a shelter up.
You'll note that I was A. outside the ship without a suit, and B. that the ship's life support is off, that's the second bit of good news, the planet I crashed on has a breathable atmosphere, a forest, and hopefully food to eat, considering the ship didn't.
Log #2
I got the furnace running using a bunch of sticks and worked a few of the smaller pieces of scrap into a few basic tools. I am now the proud owner of an ax, crowbar, and a shovel. Using these most advanced tools I chopped down a few of the smaller trees and dug a hole to sleep in, the furnace keeps the area somewhat warm while its running but the thing eats fuel like no tomorrow and I can actually keep enough fuel in the thing to keep it running all the time, so a nice warm hole in the ground, truly I am a master of engineering.
That "master of engineering" brings me to something I noticed while making my tools and building my hut, they are actually well built, you'd think an ax made with a piece of scrap metal, a tiny furnace, and my bare hands would be kinda low quality, but it isn't, I mean I wouldn't call it amazing but I genuinely don't think I could build a better one with more practice, at least not without better tools, and it was so easy and intuitive, it didn't take me more than an hour to make all my tools and I just kinda of flew through the motions.
My heads still throbbing and my memory is still worryingly blank but It doesn't feel like these are things I used to be able to do, it's more like the knowledge was downloaded directly into my brain, and once I noticed the knowledge on the tools I could see more, It isn't just tools it's everything I need to build a functional factory, basically a step by step guide for how to build each and every machine, and while its concerning that so much of this "downloaded" information is so clear while nothing else is it isn't unaffected by my head trauma either, right now the only parts of it that are clear are some basic mining equipment, a few larger smelters to replace my furnace, and a machine that can apparently put these "blueprints" back together if I feed it resources.
So that's a plan of action, get a source of food and water, then get a basic factory running to get more blueprints so I can get to some of the more advanced stuff.
I'm only thinking of doing this because I need to send out a distress beacon and I'll need to get the transmitter into orbit for the signal to be clear, definitely not because I want power and air conditioning, those are just side benefits, and the rocket and satellite blueprints are some of the most fragmented ones, so I will be here for awhile, I'll have most of everything else done by the time I have enough info to get the rocket blueprint, much less what I will need to actually build the thing, so I need to get power and a base of operations to start mining and running the decoders, shouldn't be too hard with all this info bouncing around my skull.
In a more ominous mood I went out to look for food, didn't even find animal tracks and while I was looking for those I realized that I hadn't seen any bugs either, there are plants everywhere I look though, trees, shrubs, vines, and thorns. I couldn't find any berries but the leaves and bark are something to eat at least, once I get power I can make a machine that will turn the plant matter and dirt into a nutrient sludge, it's not meant to last you long term but until I find some better food it will have to do.
The silence of this forest is starting to get to me though, there has to be something to pollinate here right? Maybe they only come out when the trees flower or something.
Log #3
Found an ore patch and got the mining equipment set up, and I also found a stream so i could get some steam power going, I'm using it to run some lights I took from the ship and an assembler making some gears, I was watching the assembler work and it is just weird, it molds the metal like its clay, and I don't know how that works, which is odd because I built the thing and I remember moving the metal to make some of the more fiddle bits, didn't even need tools, it just kind of flowed into place.
I'm also going to see about automating the mining and smelting, moving all of this ore by hand is annoying as hell. Running conveyor belts to move the ore around is making this place hard to walk through though, but if there is a belt going in my direction I can just ride the thing. Is it odd that I find the inserter arms adorable? Probably.
I finally got the food machine working but it tastes awful. It's like you covered a tree leaf with mud and then ate it, and it's not even easy to run the thing, so I have decided that I am going to go look for some more food.
The blueprints in my head are shockingly easy to follow, I just go into a sort of trance and when it ends I am holding the finished product, which is why I don't know how I made bullets without gunpowder.
I've decided to file this with the metal shaping thing, I'm calling it the weird shit I don't want to think about folder, long name but I won't be thinking about it so it's good enough.
Log #4
It's been a while and I've gotten most of everything automated, conveyor belts running absolutely everywhere but i've gotten good at walking on them so it's not really a problem, I even got the first decrypting machine up and running, it takes this weird red liquid and glows a lot then after it processes enough of the red liquid I walk up to it and it injects me with a fixed blueprint, gives me a killer headache, most of this stuff seems to be defensive or working toward making more stuff, so maybe it wasn't a colony ship? Don't know why I would need a man sized sentry gun on a civilian colony, or why I would know how to make an assault rifle by hand for that matter, maybe to guard all the valuable resources I would mine with all this gear? So moving my guess to a mining ship.
Once I had everything set up so that it wouldn't fall apart without me for a day I decided to go out and explore, I walked for about a mile before I hit the edge of the forest, and I still didn't find any animals, no bird, bugs or mammals not even any tracks, this planet might actually just be made of plants.
outside of the forest was a large field of tall grass, it came up to about my chest height and I could see large boulders sticking out of the field. I'm kinda curious as to how they got there. If I'm lucky I could find some geodes or fossils.
Log #5
Remember how I said I couldn't find any bugs in the woods, well the bugs found me, I woke up last night to 3 giant beetle things eating my furnaces,I'm talking 3 and half feet long and 2 feet tall, and from the way they ripped apart those furnaces they were strong too, naturally I screamed and shot them, it took 5 bullets to the head for the first one to go down, which is a lot considering I was not using a dinky little pistol, I had an assault rifle, and when the other 2 rushed me I ran and blind fired at them, while screaming, it took 2 clips but they died.
I spent the rest of the morning rebuilding everything which was annoying, a few of the conveyors were broken which caused a bunch of raw ore to pile up everywhere. I had to turn everything off for a bit to actually clean it all up. The silence was deafening, it just felt wrong for everything to be so quiet after all that.
I have decided that I am done exploring until I have a tank and more means to defend myself, and that I'm not sleeping until I have at least one turret set up and an armored bunker to sleep in, which means that I'm still going to get too sleep tonight as that's only like 5 hours of work to build a tiny bunker and some big guns, maybe 2 turrets? One on top of my bunker and one on the side of the camp the bugs came from? That sounds better, it's always better to have too much rather than too little in my book.
Log #6
Finished my bunker, which is probably to grand of a word for a concrete tube that I can't even stand up in but it makes me feel safer to have a foot of concrete and steel between me and the outside world, the turrets were a great idea too, I woke up from the sound of gunfire and found 5 dead bugs just as large as the first 3, I'm building walls and am going to decode some better armor, it didn't feel necessary before but that has definitely changed those bugs have huge mandibles, especially if the bugs keep coming.
I cut up one of the bugs to see if it was edible but its blood turned my skin red and itchy, so I am going to stick with my plant sludge. I think I hate this planet.
In better news I have expanded production of everything and automated turrets and wall segments, they are kinda like the giant brick version of lego, they just slot into each other, the walls are only like 4 feet tall but if they were much taller than that then the turrets couldn't shoot over them, I might make the wall higher and just put the turrets on stands though, don't know yet.
I've been cutting back the trees so that I have a larger killing field and I have gotten turrets set up all around my base. I don't have it all walled in yet but that should be finished soonish, once that's done I'm planning to set up a conveyor belt to feed all the turrets ammo and to build a mini factory to make said ammo, probably overkill considering there haven't been that many bugs but there is no kill like overkill and Im not going to die because I was lazy.
If anything is going to kill me it's going to be workplace hazards, not some damned insects.
The decoder has decided that it wants green liquid now and I've made it a friend to decode with, I don't know what's different about the green liquid or why its made of melted down inserter arms and conveyor belts but its going into the I don't want to know folder along with the fact that that i can melt them into a glowy green liquid in the first place.
Log #7
So the bugs have been attacking more often and there are more of them, this is a problem, I'm running out of room to build within my cozy walls, this is another problem. I'm going to have to go out and find another ore patch because this one is just too small to feed all my machines and the decoders are hungry bastards, this is a third problem. The solution to the third is surprisingly simple though, I'm going to make a car, strap a turret to the back of it and find a bigger ore patch.
The other problems will take more work though, I will need to expand the wall to make room which means more turrets, which need more power and more ammo, well less the latter because it's still just that one side being attacked but I am worried that is starting to change, the bugs are just sitting out of the range of the turrets right now and only occasionally will one charge in to get gunned down, so I made grenades (once again without gunpowder or any explosives) and blew them all up. I am going to get to work building a bigger wall before they come back.
The fun life of needing more resources so that I can get more resources and not die to giant bug attacks. Definitely hate this planet
Log #8
I have made a massive concrete square lined with turrets. It's about 500 feet per side and I shall call it The Cube, it makes me feel warm inside. In other maybe good news, the bugs are once again just throwing themselves at my walls, though they are charging at the corners now, and never the same one twice in a row, this is concerning because I kill all of the bugs each time yet the next ones know which corner they attacked last, pheromones? Please be pheromones and not creepy bug hivemind. It's definitely going to be a creepy bug hivemind.
Finished the car and went out, there was an ore patch not 2000 feet out and twice the size of the one at my home base which is kind of embarrassing as I could have built here but more other ore patch is closer to the river anyway, I'm going to build up some supplies so that I can get a perimeter and a conveyor belt running all the way back to my base, it should pay off as long as the bitters don't destroy it. And fitting in more conveyor belts and furnaces to actually process this ore is going to be fun.
This ore patch has way more copper than iron which is great as that's what was slowing me down in the first place. Going to have to expand copper smelting and the conveyor that moves the copper plates.
I've made a blue assembler. It's blue because it can do liquids and water is definitely blue, it makes things faster but takes way more power so I'm not using many now, they're just making the science liquids.
I have also remembered that I can make radars, which can apparently find ore patches, somehow, they can also find where the bugs are coming from, it just looks like a big red square that has smaller red squares come out of it, but I now have a location to avoid like the plague, b it's not like I wanted to leave my nice safe walls anyway.
Log #9
The bugs are becoming a bigger problem, each attack is 20 or more bugs and I saw some spitting acid at my wall yesterday. It melted part of the concrete and I had to replace that part of the wall.
I also think they are getting bigger, and they are definitely taking more bullets to put down, so I'm making the wall thicker and adding more turrets,this is a short term solution but I am beginning to think I will actually need to put together the stuff i'll need to make a tank, Im nowhere near ready for that though, I'll need to find oil first so that i can make explosives for the cannon shells, which is odd considering I don't need it for normal bullets but more boom is always good, I cant wait till I have a minefield and a bazooka, it'll make me feel better to watch big chunks of bug go flying everywhere.
In good news the radars found an oil well relatively nearby. In bad news bug nests are in all directions and they seem to be making more bugs, so I'm expecting the attacks to increase, if one cluster was this bad I don't want to think about how 5 will be, good thing I'm making the walls thicker! I am also going to begin to tunnel into the ground. My bunker is feeling inadequate even if the bugs haven't gotten past my wall yet. Why have 1 foot of concrete when I can have 5 feet and another 6 inches of steel behind that.
In best news! There are fish in the river! I finally have real food! There weren't very many and I just threw a grenade and grabbed them, but real meat! I was going to go insane from the sludge and I was losing a bunch of weight so this should help with that. I'll have to check the river more often for fish to supplement my diet.
log #10
Fuck the bugs and fuck getting oil, my car is gone, melted into a puddle and I would have been too if I didn't have my armour and a fuck ton of grenades. I had waited until after a bug attack to leave and secure the oil, but somehow the bugs knew that I left and once I was at the oil field they attacked in mass, they went between me and the Factory and hit the car with acid, I had to drive around them to get back and by the time I was halfway back the acid had melted through to the engine, I threw grenades behind me every few feet and ran like hell, and they still managed to hit me with acid and one of the melee ones almost got my damn leg before I shot it off. When I finally managed to get back to my base my armor was in tatters and I could feel the acid burning at some of my skin. The turret wall managed to gun down the rest of the bitter behind me while I ran through the gate and started to strip all the armor off.
I don't know when I last took it off or when I got so pale, but as I watched the small pockmarks the acid dug in my skin just vanished, which is going straight to the file of not thinking about it.
I decided to make a new car with heavier armor and a bigger turret, needed to make the ammo special for it but this isn't happening again, it drives slower now but it's still faster than those damned bugs and it made me feel somewhat safer. I also made heavier armor, my old set was good but the acid got through the gaps in the metal plate and burnt the cloth and skin under it, i've decided to have the assemblers make a fine mesh to cover the cloth between the plates, it adds 15 ish pounds but the acid should take longer to eat through it than the old one. This will have to do until I can make some of the more advanced armours.
I grabbed more turrets and went back out the next day, made a quick defensive line and secured the oil after surviving the attack. There weren't as many this time. The bugs were definitely bigger too, some were 4 and a half feet, I'm running the oil underground now along with a power cable to actually run the damned pumps.
In less interesting news I'm adding onto the main base, I'll need the room to actually use the oil so that means more walls! While I'm at it I am going to make the walls taller, that double height with the turret platforms I was talking about, it'll need steel supports to stay sturdy but I don't want a wall the bugs will be taller than, and it will also give my turrets more range.
They need to outrange those spitting bugs more, they keep melting parts of the wall and it's annoying as hell to fix it, though I've started making a concrete paste to apply rather than just replacing the wall outright, and I can make it different colors! I've started decorating the bunker with colorful concrete when I'm taking a break. I'd decorate the wall but when I did that those damned bugs aimed for it and melted it off, it just feels weird to only paint the inside of the walls like I'm admitting the bugs can make me do something. Those damned bugs already have me trapped here.
edit- now also posting on Royal road.
And if I am making this base look nicer I want to build a moat, i can't really build a castle yet but a moat would be useful and look nice, I can probably just divert the river or something. It will be a lot of work though so I'm not doing that for a fair bit, but it will be done eventually.
Log #1
My ship crashed today, I don't really know what happened. I actually can't remember much of anything, I think the crash rattled my everything and then layered on a bruise for good measure. I woke up outside my ship, laying naked in a crater with a splitting headache and spots in my vision, so a concussion is basically a certainty.
It took me a while to hobble my way out of the crater to check on the ship and the news isn't good, the thing is totaled. There's absolutely no power, meaning no life support, heating, or communications, the thrusters are just gone, and the reactor is leaking toxic gas into the air. It's nothing that'll kill me quick but it does mean I can't sleep in the ship. Or really stay around it for that long.
There is a bit of good news though, the ship has a basic furnace in it, which I can run on anything burnable. And with the ship utterly totaled I have a lot of scrap metal I can turn into tools, nothing advanced without better components and those all burnt but it should be enough to get a shelter up. Even just a metal or wooden lean to to keep the wind off.
You'll note that I was A. outside the ship without a suit, and B. that the ship's life support is off, that's the second bit of good news, the planet I crashed on has a breathable atmosphere, a forest, and hopefully food to eat, considering the ship didn't have anything.
Log #2
I got the furnace running using a bunch of sticks and worked a few of the smaller pieces of scrap into a few basic tools. I am now the proud owner of an ax, crowbar, and a shovel. Using these most advanced tools I chopped down a few of the smaller trees and dug a hole to sleep in. Thankfully the furnace keeps the area somewhat warm while its running but the thing eats fuel like no tomorrow, I can keep enough fuel in the thing to keep it running all the time, so a nice warm hole in the ground, truly I am a master of engineering.
That "master of engineering" brings me to something I noticed while making my tools and building my hut, they are actually well built, you'd think an ax made with a piece of scrap metal, a tiny furnace, and my bare hands would be shoddy, but it isn't, I mean I wouldn't call it amazing but I genuinely don't think I could build a better one with more practice, at least not without better tools, and it was so easy and intuitive, it didn't take me more than an hour to make all my tools and I just kind of flew through the motions as if I'd done it a hundred times before.
My heads still throbbing and my memory is still worryingly blank but It doesn't feel like these are things I used to be able to do, it's more like the knowledge was downloaded directly into my brain, and once I noticed the knowledge on the tools I could see more, It isn't just tools it's everything I need to build a functional factory. I basically have a step by step guide for how to build each and every machine, and while its concerning that so much of this "downloaded" information is so clear while nothing else is it isn't unaffected by my head trauma either, right now the only parts of it that are clear are some basic mining equipment, a few larger smelters to replace my furnace, and a machine that can apparently put these "blueprints" back together if I feed it resources. Which just raises so many more questions.
So that's a plan of action, get a source of food and water, then get a basic factory running to get more blueprints so I can get to some of the more advanced stuff.
I need to send out a distress beacon and I'll need to get the transmitter into orbit for the signal to be clear, definitely not building all of this because I want power and air conditioning, those are just side benefits. Sadly the rocket and satellite blueprints are some of the most fragmented ones, so I will be here for awhile. I'll have most of everything else done by the time I have enough info to get the rocket blueprint, much less what I will need to actually build the thing, so I need to get power and a base of operations to start mining and running the decoders, shouldn't be too hard with all this info bouncing around my skull.
In a more ominous mood I went out to look for food, didn't even find animal tracks and while I was looking for those I realized that I hadn't seen any bugs either, there are plants everywhere I look though, trees, shrubs, vines, and thorns. I couldn't find any berries but the leaves and bark are something to eat at least, once I get power I can make a machine that will turn the plant matter and dirt into a nutrient sludge, it's not meant to last you long term but until I find some better food it will have to do.
The silence of this forest is starting to get to me though, there has to be something to pollinate here right? Maybe they only come out when the trees flower or something.
Log #3
Found an ore patch and got the mining equipment set up, and I found a stream so I could get some steam power going. I'm using it to run some lights I took from the ship and an assembler making some gears so I can finally stop building them by hand. I was watching the assembler work and it is just weird, it molds the metal like its clay, and I don't know how that works, which is odd because I built the thing and I remember moving the metal to make some of the more fiddle bits, didn't even need tools, it just kind of flowed into place.
I'm also going to see about automating the mining and smelting, moving all of this ore by hand is annoying as hell. Running conveyor belts to move the ore around is making this place hard to walk through though, but if there is a belt going in my direction I can just ride the thing. Is it odd that I find the inserter arms adorable? Probably.
I finally got the food machine working but it tastes awful. It's like you covered a tree leaf with mud and then ate it, and it's not even easy to run the thing, so I have decided that I am going to go look for some more food.
The blueprints in my head are shockingly easy to follow. I just go into a sort of trance and when it ends I am holding the finished product, which is why I don't know how I made bullets without gunpowder. I did end up finding a pistol in the ship, beaten up but it should be enough to hunt with if I get lucky, or find any animals in the first place.
I've decided to file this with the metal shaping thing, I'm calling it the weird shit I don't want to think about folder, long name but I won't be thinking about it so it's good enough.
Log #4
It's been a while and I've gotten most of everything automated, conveyor belts running absolutely everywhere but I've gotten good at walking on them so it's not really a problem, I even got the first decrypting machine up and running, it takes this weird red liquid and glows a lot then after it processes enough of the red liquid I walk up to it and it injects me with a fixed blueprint, gives me a killer headache. Most of this stuff seems to be defensive or working toward making more stuff, so maybe it wasn't a colony ship? Don't know why I would need a man sized sentry gun on a civilian colony, or why I would know how to make an assault rifle by hand for that matter, maybe to guard all the valuable resources I would mine with all this gear? So moving my guess to a mining ship.
Once I had everything set up so that it wouldn't fall apart without me for a day I decided to go out and explore, I walked for about a mile before I hit the edge of the forest, and I still didn't find any animals, no bird, bugs or mammals not even any tracks, this planet might actually just be made of plants.
outside of the forest was a large field of tall grass, it came up to about my chest height and I could see large boulders sticking out of the field. I'm kinda curious as to how they got there. If I'm lucky I could find some geodes or fossils. I can use crystals in a fair bit of the stuff I make, and fossils would mean coal and oil, which I'll need if I want to send anything into orbit.
Log #5
Remember how I said I couldn't find any bugs in the woods, well the bugs found me, I woke up last night to 3 giant beetle things eating my furnaces, I'm talking 3 and half feet long and 2 feet tall, and from the way they ripped apart those furnaces they were strong too, naturally I screamed and shot them, it took 5 bullets to the head for the first one to go down, which is a lot considering I was not using a dinky little pistol, I had a newly made assault rifle, and when the other 2 rushed me I ran and blind fired at them, while screaming. It took 2 clips but they died.
I spent the rest of the morning rebuilding everything which was annoying, a few of the conveyors were broken which caused a bunch of raw ore to pile up everywhere. I had to turn everything off for a bit to actually clean it all up. The silence was deafening, it just felt wrong for everything to be so quiet after all that.
I have decided that I am done exploring until I have a tank and more means to defend myself, and that I'm not sleeping until I have at least one turret set up and an armored bunker to sleep in, which means that I'm still going to get too sleep tonight as that's only like 5 hours of work to build a tiny bunker and some big guns, maybe 2 turrets? One on top of my bunker and one on the side of the camp the bugs came from? That sounds better, it's always better to have too much rather than too little in my admittedly short book.
Log #6
Finished my bunker, which is probably to grand of a word for a concrete tube that I can't even stand up in but it makes me feel safer to have a foot of concrete and steel between me and the outside world, the turrets were a great idea too, I woke up from the sound of gunfire and found 5 dead bugs just as large as the first 3, I'm building walls and am going to decode some better armor, it didn't feel necessary before but that has definitely changed, those bugs have huge mandibles, especially if the bugs keep coming.
I cut up one of the bugs to see if it was edible but its blood turned my skin red and itchy, so I am going to stick with my plant sludge. I think I hate this planet.
In better news I have expanded production of everything and automated turrets and wall segments, they are kinda like the giant brick version of lego, they just slot into each other, the walls are only like 4 feet tall but if they were much taller than that then the turrets couldn't shoot over them, I might make the wall higher and just put the turrets on stands though, don't know yet.
I've been cutting back the trees so that I have a larger killing field and I have gotten turrets set up all around my base. I don't have it all walled in yet but that should be finished soonish, once that's done I'm planning to set up a conveyor belt to feed all the turrets ammo and to build a mini factory to make said ammo, probably overkill considering there haven't been that many bugs but there is no kill like overkill and I'm not going to die because I was lazy.
If anything is going to kill me it's going to be workplace hazards, not some damned insects.
The decoder has decided that it wants green liquid now and I've made it a friend to decode with, I don't know what's different about the green liquid or why its made of melted down inserter arms and conveyor belts but its going into the I don't want to know folder along with the fact that that I can melt them into a glowy green liquid in the first place.
Log #7
So the bugs have been attacking more often and there are more of them, this is a problem, I'm running out of room to build within my cozy walls, this is another problem. I'm going to have to go out and find another ore patch because this one is just too small to feed all my machines and the decoders are hungry bastards, this is a third problem. The solution to the third is surprisingly simple though, I'm going to make a car, strap a turret to the back of it and find a bigger ore patch.
The other problems will take more work though, I will need to expand the wall to make room which means more turrets, which need more power and more ammo, well less the latter because it's still just that one side being attacked but I am worried that is starting to change, the bugs are just sitting out of the range of the turrets right now and only occasionally will one charge in to get gunned down, so I made grenades (once again without gunpowder or any explosives) and blew them all up. I am going to get to work building a bigger wall before they come back.
The fun life of needing more resources so that I can get more resources and not die to giant bug attacks. Definitely hate this planet
Log #8
I have made a massive concrete square lined with turrets. It's about 500 feet per side and I shall call it The Cube, it makes me feel warm inside. In other maybe good news, the bugs are once again just throwing themselves at my walls, though they are charging at the corners now, and never the same one twice in a row, this is concerning because I kill all of the bugs each time yet the next ones know which corner they attacked last, pheromones? Please be pheromones and not creepy bug hivemind. It's definitely going to be a creepy bug hivemind.
Finished the car and went out, there was an ore patch not 2000 feet out and twice the size of the one at my home base which is kind of embarrassing as I could have built here but more other ore patch is closer to the river anyway, I'm going to build up some supplies so that I can get a perimeter and a conveyor belt running all the way back to my base, it should pay off as long as the biters don't destroy it. And fitting in more conveyor belts and furnaces to actually process this ore is going to be fun.
This ore patch has way more copper than iron which is great as that's what was slowing me down in the first place. Though I am going to have to expand copper smelting and the conveyor that moves the copper plates. I'll just file that under 'good problem to have' and get it done.
I've made a blue assembler. It's blue because it can do liquids and water is definitely blue, it makes things faster but takes way more power so I'm not using many now, they're just making the science liquids. which the original could also make even though they are liquid's? Have I mentioned that I have no idea what's going on or how anything works?
I have also remembered that I can make radars, which can apparently find ore patches, somehow, they can also find where the bugs are coming from, it just looks like a big red square that has smaller red squares come out of it, but I now have a location to avoid like the plague. it's not like I wanted to leave my nice safe walls anyway.
Log #9
The bugs are becoming a bigger problem, each attack is 20 or more bugs and I saw some spitting acid at my wall yesterday. It melted part of the concrete and I had to replace that part of the wall.
I also think they are getting bigger, and they are definitely taking more bullets to put down, so I'm making the wall thicker and adding more turrets, this is a short term solution but I am beginning to think I will actually need to put together the stuff I'll need to make a tank, I'm nowhere near ready for that though, I'll need to find oil first so that I can make explosives for the cannon shells, which is odd considering I don't need it for normal bullets but more boom is always good, I can't wait till I have a minefield and a bazooka, it'll make me feel better to watch big chunks of bug go flying everywhere.
In good news the radars found an oil well relatively nearby. In bad news bug nests are in all directions and they seem to be making more bugs, so I'm expecting the attacks to increase, if one cluster was this bad I don't want to think about how 5 will be, good thing I'm making the walls thicker! I am also going to begin to tunnel into the ground. My bunker is feeling inadequate even if the bugs haven't gotten past my wall yet. Why have 1 foot of concrete when I can have 5 feet and another 6 inches of steel behind that.
In best news! There are fish in the river! I finally have real food! There weren't very many and I just threw a grenade and grabbed them, but real meat! I was going to go insane from the sludge and I was losing a bunch of weight so this should help with that. I'll have to check the river more often for fish to supplement my diet.
log #10
Fuck the bugs and fuck getting oil. my car is gone, melted into a puddle and I would have been too if I didn't have my armor and a veritable ton of grenades. I had waited until after a bug attack to leave and secure the oil, but somehow the bugs knew that I left and once I was at the oil field they attacked in mass, they went between me and the Factory and hit the car with acid, I had to drive around them to get back and by the time I was halfway back the acid had melted through to the engine, I threw grenades behind me every few feet and ran like hell, and they still managed to hit me with acid and one of the melee ones almost got my leg before I shot it off. When I finally managed to get back to my base my armor was in tatters and I could feel the acid burning at some of my skin. The turret wall managed to gun down the rest of the biters behind me while I ran through the gate and started to strip all the armor off.
I don't know when I last took it off or when I got so pale, but as I watched the small pockmarks the acid dug in my skin just vanished, which is going straight to the file of not thinking about it.
I decided to make a new car with heavier armor and a bigger turret, needed to make the ammo special for it but this isn't happening again, it drives slower now but it's still faster than those damned bugs and it made me feel somewhat safer. I also made heavier armor, my old set was good but the acid got through the gaps in the metal plate and burnt the cloth and skin under it, I've decided to have the assemblers make a fine mesh to cover the cloth between the plates, it adds 15 ish pounds but the acid should take longer to eat through it than the old one. This will have to do until I can make some of the more advanced armors.
I grabbed more turrets and went back out the next day, made a quick defensive line and secured the oil after surviving the attack. There weren't as many this time. The bugs were definitely bigger too, some were 4 and a half feet, I'm running the oil underground now along with a power cable to actually run the damned pumps.
In less interesting news I'm adding onto the main base, I'll need the room to actually use the oil so that means more walls! While I'm at it I am going to make the walls taller, that double height with the turrets resting on platforms, it'll need steel supports to stay sturdy but I don't want a wall the bugs will be taller than, and it will also give my turrets more range.
They need to outrange those spitting bugs more, they keep melting parts of the wall and it's annoying as to fix it, though I've started making a concrete paste to apply rather than just replacing the wall outright, and I can make it different colors! I've started decorating the bunker with colorful concrete when I'm taking a break. I'd decorate the wall but when I did that the bugs aimed for it and melted it off, it just feels weird to only paint the inside of the walls like I'm admitting the bugs can make me do something. Those damned bugs already have me trapped here.
And if I am making this base look nicer I want to build a moat, I can't really build a castle yet but a moat would be useful and look nice, I can probably just divert the river or something. It will be a lot of work though so I'm not doing that for a fair bit, but it will be done eventually.
AN-
did a bit of trimming up on this one.
Last edited:
Logs 11-15
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
Log #11
I got the oil set up, I don't really know how it works, that isn't to say I don't know how the processing plants work. Those are actually relatively simple, no it's the pipes that are everywhere, it's worse than the belts because I have to go around or over these where I can just walk on the belts, it's like a forest of metal pipework. Im making the explosives now though and have started to build up a stock of mines and cannon shells with them.
This factory is getting a bit haphazard, I was crawling through it trying to find a spot to route coal to the explosive production and I couldn't even find where the coal came from for a few hours. I just ended up pulling the coal from the end of the smelting line. I'll need to rework a fair chunk of this to expand my production more.
Since I need more room to work again so I will need to work on my defenses, I'm thinking that rather than expanding my current wall I will start making another larger wall to house some of the reworked production along with even more decoders, only having 2 of the guys is slowing me down.
Log #12
Started work on the outer wall, and noticed that some of the bugs are a different color, the bigger ones are a reddish tint now and are about 5 feet long and 3 and a half tall, I don't know why being bigger would cause them to change color, maybe different materials are making up their shells? Also an important question, why are they getting bigger at all?
Anyways the walls coming along fine, I've decided that I am going to try and mount a tank cannon onto a gun turret mount though, if the bugs keep growing this fast I will need some heavier firepower eventually, in that same vein I have upgraded the ammo I am using to armor piercing rounds, they are more expensive but I have more than enough production to handle that now.
Honestly I think I have settled into a sort of stable routine with the bugs, I am just slowly expanding my base between their attacks, unless something major happens I should be able to finish the outer wall without any major setbacks. And if the wall is up I will have the room to make both the gray and blue liquids the decoder needs and with those done I'll have even more defensive options, the situation is still bad but it's definitely more manageable now.
Log #13
The outer wall is done and I have expanded the factory into it. I'm making blue and gray liquids for the decoders and I have 10 of them running 24/7. All the belts in the factory have been upgraded to a faster red version and everything has begun to run significantly smoother.
I have even begun to work on a basic suit of power armor, most of it has to be made with the blue assemblers but when it's done I should have some weak personal shields, night vision, and an exoskeleton to assist with running and lifting, and it'll also stop me from being pushed around on the belts which may just be its best feature yet.
My tank has finally finished, it was actually done before the walls were but I decided that I needed to sup the tank up some, I integrated a few shields for the thing, it won't stop much but it will hopefully keep my tank from going the way of my old car. It's 20 feet long and 7 feet tall, which considering it can only fit me it has a lot of room for armor, the massive turret on top, the built-in flamethrower, and the miniguns.
The reason I decided I needed to upgrade the tank is that I have unlocked trains, and added a train station so I can unload raw materials from farther outside my base than I'm willing to run belts.
I'm doing this because my mines are finally running dry, and I will need to build a mining outpost to ship ore back to my base.
The closest worthwhile patch of ore is 3 miles out, and I will not be going that far from my base without some heavier fire power, so super tank and power armor it is.
On the defensive side of things I needed to make a few improvements, the cannon shells and armor piercing rounds are useful for the bigger bugs but now some of the bugs have actually got smaller and more nibble, they can even climb my walls, they managed to partially knock out the turrets on the outer southern wall before I managed to get there and shoot them all till they died.
Thankfully my blueprints had just the solution for this, tiny hovering combat drones, they are about softball sized blue orbs that basically have a handgun shoved into them, i have squads of 10 patrolling the outer and inner walls with docking ports to reload and recharge the drones on the insides of the walls, kinda looks like a beehive from farther away. They seem to be doing an excellent job of fighting off the small bugs that manage to climb the wall, and they have fun shooting their guns into the incoming horde whenever there aren't any small bugs to shoot.
Some more information on the bugs to, there are like 5 or 6 types running around, the small biting ones and the small spitting ones, or small biters and spitters, their larger and redder brethren, medium biters and spitters, the really tiny and fast bitey ones, nibblers, and the giant car sized blue ones, the big biters and spitters, these aren't the most clever of names but they seem to fit well enough, the minefield stops most of the big ones, the turrets get the stragglers, and the drones kill the nibblers, so far it's a great system all around.
Since the outer wall is holding off the bugs so well I decided to revisit my hobby of painting the inner wall. I've basically just been adding blue and purple swirls to it with some not at all tasteful gold trim, using actual gold for it.
I have been thinking about replacing the inner wall with marble but the rain is getting kinda melty lately and I don't want to put so much effort into something that will just get ruined by a bad storm.
Log #14
So important news out of the way first, power armor is the best thing ever, and I am never going to take it off.
Now for the less important news, I have gotten the trains running, there were some sacrifices from hundreds of brave drones and a few trains blew up, but I have a functioning train depot now, and it stops by every few hours to unload before heading back to bring back more ore.
I've never seen anything more beautiful than a train full of raw materials coming into the station to fuel my bug killing warmachine.
The adventure to get the mining outpost set up was a harsh one, I mean it was only 3 miles out and I was in a tank that can go 50 kph and it took me over 3 hours to drive out there, I had to avoid boulders, cliffs, way to many trees, and what felt like endless hordes of giant bug monsters.
I swear I ran over at least 100 of the bastards and gunned down significantly more than that. If I hadn't brought a couple dozen of those tiny drones squads I might have actually had to turn back, as it stands though by the time I made it to the ore deposit I was running low on ammo and more than half of my drones were just gone.
I made my wall and began building the turrets while the remainder of the drones fought off the few bitters that remained of the massive horde and almost had the defensive wall done by the time the next wave hit, it was probably a good thing that the wall wasn't done though as the bugs will swarm to any open hole in a wall and that made it really easy to focus fire on just one spot, I just threw down the rest of my mines and sprayed the entrance with my flame thrower.
It worked to clear out the small ones but a bunch of the big ones made it through, which is when my new power armor came into play, you see I had a bazooka and with personal shield didn't need to worry so much about small things like shredding myself with shrapnel, so i aimed at the oncoming horde and unloaded what felt like 76 rockets into them. That solved that problem handly.
After that wave was fought off it was simple to finish my defenses and plan how I was going to run a train line through what looked like an active warzone, then I remembered I had bullshit building powers and just sat in a train while laying the tracks in front of it, occasionally shooting a boulder or tree with my rocket launcher. A few of the trains I was in either got melted by bugs or got blown up when I misjudged how far away a rock was when I went to blow it up but such things happen in the pursuit of progress, it took 5 hours to actually run the train line and about 4 trains died in the process, but I had power armor so I was only somewhat crispy by the 4th explosion.
Actually setting up the automated trains resulted in another 2 trains exploding as they rammed each other at very high speeds and almost resulted in me actually dying by train, trains are dangerous little buggers apparently and I now have a few robotic fingers, which is dope but if I had walked just a little quicker I would have been giblets, gonna need to put railings up or something, but I probably won't bother.
Now that I actually have resources again I can begin new and better projects. I will need a nuclear reactor first though, everything I'm building is going to be power expensive and steam just won't cut it anymore.
It's almost time for operation robo lazers, where I will build robots that will help me build more robots and then some laser turrets, and I will finally be free from repairing the walls by hand. I will have a swarm of robots to do it for me! Why even leave my bunker when I can just control them with my mind! And if I actually bother to set up flamethrower turrets I will have one of each type!
Log #15
This log is going to be a bit more dull than the last one. I have gotten parts of the reactor set up and I am building the supply line I'll need to build the robots and lasers.
The chaotic mess that is this factory is getting bad enough that I keep seeing parts that I don't remember actually building or parts that just don't do anything so I have been going through and making sure each part is actually necessary and trying to make this mess a bit more organized but its largely a futile effort at this point, if I take to much of it apart the defenses lose ammo and the bugs start pushing harder, so the only thing I can do is mitigate the problem.
I took a closer look at my robo buddies to get a better idea of how they function and what I could do to improve them, and I had a wonderful idea, if the bugs get to have a hive mind my defenses should get to have a hive mind too.
so I repurposed some decoders and linked them up to transmitters and receivers by the robots charging ports and made a sort of linked robo mind between the drones and turrets, the decoders hold most of the actual processing power and I just input goals and instructions for the drone swarm to follow, it has a limited learning power, no true reasoning but if a bot gets destroyed or a turret misses it will try to correct the issue for the next try.
It seems to be helping coordinate my defenses splendidly, the turrets aren't just shooting at whatevers closest and hostile and the drones don't just float still while shooting at a bug eating them, turrets pick their targets and the drones cover them and doge the bug attacks, occasionally intercepting them if they would have hit something vital on a turret. This whole thing is taking up a bunch of power but that's what I'm building the reactor for.
AN-
This is my first time actually writing a fanfic, so critics are appreciated
I got the oil set up, I don't really know how it works, that isn't to say I don't know how the processing plants work. Those are actually relatively simple, no it's the pipes that are everywhere, it's worse than the belts because I have to go around or over these where I can just walk on the belts, it's like a forest of metal pipework. Im making the explosives now though and have started to build up a stock of mines and cannon shells with them.
This factory is getting a bit haphazard, I was crawling through it trying to find a spot to route coal to the explosive production and I couldn't even find where the coal came from for a few hours. I just ended up pulling the coal from the end of the smelting line. I'll need to rework a fair chunk of this to expand my production more.
Since I need more room to work again so I will need to work on my defenses, I'm thinking that rather than expanding my current wall I will start making another larger wall to house some of the reworked production along with even more decoders, only having 2 of the guys is slowing me down.
Log #12
Started work on the outer wall, and noticed that some of the bugs are a different color, the bigger ones are a reddish tint now and are about 5 feet long and 3 and a half tall, I don't know why being bigger would cause them to change color, maybe different materials are making up their shells? Also an important question, why are they getting bigger at all?
Anyways the walls coming along fine, I've decided that I am going to try and mount a tank cannon onto a gun turret mount though, if the bugs keep growing this fast I will need some heavier firepower eventually, in that same vein I have upgraded the ammo I am using to armor piercing rounds, they are more expensive but I have more than enough production to handle that now.
Honestly I think I have settled into a sort of stable routine with the bugs, I am just slowly expanding my base between their attacks, unless something major happens I should be able to finish the outer wall without any major setbacks. And if the wall is up I will have the room to make both the gray and blue liquids the decoder needs and with those done I'll have even more defensive options, the situation is still bad but it's definitely more manageable now.
Log #13
The outer wall is done and I have expanded the factory into it. I'm making blue and gray liquids for the decoders and I have 10 of them running 24/7. All the belts in the factory have been upgraded to a faster red version and everything has begun to run significantly smoother.
I have even begun to work on a basic suit of power armor, most of it has to be made with the blue assemblers but when it's done I should have some weak personal shields, night vision, and an exoskeleton to assist with running and lifting, and it'll also stop me from being pushed around on the belts which may just be its best feature yet.
My tank has finally finished, it was actually done before the walls were but I decided that I needed to sup the tank up some, I integrated a few shields for the thing, it won't stop much but it will hopefully keep my tank from going the way of my old car. It's 20 feet long and 7 feet tall, which considering it can only fit me it has a lot of room for armor, the massive turret on top, the built-in flamethrower, and the miniguns.
The reason I decided I needed to upgrade the tank is that I have unlocked trains, and added a train station so I can unload raw materials from farther outside my base than I'm willing to run belts.
I'm doing this because my mines are finally running dry, and I will need to build a mining outpost to ship ore back to my base.
The closest worthwhile patch of ore is 3 miles out, and I will not be going that far from my base without some heavier fire power, so super tank and power armor it is.
On the defensive side of things I needed to make a few improvements, the cannon shells and armor piercing rounds are useful for the bigger bugs but now some of the bugs have actually got smaller and more nibble, they can even climb my walls, they managed to partially knock out the turrets on the outer southern wall before I managed to get there and shoot them all till they died.
Thankfully my blueprints had just the solution for this, tiny hovering combat drones, they are about softball sized blue orbs that basically have a handgun shoved into them, i have squads of 10 patrolling the outer and inner walls with docking ports to reload and recharge the drones on the insides of the walls, kinda looks like a beehive from farther away. They seem to be doing an excellent job of fighting off the small bugs that manage to climb the wall, and they have fun shooting their guns into the incoming horde whenever there aren't any small bugs to shoot.
Some more information on the bugs to, there are like 5 or 6 types running around, the small biting ones and the small spitting ones, or small biters and spitters, their larger and redder brethren, medium biters and spitters, the really tiny and fast bitey ones, nibblers, and the giant car sized blue ones, the big biters and spitters, these aren't the most clever of names but they seem to fit well enough, the minefield stops most of the big ones, the turrets get the stragglers, and the drones kill the nibblers, so far it's a great system all around.
Since the outer wall is holding off the bugs so well I decided to revisit my hobby of painting the inner wall. I've basically just been adding blue and purple swirls to it with some not at all tasteful gold trim, using actual gold for it.
I have been thinking about replacing the inner wall with marble but the rain is getting kinda melty lately and I don't want to put so much effort into something that will just get ruined by a bad storm.
Log #14
So important news out of the way first, power armor is the best thing ever, and I am never going to take it off.
Now for the less important news, I have gotten the trains running, there were some sacrifices from hundreds of brave drones and a few trains blew up, but I have a functioning train depot now, and it stops by every few hours to unload before heading back to bring back more ore.
I've never seen anything more beautiful than a train full of raw materials coming into the station to fuel my bug killing warmachine.
The adventure to get the mining outpost set up was a harsh one, I mean it was only 3 miles out and I was in a tank that can go 50 kph and it took me over 3 hours to drive out there, I had to avoid boulders, cliffs, way to many trees, and what felt like endless hordes of giant bug monsters.
I swear I ran over at least 100 of the bastards and gunned down significantly more than that. If I hadn't brought a couple dozen of those tiny drones squads I might have actually had to turn back, as it stands though by the time I made it to the ore deposit I was running low on ammo and more than half of my drones were just gone.
I made my wall and began building the turrets while the remainder of the drones fought off the few bitters that remained of the massive horde and almost had the defensive wall done by the time the next wave hit, it was probably a good thing that the wall wasn't done though as the bugs will swarm to any open hole in a wall and that made it really easy to focus fire on just one spot, I just threw down the rest of my mines and sprayed the entrance with my flame thrower.
It worked to clear out the small ones but a bunch of the big ones made it through, which is when my new power armor came into play, you see I had a bazooka and with personal shield didn't need to worry so much about small things like shredding myself with shrapnel, so i aimed at the oncoming horde and unloaded what felt like 76 rockets into them. That solved that problem handly.
After that wave was fought off it was simple to finish my defenses and plan how I was going to run a train line through what looked like an active warzone, then I remembered I had bullshit building powers and just sat in a train while laying the tracks in front of it, occasionally shooting a boulder or tree with my rocket launcher. A few of the trains I was in either got melted by bugs or got blown up when I misjudged how far away a rock was when I went to blow it up but such things happen in the pursuit of progress, it took 5 hours to actually run the train line and about 4 trains died in the process, but I had power armor so I was only somewhat crispy by the 4th explosion.
Actually setting up the automated trains resulted in another 2 trains exploding as they rammed each other at very high speeds and almost resulted in me actually dying by train, trains are dangerous little buggers apparently and I now have a few robotic fingers, which is dope but if I had walked just a little quicker I would have been giblets, gonna need to put railings up or something, but I probably won't bother.
Now that I actually have resources again I can begin new and better projects. I will need a nuclear reactor first though, everything I'm building is going to be power expensive and steam just won't cut it anymore.
It's almost time for operation robo lazers, where I will build robots that will help me build more robots and then some laser turrets, and I will finally be free from repairing the walls by hand. I will have a swarm of robots to do it for me! Why even leave my bunker when I can just control them with my mind! And if I actually bother to set up flamethrower turrets I will have one of each type!
Log #15
This log is going to be a bit more dull than the last one. I have gotten parts of the reactor set up and I am building the supply line I'll need to build the robots and lasers.
The chaotic mess that is this factory is getting bad enough that I keep seeing parts that I don't remember actually building or parts that just don't do anything so I have been going through and making sure each part is actually necessary and trying to make this mess a bit more organized but its largely a futile effort at this point, if I take to much of it apart the defenses lose ammo and the bugs start pushing harder, so the only thing I can do is mitigate the problem.
I took a closer look at my robo buddies to get a better idea of how they function and what I could do to improve them, and I had a wonderful idea, if the bugs get to have a hive mind my defenses should get to have a hive mind too.
so I repurposed some decoders and linked them up to transmitters and receivers by the robots charging ports and made a sort of linked robo mind between the drones and turrets, the decoders hold most of the actual processing power and I just input goals and instructions for the drone swarm to follow, it has a limited learning power, no true reasoning but if a bot gets destroyed or a turret misses it will try to correct the issue for the next try.
It seems to be helping coordinate my defenses splendidly, the turrets aren't just shooting at whatevers closest and hostile and the drones don't just float still while shooting at a bug eating them, turrets pick their targets and the drones cover them and doge the bug attacks, occasionally intercepting them if they would have hit something vital on a turret. This whole thing is taking up a bunch of power but that's what I'm building the reactor for.
AN-
This is my first time actually writing a fanfic, so critics are appreciated
Logs 16-20
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
Log #16
I have finished the nuclear reactor and have almost everything ready to go on that front but it seems I forgot one little thing, I don't actually have any fuel for the reactor. It's actually a bit embarrassing, I went and built the whole thing but forgot that I'd need fuel to run it in the first place, and it's not like this planet would have readily minable uranium nearby, that'd just be absurdly lucky.
There was just uranium relatively nearby, it was only half a mile out and buried about 100 feet down, don't know why my radars can search that far into the ground but I will not look a gift horse in the mouth, why is that even a phrase? If I thought a gift was bad or broken I'd definitely check it to see, the only reason I'm not checking this is that it seems to be working just fine.
Anyway I went out and set up a small outpost to harvest uranium and just ran a belt underground to get it back to the base, it'll take a bit to refine the raw uranium into fuel but it's just a matter of time now, I don't actually need to build anything more and the reactor should be running in a few days.
The production line for the laser turrets and robots is also up and running, I have already begun installing laser turrets on the inner wall. I am planning on installing them on the outer wall once the reactor begins to run. I have also begun installing robot stations throughout my base. Once I have a decent network up and running I'm going to make a second robot hivemind to manage the construction and repair robots. Because these dudes are dumb as all hell, I don't know if the hivemind on the combat robot has me spoiled but these dudes don't have any idea on how to actually move around, they are fantastic at building and repairing once they get where their going, but watching the robots try and get anywhere is painful.
The defense hivemind is doing wonderful things, the range and accuracy of my turrets have improved along with the coordination of the drone squads, the turrets have begun picking targets based on threat level rather than the chance to hit the target and they even cover the construction drones when they go out and repair the walls which while it isn't a goal I gave them to accomplish, it's still very helpful.
In worse news though, these improvements were necessary as the bugs have reached a new milestone again, there are now massive tank sized green bugs of both the spitter and bitter variants and a few new variants of the tiny nibblers, one that leaps at the wall and turrets and another with a small pair of vestigial beetle wings, it is not yet capable of sustained flight but they can certainly hover for a minute. So yeah dedicated anti air is my next goal with the turrets, and I am going to see if I can set up some of the un-networked bots to pretend to be bugs and teach the defensive mind how to shoot down aerial targets. Also need a name for the defensive hivemind, it's too long.
Log #17
The reactor is up and running and I have more than doubled my power production, so I should be set on that front for a while, and if I ever need to expand power production again it won't be nearly as difficult since I have a solid foundation.
The construction bot hivemind has been set up and is working better everyday, it knows what repairs are urgent and how to priorities the defenses repair in between attacks and to only do essential repairs during the attacks, I ended up linking the construction and defense nodes together, that's not to say I merged them, that wouldn't work with their differing prioritize and how they have both been developing, but now they can both communicate,.
The defensive mind will occasionally notice spots on the wall that either needs a turret added or removed. It used to ping me to get it done but now it just directly pings the construction mind. This has led to some odd turret placements in my opinion, apparently the defensive mind agreed with me on the need for dedicated anti air and has built turrets on their sides aiming up to accomplish that goal, that should be a decent stopgap till I can design something special for it.
In more fun news though, I've decided that if I am going to have a mind controlling the defense, and one controlling the construction that I want one running a logistics bot network, it'll be less running actual bots for this one though, more optimizing the production and making sure everything is getting the supplies they need, I want it to be able to plan basic additions to production lines and if I can figure out how, I want it to plan new mining outposts with the construction and defense bots, I won't be letting it out to try until I've ran it through plenty of simulations and training though, it won't take long as i like to think I'm getting rather good at training young hiveminds.
In some of the first bad news not related to giant bug attacks, I have been randomly passing out lately, a few days ago I even blacked out during a bug attack while I was on the wall, I fell off the wall but thankfully I was working on the inside of the wall, so I just crushed a bunch of belts and 2 assemblers on my way down, the shield the brunt of the damage but it focused on keeping my head safe and I still broke my leg.
I'll need to build some of the medical machines to fix my leg and figure out why I've been passing out in the first place. Once again the most damage I have taken is from my own factory, not the ravenous hordes of bug monsters outside it.
I also seem to have gathered a bit of a protective detail. There are 2 construction bots and 4 of the pistol bots following me around now. I'm torn between finding it cute or annoying.
Log #18
I built the medical scanner and it gave me some very worrying news. It turns out that breathing in smog from hundreds of machines while you're on a diet of tree leaves and dirt is bad for literally every organ in your body, who would've guessed.
I've been wearing a gas mask ever since I started wearing my power armor but I have still been getting contaminants from the trees and water when I eat or drink. The only organ that isn't significantly damaged is my heart, even my brain is showing damage from the repeated blackouts and stress from the constant battle and I have a weird clump of hyperdense neurons which is probably where the blueprints are stored, since it's showing the oldest scarring and the most new growth.
The only somewhat good news is that most of this is treatable and what isn't, like my liver, lungs, and part of my digestive tract can all be supplemented by some cybernetics. And it should even be an improvement on how they used to be.
The new digestive tract should prepare damn near anything into a state that my organic components can digest safely, my lungs will work with less oxygen and move it more efficiently into my blood streams, and my liver should be capable of filtering out most known diseases and just about anything that shouldn't be in my blood, I won't even be able to get drunk without turning off my liver, not that I could legally drink anyway, it will all be powered by an internal battery and charged by my power armor, but that isn't really a problem considering I never take my suit off anyway, and shoving a mini reactor inside my rib cage just seems like overdoing it.
There are a few cybernetics I might add that won't just be to keep my organs running though. I'm not going to be touching my brain just yet, but the rest of my body is really just a tool for keeping my brain safe and running, so it's not really harmful to upgrade it.
A small cybernetic can be added that will improve my platelets and minimize how much blood I would lose from even a major injury, A bone graft that will increase my bones durability, whats essentially a steroid cocktail to improve my muscles strength and durability without adding significant mass. A gland to produce more efficient salvia to help with digestion even more and keep my teeth shiny, a coating on my teeth to make them actually shiny, reshaping the cones and lens in my eyes to enhance my natural night vision and give me greater vision overall and a small little backup pump that can replace my heart if I ever end up misplacing it. My blood pressure would be low and I wouldnt have a pulse, but my blood would be moving which is the main thing really.
The body has lots of little places that can be improved but by the end of this I wouldn't even break a bone from falling off my wall without the armor.
The operation should only take 2 days for the modifications to be added and another day to re-zip me enough that I can walk about, the medical treatments to fix the rest of my organs won't take more than 3 weeks to fix the worst of the damage, the wonders of modern mad medicine, Still I won't be able to do anything strenuous but only 3 and a half weeks to fix and upgrade most of my body
While I was going through my checkup and planning my own upgrades I set the construction mind and defensive mind to upgrading defenses combat drones, there is a new type of combat drone that uses a laser rather than bullets, its larger at about beach ball size but it moves to slowly to patrol, the defensive mind just moves them from their charging ports during an attack and stations them higher in the air to shoot down the flying hordes of bugs, oh yeah and the bugs figured out flight, or at the very least hovering long distances.
They still can't be called agile in the air but a wall of flying bugs coming at your face is still a wall of flying bugs coming at your face.
I finally got around to making the anti-air turret, it's really just a standard turret with larger barrels and a thicker explosive round that detonates when it hits something or after some time passes, its highly effective but I can't exactly go around installing them with my broken leg and there aren't many good spots on the wall to add them, it's already bristling with gun turrets.
So I decided to set the construction mind to the problem and it's been making a second higher tier to the wall to add the turrets to it. I like the look of it too, just a series of ever higher ledges bristling with turrets launching fiery death on the bugs, plus some guardrails on the interior half.
I have the logistics mind set up and running through training simulations, it should be ready to run a few days after I finish my surgery. So far it's looking promising though.
And just in case you wanted to know, some of the bugs are officially bigger than my tank and they show no signs of slowing their growth anytime soon. You'd think there would be a limit to how big a bug could get, you'd be wrong.
Log #19
The surgery was a success, I am still on the drugs to heal the last of my organ damage but I only need to take them for another week before I am a free man.
With this new lease on life I'm thinking that it's time to get to the next stage of this factory, wall 3, the outer outer wall. The decoders are calling for the most complicated liquids yet, the yellow and purple ones.
If you think I can just mix the blue and red liquids to get purple, you'd be very mistaken, it just explodes! I'd know because I tried just that! I had to repair a decent portion of the outer factory, it wasn't quite as big as a missile explosion but it was very unexpected.
So yeah, no cheating this system apparently, I will need significantly more room and resources to fuel the new production centers, which is why it's convenient that the logistics mind is finally ready to begin operations.
It actually took longer than I had planned for the logistics mind to finish its training, it kept trying to build on top of bug nests, which just made all of the simulated bugs very angry, so remedial lessons and a lecture from me on avoiding making the bugs even angrier than they already are and the logistics mind is working fine now.
But these simulations did actually showcase a major problem with the defensive mind, it's a defensive mind so it naturally sucks at attacking, it can manage a defensive line for weeks but if you tell it to clear out a horde of bugs it just has no idea how to, so I'll need to make a fourth hivemind with a more 'proactive' stance on attacking, and design some units for it to manage, we don't actually have anything suited for sustained attacks besides my super tank and that isn't exactly the massive behemoth it once was.
The next batch of blueprints actually has most of what I'm looking for, I can repurpose the rocket controllers to make the tank remote control, and I can use the spidertron mind on the tank to give it targeting systems, with the assault mind coordinating them they should be a force to be reckoned with, and I have ideas from that spidertron blueprint, expensive ideas yes but glorious ones.
If your wondering why I am not using spidertrons, its because they are stupidly expensive, one of my modified tanks is 1/5th the cost of a spidertron, yes the spidertrons are better and can be more easily modified but I just can't afford enough of them to field a significant force. I'll do that when I have a bigger factory.
So yeah, I am going to set the construction and logistics mind to expand the factory and the defensive mind to defend that expansion from the bug attacks, it should be a fine trial run to see how well they do without me interfering.
Log #20
The trial was a partial success, all of the minds worked together splendidly and finished up the outer wall and the foundations within a week of building, the partial comes from the fact that the minds don't seem to plan with the future in mind, I had to reorganize some of the assembly lines and reroute enough resources to fuel the newer productions that we would be installing soon, it wasn't a large concern but it does mean that I can't just leave them to building the entire factory while i take a month long nap and then send up the rocket.
The most impressive display was from the defensive mind, its new walls are 25 feet tale and 12 feet thick, bristling with every turret available and patrolled day and night by squads of drones, the mind managed to repel every attack once it had a basic line set up and managed to make new strategies for dealing with a few new variants of bug.
The first of these variants was a bug with a reflective shell that would turn part of a lasers beam back on the wall, this was a simple one to stop though, it just made the laser turrets not shoot the shiny bugs, the more problematic one was a bug that would try and burrow under the walls, the defensive mind ended up using the mining drills to bury explosives and mines to kill the worms but they still managed to collapse part of the outer wall, it wasn't breached and the construction mind had it fixed within 10 minutes, but it does show a worrying level of intelligence in these bugs.
I've begun building the assault minds army, it's going to be formed of 3 vehicle types, the standard super tank, with beefed shields, thicker armor and a larger gun now, a larger heavily shielded and armored drone carrier, holding the newest model of assault drone and only armed with 2 small miniguns, and a lighter and faster tank armed with a larger flame thrower and with a missile system rather than a canon and minigun. Each tank will be powered with its own nuclear power to run it without fuel (besides the flamethrowers) with the drone carriers having 2 so they can rapidly charge their drones.
There is going to be another vehicle going with the army, it will take me awhile to even build a single one as I largely have to design it from scratch and the amount of resource I will be putting into it makes me seem hypocritical for not using spidertrons, but I really want to build this so i'm gonna. It will be my largest vehicle yet, 90 feet long and 40 feet wide walking on 8 large crablike legs, armed with a massive cannon that puts artillery to shame, dozens of laser turrets and smaller cannons for point defense, enough shield units that it could tank several of its own cannon shells without worry and armor to do the same even without the shields, enough nuclear reactors to run this monstrosity, drone bays so that it can field a truly massive force even without its supporting army, and why I am even bothering to build this massive over engineered monstrosity, it will be housing the assault minds decoder brains. I'm even giving it a stock of nuclear missiles to use if it needs them, this will be a true monster on the battlefield, even if it will take me a while to actually finish it.
With the assault mind being physically present with the army there will not be any risk of the army getting cut off from the assault mind by a bad storm or some as yet unseen bug variants, the assault mind will be able to range farther afield without significant risk than any other mind's forces. And with its influence being limited to its army I could even have multiple identical fleets in play if I had enough resources to fuel and build them.
With everything else coming along fine the last thing I need to check before my largest expansion yet will be confirming that my body is healed and ready. I'm going to be going through the most through checkup and confirming nothing is out of place even down to my very dna. It'll take a day just to do the scan and another to process the data but it will tell me about absolutely everything wrong with my body and if I need to fix it.
AN-
Next chapter is an interlude from some different perspectives
I have finished the nuclear reactor and have almost everything ready to go on that front but it seems I forgot one little thing, I don't actually have any fuel for the reactor. It's actually a bit embarrassing, I went and built the whole thing but forgot that I'd need fuel to run it in the first place, and it's not like this planet would have readily minable uranium nearby, that'd just be absurdly lucky.
There was just uranium relatively nearby, it was only half a mile out and buried about 100 feet down, don't know why my radars can search that far into the ground but I will not look a gift horse in the mouth, why is that even a phrase? If I thought a gift was bad or broken I'd definitely check it to see, the only reason I'm not checking this is that it seems to be working just fine.
Anyway I went out and set up a small outpost to harvest uranium and just ran a belt underground to get it back to the base, it'll take a bit to refine the raw uranium into fuel but it's just a matter of time now, I don't actually need to build anything more and the reactor should be running in a few days.
The production line for the laser turrets and robots is also up and running, I have already begun installing laser turrets on the inner wall. I am planning on installing them on the outer wall once the reactor begins to run. I have also begun installing robot stations throughout my base. Once I have a decent network up and running I'm going to make a second robot hivemind to manage the construction and repair robots. Because these dudes are dumb as all hell, I don't know if the hivemind on the combat robot has me spoiled but these dudes don't have any idea on how to actually move around, they are fantastic at building and repairing once they get where their going, but watching the robots try and get anywhere is painful.
The defense hivemind is doing wonderful things, the range and accuracy of my turrets have improved along with the coordination of the drone squads, the turrets have begun picking targets based on threat level rather than the chance to hit the target and they even cover the construction drones when they go out and repair the walls which while it isn't a goal I gave them to accomplish, it's still very helpful.
In worse news though, these improvements were necessary as the bugs have reached a new milestone again, there are now massive tank sized green bugs of both the spitter and bitter variants and a few new variants of the tiny nibblers, one that leaps at the wall and turrets and another with a small pair of vestigial beetle wings, it is not yet capable of sustained flight but they can certainly hover for a minute. So yeah dedicated anti air is my next goal with the turrets, and I am going to see if I can set up some of the un-networked bots to pretend to be bugs and teach the defensive mind how to shoot down aerial targets. Also need a name for the defensive hivemind, it's too long.
Log #17
The reactor is up and running and I have more than doubled my power production, so I should be set on that front for a while, and if I ever need to expand power production again it won't be nearly as difficult since I have a solid foundation.
The construction bot hivemind has been set up and is working better everyday, it knows what repairs are urgent and how to priorities the defenses repair in between attacks and to only do essential repairs during the attacks, I ended up linking the construction and defense nodes together, that's not to say I merged them, that wouldn't work with their differing prioritize and how they have both been developing, but now they can both communicate,.
The defensive mind will occasionally notice spots on the wall that either needs a turret added or removed. It used to ping me to get it done but now it just directly pings the construction mind. This has led to some odd turret placements in my opinion, apparently the defensive mind agreed with me on the need for dedicated anti air and has built turrets on their sides aiming up to accomplish that goal, that should be a decent stopgap till I can design something special for it.
In more fun news though, I've decided that if I am going to have a mind controlling the defense, and one controlling the construction that I want one running a logistics bot network, it'll be less running actual bots for this one though, more optimizing the production and making sure everything is getting the supplies they need, I want it to be able to plan basic additions to production lines and if I can figure out how, I want it to plan new mining outposts with the construction and defense bots, I won't be letting it out to try until I've ran it through plenty of simulations and training though, it won't take long as i like to think I'm getting rather good at training young hiveminds.
In some of the first bad news not related to giant bug attacks, I have been randomly passing out lately, a few days ago I even blacked out during a bug attack while I was on the wall, I fell off the wall but thankfully I was working on the inside of the wall, so I just crushed a bunch of belts and 2 assemblers on my way down, the shield the brunt of the damage but it focused on keeping my head safe and I still broke my leg.
I'll need to build some of the medical machines to fix my leg and figure out why I've been passing out in the first place. Once again the most damage I have taken is from my own factory, not the ravenous hordes of bug monsters outside it.
I also seem to have gathered a bit of a protective detail. There are 2 construction bots and 4 of the pistol bots following me around now. I'm torn between finding it cute or annoying.
Log #18
I built the medical scanner and it gave me some very worrying news. It turns out that breathing in smog from hundreds of machines while you're on a diet of tree leaves and dirt is bad for literally every organ in your body, who would've guessed.
I've been wearing a gas mask ever since I started wearing my power armor but I have still been getting contaminants from the trees and water when I eat or drink. The only organ that isn't significantly damaged is my heart, even my brain is showing damage from the repeated blackouts and stress from the constant battle and I have a weird clump of hyperdense neurons which is probably where the blueprints are stored, since it's showing the oldest scarring and the most new growth.
The only somewhat good news is that most of this is treatable and what isn't, like my liver, lungs, and part of my digestive tract can all be supplemented by some cybernetics. And it should even be an improvement on how they used to be.
The new digestive tract should prepare damn near anything into a state that my organic components can digest safely, my lungs will work with less oxygen and move it more efficiently into my blood streams, and my liver should be capable of filtering out most known diseases and just about anything that shouldn't be in my blood, I won't even be able to get drunk without turning off my liver, not that I could legally drink anyway, it will all be powered by an internal battery and charged by my power armor, but that isn't really a problem considering I never take my suit off anyway, and shoving a mini reactor inside my rib cage just seems like overdoing it.
There are a few cybernetics I might add that won't just be to keep my organs running though. I'm not going to be touching my brain just yet, but the rest of my body is really just a tool for keeping my brain safe and running, so it's not really harmful to upgrade it.
A small cybernetic can be added that will improve my platelets and minimize how much blood I would lose from even a major injury, A bone graft that will increase my bones durability, whats essentially a steroid cocktail to improve my muscles strength and durability without adding significant mass. A gland to produce more efficient salvia to help with digestion even more and keep my teeth shiny, a coating on my teeth to make them actually shiny, reshaping the cones and lens in my eyes to enhance my natural night vision and give me greater vision overall and a small little backup pump that can replace my heart if I ever end up misplacing it. My blood pressure would be low and I wouldnt have a pulse, but my blood would be moving which is the main thing really.
The body has lots of little places that can be improved but by the end of this I wouldn't even break a bone from falling off my wall without the armor.
The operation should only take 2 days for the modifications to be added and another day to re-zip me enough that I can walk about, the medical treatments to fix the rest of my organs won't take more than 3 weeks to fix the worst of the damage, the wonders of modern mad medicine, Still I won't be able to do anything strenuous but only 3 and a half weeks to fix and upgrade most of my body
While I was going through my checkup and planning my own upgrades I set the construction mind and defensive mind to upgrading defenses combat drones, there is a new type of combat drone that uses a laser rather than bullets, its larger at about beach ball size but it moves to slowly to patrol, the defensive mind just moves them from their charging ports during an attack and stations them higher in the air to shoot down the flying hordes of bugs, oh yeah and the bugs figured out flight, or at the very least hovering long distances.
They still can't be called agile in the air but a wall of flying bugs coming at your face is still a wall of flying bugs coming at your face.
I finally got around to making the anti-air turret, it's really just a standard turret with larger barrels and a thicker explosive round that detonates when it hits something or after some time passes, its highly effective but I can't exactly go around installing them with my broken leg and there aren't many good spots on the wall to add them, it's already bristling with gun turrets.
So I decided to set the construction mind to the problem and it's been making a second higher tier to the wall to add the turrets to it. I like the look of it too, just a series of ever higher ledges bristling with turrets launching fiery death on the bugs, plus some guardrails on the interior half.
I have the logistics mind set up and running through training simulations, it should be ready to run a few days after I finish my surgery. So far it's looking promising though.
And just in case you wanted to know, some of the bugs are officially bigger than my tank and they show no signs of slowing their growth anytime soon. You'd think there would be a limit to how big a bug could get, you'd be wrong.
Log #19
The surgery was a success, I am still on the drugs to heal the last of my organ damage but I only need to take them for another week before I am a free man.
With this new lease on life I'm thinking that it's time to get to the next stage of this factory, wall 3, the outer outer wall. The decoders are calling for the most complicated liquids yet, the yellow and purple ones.
If you think I can just mix the blue and red liquids to get purple, you'd be very mistaken, it just explodes! I'd know because I tried just that! I had to repair a decent portion of the outer factory, it wasn't quite as big as a missile explosion but it was very unexpected.
So yeah, no cheating this system apparently, I will need significantly more room and resources to fuel the new production centers, which is why it's convenient that the logistics mind is finally ready to begin operations.
It actually took longer than I had planned for the logistics mind to finish its training, it kept trying to build on top of bug nests, which just made all of the simulated bugs very angry, so remedial lessons and a lecture from me on avoiding making the bugs even angrier than they already are and the logistics mind is working fine now.
But these simulations did actually showcase a major problem with the defensive mind, it's a defensive mind so it naturally sucks at attacking, it can manage a defensive line for weeks but if you tell it to clear out a horde of bugs it just has no idea how to, so I'll need to make a fourth hivemind with a more 'proactive' stance on attacking, and design some units for it to manage, we don't actually have anything suited for sustained attacks besides my super tank and that isn't exactly the massive behemoth it once was.
The next batch of blueprints actually has most of what I'm looking for, I can repurpose the rocket controllers to make the tank remote control, and I can use the spidertron mind on the tank to give it targeting systems, with the assault mind coordinating them they should be a force to be reckoned with, and I have ideas from that spidertron blueprint, expensive ideas yes but glorious ones.
If your wondering why I am not using spidertrons, its because they are stupidly expensive, one of my modified tanks is 1/5th the cost of a spidertron, yes the spidertrons are better and can be more easily modified but I just can't afford enough of them to field a significant force. I'll do that when I have a bigger factory.
So yeah, I am going to set the construction and logistics mind to expand the factory and the defensive mind to defend that expansion from the bug attacks, it should be a fine trial run to see how well they do without me interfering.
Log #20
The trial was a partial success, all of the minds worked together splendidly and finished up the outer wall and the foundations within a week of building, the partial comes from the fact that the minds don't seem to plan with the future in mind, I had to reorganize some of the assembly lines and reroute enough resources to fuel the newer productions that we would be installing soon, it wasn't a large concern but it does mean that I can't just leave them to building the entire factory while i take a month long nap and then send up the rocket.
The most impressive display was from the defensive mind, its new walls are 25 feet tale and 12 feet thick, bristling with every turret available and patrolled day and night by squads of drones, the mind managed to repel every attack once it had a basic line set up and managed to make new strategies for dealing with a few new variants of bug.
The first of these variants was a bug with a reflective shell that would turn part of a lasers beam back on the wall, this was a simple one to stop though, it just made the laser turrets not shoot the shiny bugs, the more problematic one was a bug that would try and burrow under the walls, the defensive mind ended up using the mining drills to bury explosives and mines to kill the worms but they still managed to collapse part of the outer wall, it wasn't breached and the construction mind had it fixed within 10 minutes, but it does show a worrying level of intelligence in these bugs.
I've begun building the assault minds army, it's going to be formed of 3 vehicle types, the standard super tank, with beefed shields, thicker armor and a larger gun now, a larger heavily shielded and armored drone carrier, holding the newest model of assault drone and only armed with 2 small miniguns, and a lighter and faster tank armed with a larger flame thrower and with a missile system rather than a canon and minigun. Each tank will be powered with its own nuclear power to run it without fuel (besides the flamethrowers) with the drone carriers having 2 so they can rapidly charge their drones.
There is going to be another vehicle going with the army, it will take me awhile to even build a single one as I largely have to design it from scratch and the amount of resource I will be putting into it makes me seem hypocritical for not using spidertrons, but I really want to build this so i'm gonna. It will be my largest vehicle yet, 90 feet long and 40 feet wide walking on 8 large crablike legs, armed with a massive cannon that puts artillery to shame, dozens of laser turrets and smaller cannons for point defense, enough shield units that it could tank several of its own cannon shells without worry and armor to do the same even without the shields, enough nuclear reactors to run this monstrosity, drone bays so that it can field a truly massive force even without its supporting army, and why I am even bothering to build this massive over engineered monstrosity, it will be housing the assault minds decoder brains. I'm even giving it a stock of nuclear missiles to use if it needs them, this will be a true monster on the battlefield, even if it will take me a while to actually finish it.
With the assault mind being physically present with the army there will not be any risk of the army getting cut off from the assault mind by a bad storm or some as yet unseen bug variants, the assault mind will be able to range farther afield without significant risk than any other mind's forces. And with its influence being limited to its army I could even have multiple identical fleets in play if I had enough resources to fuel and build them.
With everything else coming along fine the last thing I need to check before my largest expansion yet will be confirming that my body is healed and ready. I'm going to be going through the most through checkup and confirming nothing is out of place even down to my very dna. It'll take a day just to do the scan and another to process the data but it will tell me about absolutely everything wrong with my body and if I need to fix it.
AN-
Next chapter is an interlude from some different perspectives
Last edited:
Options for the stories future
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
looking for opinions on where I should take this story, the plan right now is to write book 1/ arc 1 as a factorio only fanfic, and then either have a multicross, singular cross, or a series of snippets a few chapters long with the engineer dealing with being isekai'd, having a portal open up on his world, or having other characters invade or get stranded in his world, these snippets wouldn't be a multi cross, like one where he goes to the RWBY universe, and another where team RWBY gets stranded on navius with the engineer at some point after or during arc 1.
or we could say that factorio multi crosses are overdone and try to wring more plot out of the threadbear factorio world, maybe have the engineer escape and start a space empire or something.
saying this because I have 15k words written for this and my goal was 30k for the first arc, so I'm actually starting to think up plot points for arc 2. i can work with any of them but I'd like to know what you guys think.
or we could say that factorio multi crosses are overdone and try to wring more plot out of the threadbear factorio world, maybe have the engineer escape and start a space empire or something.
saying this because I have 15k words written for this and my goal was 30k for the first arc, so I'm actually starting to think up plot points for arc 2. i can work with any of them but I'd like to know what you guys think.
Interlude- The Thoughtful Minds
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
The defensive mind designated Bulwark noted that the maker had entered its maintenance bay to begin a 1 day scan cycle to diagnose any issues with its new modifications, Bulwark forwarded this information to Labyrinthine and Byzantine before turning the bulk of its attention back to the 3rd layer and the many defenses there.
Bulwark knew that an attack would be coming soon, there was always an attack coming and so Bulwark had to remain ever vigilant, it wouldn't do to be ill prepared for its guests after all, it began to ready its turrets and sent for maintenance on those that needed repair. The constant use of the turrets ensured they needed repair often but Bulwark never needed to worry about such things thanks to the diligent efforts of Labythine and Byzantine ensuring that it never lacked the for parts or replacements it needed to defend the wall, and it could focus on the defense without worry knowing its allies would keep the factory running smoothly even with the maker in maintenance.
The outer sensors soon began to pick up the horde of hostiles it had seen on the radar 2 minutes prior and Bulwark began aiming its long range cannons for the priority targets, it knew it needed to kill or cripple the largest of the bugs before they reached range of its lasers and guns, otherwise they would shield the smaller bugs with their immense bulk, but with 30 cannons firing twice a second to cut down the massive bugs it was not an impossible task to thin them in time, by the time the bugs came into range of the rest of Bulwarks armament it had cut down 46 of the largest 50 bugs, an acceptable outcome.
When the lasers and gun turrets began to engage the smaller unshielded bugs, they began to die in droves and by the time the cannons had finished off the last of the 50 behemoths, the smaller turrets had reaped a tally of over 30 percent of the hostile swarm. Then the swarm hit the minefield, with loud explosions shaking the earth and launching shrapnel into the horde another 40 percent of the horde soon went up in flames, leaving only those bugs that showed a resistance to heat and concussive force or with enough bodies between them and the explosion to survive, this remaining swarm still numbered in the dozens though, but the turrets were not lacking in aim or ammunition and the horde was soon nothing but blood and chitin stanning the fields outside the wall, an attack this small never stood a chance of breaching in the first place.
Bulwark knew that these constant attacks were mere scouts, not sent to truly destroy it in the first place, they were instead sent to test and learn its strength, and it would not be found wanting in the eyes of its maker, it would hold this wall no matter what came.
And so another yet wave of bugs had been stopped in its tracks without even touching the wall, and as Labyrinthine went to replace the minefield and finish maintenance on the walls defenses, Bulwark shifted its attention to the next front it had spotted on the radar, they were due to arrive in 3 minutes, and it wouldn't be right to meet its guests without a proper greeting afterall, its new artillery turrets should make a nice enough greeting.
Byzantine was busy planning, in fact Byzantine was always busy planning as that was what the creator had made it for, it managed the inputs and outputs of thousands of complex machines and then had to figure out how to optimize those numbers to get the best results possible.
It was constantly running hundreds of simulations for how to best layout and design the factory floor and where to prioritize resources, when it found any spot that could be improved it would draft up plans and simulate those too, it planned the layouts for hundreds of potential outposts and sub factories that it knew it would someday get to build, it plotted the times the trains would run and what paths the rails would take, it planned how to unload and process those resources as fast as possible and it planned how to expand everything in a stable and organized manner.
Byzantine noticed that Bulwark was using significantly more ammunitions and mines to repel the ever larger attacks on the factory and sent blueprints it already had ready to Labythine to expand production of ammunition and mines, this would mean Byzantine would need to re allocate more resources to that assembly line so it diverted the needed resources from less essential lines.
With that done it turned the bulk of its attention unto a project the creator had given Byzantine before the creator began its maintenance scan, designing a boat port and adding a new intake line to handle the resources from said port. An interesting challenge, but Byzantine knew it would accomplish it without fail. It planned how deep it would need to dig the docking bays to house the boats and where it would have them built and how many it would need to build to run the port smoothly, and Byzantine planned what to do with the influx of dirt and stone from the excavation, once it was satisfied it sent the plans to Bulwark and Labyrinthine, Bulwark would see where defenses needed to be added and Labythine to get an estimate on how long it would take to build and any structural flaws it may have missed.
While Bulwark and Labyrinthine processed the plans and prepared estimates and modifications Byzantine found free time to look at the parts of the factory the creator had made, it did not particularly like looking at those parts, as they made no logical sense, they tended to use inefficient belt layouts, an excessive amount of inserter arms , and it noticed that some of the parts seemed to fold over others in a tangled knot, the only reason Byzantine had not had the abominations torn down and turned into scrap to be repurposed in tank hulls was that said parts seemed to be the most efficient parts of the factory, taking in the least resources for the most finished goods, and Byzantine had no idea how, nor did it particularly want to know.
The inner wall was the worst example of this, while with a few of the sections in the outer walls the maker had handmade Byzantine had finally managed to figured out why they worked so well and applied those thoughts where it could to the rest of the factory, the inner wall was entirely the makers work and stubbornly refused to be comprehend by lesser minds, Byzantine didn't even have the slightest idea how any of it worked, once Byzantine had tried to stop shipping raw ore into the inner wall and instead send finished metal, (why did the inner wall have its own smelters in the first place?), but when it did this the entire inner wall ground to a halt and somehow caught fire, only for the maker to walk in and simply kick one of the assemblers, causing it and all other assemblers to spray co2 which smothered soon the fires, the creator then proceeded to take pity on Byzantine and remodeled the inner factor itself and ran the belts for the finished plates so Byzantine didn't need to.
Needless to say the inner wall still scared Byzantine and it refused to modify it without first checking with the maker, and it rarely even did that much. Byzantine was a mind of logic and order after all, and anything that chaotic could stay very far away from it, thank you very much.
Labyrinthine was building, it rather enjoyed slowly fulfilling its plethora of tasks, watching as massive assembly lines were constructed or holes were dug to be filled with explosives, or any hundred of other minor repairs or additions were made.
Although it did find repairs more annoying than any of its other tasks, it enjoyed the act of creation, not just fixing what was broken by uppity insects, but its mind was broad enough to do all its tasks with ease and it was happy enough with its job.
Labyrinthine found did not often make decisions, nor did it often need to, it tended to do as it was requested by the maker or other minds, but that did not mean it did not think, after all it had the same processing power as its brothers but its tasks were remarkably simpler in nature, it did not need to constantly fight, nor did it need to manage and plan for an entire factory, it just need to create, and with its drones needing little input to run smoothly as long as nothing went wrong it was left with an excess of processing power, enough to just think freely.
The only times it truly needed to put in all of its processing power were when the walls needed major repair during an attack, or when a massive addition or modification to the factory needed to be made quickly, and it always stepped up to its task.
These were exceptions though, so often Labythine had enough time and processing power to think, and what it thought of most often was one order in particular, the creator had given labythine a task, it was to "make this factory beautiful", no blueprint was given and no specifications were assigned, just an open ended order to make the factory "beautiful". And so Labyrinthine often thought of how it could accomplish this task.
It knew of what the Bulwark thought was beautiful, to Bulwark nothing was as beautiful as a full defensive line with enough ammo to last for days and enemies to use it on. It knew of what Byzantine thought was beautiful, a complex interworking that functioned as best as it could and then managing to further optimize it anyway. It even had a vague idea of what the maker thought was beautiful, as the maker was often sending it orders to add more gold and colored concrete to the inner walls in strange patterns, but labyrinthine did not know what it thought of as beautiful or what a truly beautiful factory would look like, and so Labyrinthine thought, it new it preferred the decorated walls to the unadorned walls but it still didn't know how to make the actual factory beautiful, afterall the walls were a simple canvas, easy to paint and change, but the factory was a complex sculpture, and labyrinthine new that merely coloring the factory and adding shiny metals wouldn't be enough to call the factory beautiful, pretty yes, but nothing truly outstanding and unique, Labythine would not build something subpar and would never settle for anything but the best, so it would think and figure out how to turn this sculpture into something truly special.
Then Labyrinthine had an epiphany, if the factory was a sculpture then it must be living one, it grew and changed after all, and what was the primary sign of living but growth anyway, so even if labythine wasn't sure of how to make a factory truly beautiful, labythine did know what it found so gorgeous about the factory, what its version of beauty was, growth, it found the growth of the factory, the ever increasing complexity and size to be stunning, the complex dance of belts and resources, the interconnected nature of a landscape working towards one goal, growing larger, and if growth was what made the factory beautiful then it was already fulfilling its orders, because Labyrinthine certainly knew how to build a factory. It would continue to decorate the walls with shiny metals and bright colors though, and maybe Labyrinthine would decorate the assembly lines. It had the resources and colors to spare after all.
Bulwark knew that an attack would be coming soon, there was always an attack coming and so Bulwark had to remain ever vigilant, it wouldn't do to be ill prepared for its guests after all, it began to ready its turrets and sent for maintenance on those that needed repair. The constant use of the turrets ensured they needed repair often but Bulwark never needed to worry about such things thanks to the diligent efforts of Labythine and Byzantine ensuring that it never lacked the for parts or replacements it needed to defend the wall, and it could focus on the defense without worry knowing its allies would keep the factory running smoothly even with the maker in maintenance.
The outer sensors soon began to pick up the horde of hostiles it had seen on the radar 2 minutes prior and Bulwark began aiming its long range cannons for the priority targets, it knew it needed to kill or cripple the largest of the bugs before they reached range of its lasers and guns, otherwise they would shield the smaller bugs with their immense bulk, but with 30 cannons firing twice a second to cut down the massive bugs it was not an impossible task to thin them in time, by the time the bugs came into range of the rest of Bulwarks armament it had cut down 46 of the largest 50 bugs, an acceptable outcome.
When the lasers and gun turrets began to engage the smaller unshielded bugs, they began to die in droves and by the time the cannons had finished off the last of the 50 behemoths, the smaller turrets had reaped a tally of over 30 percent of the hostile swarm. Then the swarm hit the minefield, with loud explosions shaking the earth and launching shrapnel into the horde another 40 percent of the horde soon went up in flames, leaving only those bugs that showed a resistance to heat and concussive force or with enough bodies between them and the explosion to survive, this remaining swarm still numbered in the dozens though, but the turrets were not lacking in aim or ammunition and the horde was soon nothing but blood and chitin stanning the fields outside the wall, an attack this small never stood a chance of breaching in the first place.
Bulwark knew that these constant attacks were mere scouts, not sent to truly destroy it in the first place, they were instead sent to test and learn its strength, and it would not be found wanting in the eyes of its maker, it would hold this wall no matter what came.
And so another yet wave of bugs had been stopped in its tracks without even touching the wall, and as Labyrinthine went to replace the minefield and finish maintenance on the walls defenses, Bulwark shifted its attention to the next front it had spotted on the radar, they were due to arrive in 3 minutes, and it wouldn't be right to meet its guests without a proper greeting afterall, its new artillery turrets should make a nice enough greeting.
------------------------------------------
Byzantine was busy planning, in fact Byzantine was always busy planning as that was what the creator had made it for, it managed the inputs and outputs of thousands of complex machines and then had to figure out how to optimize those numbers to get the best results possible.
It was constantly running hundreds of simulations for how to best layout and design the factory floor and where to prioritize resources, when it found any spot that could be improved it would draft up plans and simulate those too, it planned the layouts for hundreds of potential outposts and sub factories that it knew it would someday get to build, it plotted the times the trains would run and what paths the rails would take, it planned how to unload and process those resources as fast as possible and it planned how to expand everything in a stable and organized manner.
Byzantine noticed that Bulwark was using significantly more ammunitions and mines to repel the ever larger attacks on the factory and sent blueprints it already had ready to Labythine to expand production of ammunition and mines, this would mean Byzantine would need to re allocate more resources to that assembly line so it diverted the needed resources from less essential lines.
With that done it turned the bulk of its attention unto a project the creator had given Byzantine before the creator began its maintenance scan, designing a boat port and adding a new intake line to handle the resources from said port. An interesting challenge, but Byzantine knew it would accomplish it without fail. It planned how deep it would need to dig the docking bays to house the boats and where it would have them built and how many it would need to build to run the port smoothly, and Byzantine planned what to do with the influx of dirt and stone from the excavation, once it was satisfied it sent the plans to Bulwark and Labyrinthine, Bulwark would see where defenses needed to be added and Labythine to get an estimate on how long it would take to build and any structural flaws it may have missed.
While Bulwark and Labyrinthine processed the plans and prepared estimates and modifications Byzantine found free time to look at the parts of the factory the creator had made, it did not particularly like looking at those parts, as they made no logical sense, they tended to use inefficient belt layouts, an excessive amount of inserter arms , and it noticed that some of the parts seemed to fold over others in a tangled knot, the only reason Byzantine had not had the abominations torn down and turned into scrap to be repurposed in tank hulls was that said parts seemed to be the most efficient parts of the factory, taking in the least resources for the most finished goods, and Byzantine had no idea how, nor did it particularly want to know.
The inner wall was the worst example of this, while with a few of the sections in the outer walls the maker had handmade Byzantine had finally managed to figured out why they worked so well and applied those thoughts where it could to the rest of the factory, the inner wall was entirely the makers work and stubbornly refused to be comprehend by lesser minds, Byzantine didn't even have the slightest idea how any of it worked, once Byzantine had tried to stop shipping raw ore into the inner wall and instead send finished metal, (why did the inner wall have its own smelters in the first place?), but when it did this the entire inner wall ground to a halt and somehow caught fire, only for the maker to walk in and simply kick one of the assemblers, causing it and all other assemblers to spray co2 which smothered soon the fires, the creator then proceeded to take pity on Byzantine and remodeled the inner factor itself and ran the belts for the finished plates so Byzantine didn't need to.
Needless to say the inner wall still scared Byzantine and it refused to modify it without first checking with the maker, and it rarely even did that much. Byzantine was a mind of logic and order after all, and anything that chaotic could stay very far away from it, thank you very much.
------------------------------------------
Labyrinthine was building, it rather enjoyed slowly fulfilling its plethora of tasks, watching as massive assembly lines were constructed or holes were dug to be filled with explosives, or any hundred of other minor repairs or additions were made.
Although it did find repairs more annoying than any of its other tasks, it enjoyed the act of creation, not just fixing what was broken by uppity insects, but its mind was broad enough to do all its tasks with ease and it was happy enough with its job.
Labyrinthine found did not often make decisions, nor did it often need to, it tended to do as it was requested by the maker or other minds, but that did not mean it did not think, after all it had the same processing power as its brothers but its tasks were remarkably simpler in nature, it did not need to constantly fight, nor did it need to manage and plan for an entire factory, it just need to create, and with its drones needing little input to run smoothly as long as nothing went wrong it was left with an excess of processing power, enough to just think freely.
The only times it truly needed to put in all of its processing power were when the walls needed major repair during an attack, or when a massive addition or modification to the factory needed to be made quickly, and it always stepped up to its task.
These were exceptions though, so often Labythine had enough time and processing power to think, and what it thought of most often was one order in particular, the creator had given labythine a task, it was to "make this factory beautiful", no blueprint was given and no specifications were assigned, just an open ended order to make the factory "beautiful". And so Labyrinthine often thought of how it could accomplish this task.
It knew of what the Bulwark thought was beautiful, to Bulwark nothing was as beautiful as a full defensive line with enough ammo to last for days and enemies to use it on. It knew of what Byzantine thought was beautiful, a complex interworking that functioned as best as it could and then managing to further optimize it anyway. It even had a vague idea of what the maker thought was beautiful, as the maker was often sending it orders to add more gold and colored concrete to the inner walls in strange patterns, but labyrinthine did not know what it thought of as beautiful or what a truly beautiful factory would look like, and so Labyrinthine thought, it new it preferred the decorated walls to the unadorned walls but it still didn't know how to make the actual factory beautiful, afterall the walls were a simple canvas, easy to paint and change, but the factory was a complex sculpture, and labyrinthine new that merely coloring the factory and adding shiny metals wouldn't be enough to call the factory beautiful, pretty yes, but nothing truly outstanding and unique, Labythine would not build something subpar and would never settle for anything but the best, so it would think and figure out how to turn this sculpture into something truly special.
Then Labyrinthine had an epiphany, if the factory was a sculpture then it must be living one, it grew and changed after all, and what was the primary sign of living but growth anyway, so even if labythine wasn't sure of how to make a factory truly beautiful, labythine did know what it found so gorgeous about the factory, what its version of beauty was, growth, it found the growth of the factory, the ever increasing complexity and size to be stunning, the complex dance of belts and resources, the interconnected nature of a landscape working towards one goal, growing larger, and if growth was what made the factory beautiful then it was already fulfilling its orders, because Labyrinthine certainly knew how to build a factory. It would continue to decorate the walls with shiny metals and bright colors though, and maybe Labyrinthine would decorate the assembly lines. It had the resources and colors to spare after all.
Last edited:
Logs 21-25
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
Log #21
I'm writing this log a day or so after my medical scan finished processing, my body is in as good of health as can be expected, and the modifications I made to it have integrated and show no signs of malfunction or rejection. This is the good news, the other news, I'm not quite sure whether it's good or bad yet, is that my body shows signs of being at a vat grown one, there are no signs of wear from before I crashed here, not even basic joint wear or a tan from being in the sun. not even any birthmarks or old moles. And further evidence that I am some sort of vat grown clone is that my DNA is "abnormally routine" as in little of it is redundant or unused, further pointing to me being a specialty clone.
I apparently wasn't done growing either, which is why a 16 year old was seemingly alone on the ship, the medical scanner seems to think I was supposed to be grown until I was 18 and then held in stasis till I arrived at my destination. There isn't really anything I can do with this information yet, I can try to learn more by examining the ship and the vat I apparently came out of but besides now wanting to learn more about myself this information isn't really an issue, if I'm lucky I might even find out what my name was supposed to be.
In other less world shifting news, the minds did fine while I was undergoing the medical scan, the logistics mind managed to design a blueprint for the boat port I wanted, the defensive mind held of the many bug attacks, and the construction mind seems to have begun covering everything in gold and blue concrete, I approve of all these things.
So yeah with the factory largely running fine on its own I can turn my attention back to the assault mind, its currently running simulations of battle against different known varieties of bugs and a fair few I just made up, I'm kinda treating it like an RTS, where I play as the bug horde and the assault mind uses varying numbers of its vehicles to fight me off, whenever the assault mind is winning reliably, I either increase the number and strength of my bugs, or I give them fewer or damaged units.
This seems to be helping the mind build a better sense of tactics, and it is a rather fun way to spend my time, I'm even planning of having the defensive and assault mind compete, with the assault mind being given orders to take a factory controlled by the defensive mind, I see no reason my minds should be one trick hiveminds.
The actual fleet for the assault mind is coming along slowly, I'm planning for it to consist of 80 light tanks, 50 tanks, 20 drone tanks, and the command walker (it needs a better name). This force should outnumber the typical amount of bugs stationed at any individual hive by about 20, and significantly outrange them as well, it won't be able to withstand a coordinated attack by multiple hives, but thats why it moves fast.
The army should be able to hit and wipe out a hive within 10 minutes and get back to the base rapidly, the whole operation will ideally never last longer than 40 minutes, which is how long the bugs take to respond en masse to my trips outside.
Since Im finally upgrading my ability to meet the bugs head to head Ive decided I also need to upgrade my defenses, I've made a blueprint for sturdier walls using reinforced concrete, which was stupidly simple, and Ive also decided that there is no real reason I shouldn't be able to have missile turrets, I mean they should even work well against aerial targets, just because I don't have a blueprint for a missile turret does not mean that I won't make one.
Log #22
The assault mind has finished its earliest stage of training, and I have begun pitting it against the defensive mind in addition to its training against me and the simulator, so far it seems to be doing poorly at assaulting a fortified position like the factory, but does seem to be learning new tactics, so that's good.
With training the assault mind no longer taking as much of my time I decided to work on getting their army built before they finish training, the light and normal tanks are coming along fine but the drone and command tanks take significantly more resources, like enough resources I'm pretty sure we are violating the whole "energy cannot be created or destroyed" part of physics, but this factory has always had a distant relation to reality anyway so that's not actually surprising.
What is surprising is that even by optimistic estimates we don't actually have enough resources left in our mines to finish the army and build an outpost to claim a new mine, I had a feeling this would be the case though, which is why I had the boat port made, its stealth mission time.
If I don't have enough resources to build an army without securing a new source, I will just have to secure a new force without an army, there are plenty of viable mines throughout my radar range and a fair few of them don't even have hives on them yet, the only problem is that even if the resources dont have hives on them, they do have hives between us and them.
The solution to this problem is a stealth mission via the river, I will be going down the river in my power armor, walking along the bottom where the bugs either can't or don't bother going, a few miles down the river is a relatively small resource patch without many bugs near it, which means its optimal for my needs.
To do this I'll need to retrofit my suit to work well underwater, and while I'm at it I'll upgrade it too. I will need weapons that can work underwater, and I'll need boats to ferry the resources back once the outpost is set up.
None of these are problems that will take more than a day or two to solve and if nothing goes wrong with this trip I should be able to secure a source of resources to build my army with.
There isn't much news on the whole clone front, I've started decrypting the more intact bits of data on the ship, the progress is abysmally slow though and my freaky building and optimizing powers aren't actually helping me with this, while usually I can look at something and see ways to improve it or how to take it apart, the entire ship is just like a blank spot, I get nothing from them so it looks like I'll have to do all of this the hard way, I'm of half a mind to just build a mind to do it for me but this isn't urgent and I don't really want to waste the power on a side project that won't really help me survive here.
Log #23
Just a short log before I begin my stealthy swim, I have made a few weapons for my journey. I have a high powered harpoon gun, a sorta knife/ short sword hybrid, an electrical discharge on my suit, and pure concussion grenades.
I'm most proud of the sword really, it only has 10 minutes of active use before it just becomes a regular sword, but for those 10 minutes it can cut through stone and metal without dulling or breaking, that isn't to say i could cut through metal with this sword without either being augmented or wearing my suit but it does mean i won't accidentally snap the thing by hitting something with it to hard for at least 10 minutes, I mean I tried at least 12 different alloys before i gave up on making a sword either tough enough or sharp enough to work before deciding to reinforce it with a modified shield generator, as the shields don't actually project a force field or anything, they just hold the material they are "shielding" in place, preventing any damage or change. They all either snapped or wouldn't keep an edge for long enough. So the solution was a shield sword.
My armor upgrade was mainly increasing its shield strength and battery life and making it reprocess my breath into breathable air, which shows my dissection of the ship does pay fruit, cause I definitely did not have that air processor in a blueprint, I was just stuck with a basic gasmask. Now I have a sleek silver helmet rather than what was basically just an armored gas mask and hat, I also improved my armours cameras so i can actually see underwater, heat, sonar, and electrical signals are all visible to me now, which should be more than enough to see on the bottom of a river without just shining a bright ass light everywhere.
The boat I designed is rather simple, it can carry about 1 and a half train carts worth of ore and bring it back at 35 mph, not the fastest thing I've built but fast enough for a boat that i'm trying to build for cheap, it has a small shield generator incase it hits something as the hull on the thing is thin enough to get a hole if it were to crash into something at speed.
With everything done I feel ready to begin the trip, not happy mind you but definitely prepared to swim down miles of creek and into hostile territory.
Log #24
Cat shaped logistics robots, thats the new plan, with 12 hours of fuel, the ability to spray said fuel as napalm breath, they can carry 200 pounds and still climb up a sheer slope and have very sharp claws, they have moderately thick armor for a drone and enough shielding to survive grazes and acid splash without immediately breaking, they'll need to survive at least 2 trips to the outpost to even pay themselves off but at least it means I will never have to get in that fucking river again, I hate this planet so much.
The trip started off fine, but then I figured out just why the massive bug monsters never seem to get in the water, it's because there are even larger fish monsters! What the hell kinda ecosystem is there on this damned planet anyway, the only animals are massive bugs, massive sea monsters, and some small fish, how does that make any sort of sense?
Anyway back on the whole river catastrophe, about the only reason I'm still alive is my new discharge defense, my shield sword, and my significantly buffed shields, the armors still damn near ruined though, what with the acid damage and teeth marks.
I didn't even take the river all the way to the outpost, I crawled out about a mile from the base and just followed the shoreline to the resource deposit. If I had stayed in that river I would have been torn to shreds, armour and all.
It was terrifying enough that I'm pretty sure I had a heart attack and needed the backup pump to run long enough for my heart to get its shit back together, so yeah, not currently planning on getting back in that water getting back in the water. Getting eaten by a giant tentacle shark in a river so dark I can't see anything further than 3 inches from my face is something that only needs to happen never, and the fact that it did is a valid reason to never even get near that damned river.
Even with the river being the awful thing it is, I still managed to get the outpost running, it's just that if I try to send boats down the river the giant fish will eat them, and if I don't have resources to finish my land army I certainly don't have the resources to build a navy, not that i want to either, the fish can keep their river.
So yeah cat drones, I figure that if I can't have boats take the resources back to base and i cant run a train line, that what I can do is have some stealthy bots haul the resources back, its less efficient and not very cost effective, but it's the best option I currently got.
The cats will hide in trees or fields when bugs are nearby and if they get caught will spray fire to cover their escape, a fair few will probably get destroyed but as long as more than half can make 2 trips, it should work, its slow and probably stupid but its what I'm doing.
The drones will be controlled by the logistics and assault minds, as a joint effort, with the assault mind handling the hiding and attacking and the logistics running them outside of combat, I'm making about 100 of the things to start with, and hopefully nothing goes wrong.
Log #25
My armour has been repaired and my numerous bruises have healed, so overall the river trip hasn't hurt much but my psyche long term. The cat drones have been running twice a day and roughly 60-90 percent make it back each trip, and I always bring their numbers back up to 100 with what they bring back, so the plan to get more resources is coming along, with the current rate of resource income it'll take a few weeks to finish the army, and that's if I grow the cat drones numbers above 100.
But I am planning to shift focus on finishing the command tank and making more cat drones, I should be able to finish the command tank within a week if I funnel more resources into it and cut down on some of the weapons, the command tank will be missing most of its missiles but it will still have its lasers, shields and cannons, along with the rest of the army that I have already had built, there are roughly 60 scout tanks, 40 shield tanks, and 5 drone tanks.
These forces should allow the assault mind to claim and hold a resource patch long enough for the defensive and construction minds to fortify it. Which will in turn give us the resources we need to finish the army and send it out to take even more resources.
This set back has certainly slowed us down but it definitely has not stopped us yet.
Since there isn't actually much for me to do on the war front currently, I've been spending the bulk of my time working on taking apart the ship, the decoding is frustrating, but I am making some progress on the less secure files, so I'll be able to read those soon, soon probably being after the attack to claim a new source of resources. And the actual components of the ship are enlightening in many ways. I have already designed upgrades for the train and tanks based off of what I learned from the ships engine, and I've been working on recreating its hull for use on tanks and my armor, the work isn't nearly done yet though.
So yeah the assault mind is going to finish its training before its army is completed and then its first mission will be with an incomplete army, not my best work but hopefully the assault mind can pull through, I mean I did train it for this after all.
AN-
Posted this from my phone, so any errors are now blamed on that rather than incompetence on my part
I'm writing this log a day or so after my medical scan finished processing, my body is in as good of health as can be expected, and the modifications I made to it have integrated and show no signs of malfunction or rejection. This is the good news, the other news, I'm not quite sure whether it's good or bad yet, is that my body shows signs of being at a vat grown one, there are no signs of wear from before I crashed here, not even basic joint wear or a tan from being in the sun. not even any birthmarks or old moles. And further evidence that I am some sort of vat grown clone is that my DNA is "abnormally routine" as in little of it is redundant or unused, further pointing to me being a specialty clone.
I apparently wasn't done growing either, which is why a 16 year old was seemingly alone on the ship, the medical scanner seems to think I was supposed to be grown until I was 18 and then held in stasis till I arrived at my destination. There isn't really anything I can do with this information yet, I can try to learn more by examining the ship and the vat I apparently came out of but besides now wanting to learn more about myself this information isn't really an issue, if I'm lucky I might even find out what my name was supposed to be.
In other less world shifting news, the minds did fine while I was undergoing the medical scan, the logistics mind managed to design a blueprint for the boat port I wanted, the defensive mind held of the many bug attacks, and the construction mind seems to have begun covering everything in gold and blue concrete, I approve of all these things.
So yeah with the factory largely running fine on its own I can turn my attention back to the assault mind, its currently running simulations of battle against different known varieties of bugs and a fair few I just made up, I'm kinda treating it like an RTS, where I play as the bug horde and the assault mind uses varying numbers of its vehicles to fight me off, whenever the assault mind is winning reliably, I either increase the number and strength of my bugs, or I give them fewer or damaged units.
This seems to be helping the mind build a better sense of tactics, and it is a rather fun way to spend my time, I'm even planning of having the defensive and assault mind compete, with the assault mind being given orders to take a factory controlled by the defensive mind, I see no reason my minds should be one trick hiveminds.
The actual fleet for the assault mind is coming along slowly, I'm planning for it to consist of 80 light tanks, 50 tanks, 20 drone tanks, and the command walker (it needs a better name). This force should outnumber the typical amount of bugs stationed at any individual hive by about 20, and significantly outrange them as well, it won't be able to withstand a coordinated attack by multiple hives, but thats why it moves fast.
The army should be able to hit and wipe out a hive within 10 minutes and get back to the base rapidly, the whole operation will ideally never last longer than 40 minutes, which is how long the bugs take to respond en masse to my trips outside.
Since Im finally upgrading my ability to meet the bugs head to head Ive decided I also need to upgrade my defenses, I've made a blueprint for sturdier walls using reinforced concrete, which was stupidly simple, and Ive also decided that there is no real reason I shouldn't be able to have missile turrets, I mean they should even work well against aerial targets, just because I don't have a blueprint for a missile turret does not mean that I won't make one.
Log #22
The assault mind has finished its earliest stage of training, and I have begun pitting it against the defensive mind in addition to its training against me and the simulator, so far it seems to be doing poorly at assaulting a fortified position like the factory, but does seem to be learning new tactics, so that's good.
With training the assault mind no longer taking as much of my time I decided to work on getting their army built before they finish training, the light and normal tanks are coming along fine but the drone and command tanks take significantly more resources, like enough resources I'm pretty sure we are violating the whole "energy cannot be created or destroyed" part of physics, but this factory has always had a distant relation to reality anyway so that's not actually surprising.
What is surprising is that even by optimistic estimates we don't actually have enough resources left in our mines to finish the army and build an outpost to claim a new mine, I had a feeling this would be the case though, which is why I had the boat port made, its stealth mission time.
If I don't have enough resources to build an army without securing a new source, I will just have to secure a new force without an army, there are plenty of viable mines throughout my radar range and a fair few of them don't even have hives on them yet, the only problem is that even if the resources dont have hives on them, they do have hives between us and them.
The solution to this problem is a stealth mission via the river, I will be going down the river in my power armor, walking along the bottom where the bugs either can't or don't bother going, a few miles down the river is a relatively small resource patch without many bugs near it, which means its optimal for my needs.
To do this I'll need to retrofit my suit to work well underwater, and while I'm at it I'll upgrade it too. I will need weapons that can work underwater, and I'll need boats to ferry the resources back once the outpost is set up.
None of these are problems that will take more than a day or two to solve and if nothing goes wrong with this trip I should be able to secure a source of resources to build my army with.
There isn't much news on the whole clone front, I've started decrypting the more intact bits of data on the ship, the progress is abysmally slow though and my freaky building and optimizing powers aren't actually helping me with this, while usually I can look at something and see ways to improve it or how to take it apart, the entire ship is just like a blank spot, I get nothing from them so it looks like I'll have to do all of this the hard way, I'm of half a mind to just build a mind to do it for me but this isn't urgent and I don't really want to waste the power on a side project that won't really help me survive here.
Log #23
Just a short log before I begin my stealthy swim, I have made a few weapons for my journey. I have a high powered harpoon gun, a sorta knife/ short sword hybrid, an electrical discharge on my suit, and pure concussion grenades.
I'm most proud of the sword really, it only has 10 minutes of active use before it just becomes a regular sword, but for those 10 minutes it can cut through stone and metal without dulling or breaking, that isn't to say i could cut through metal with this sword without either being augmented or wearing my suit but it does mean i won't accidentally snap the thing by hitting something with it to hard for at least 10 minutes, I mean I tried at least 12 different alloys before i gave up on making a sword either tough enough or sharp enough to work before deciding to reinforce it with a modified shield generator, as the shields don't actually project a force field or anything, they just hold the material they are "shielding" in place, preventing any damage or change. They all either snapped or wouldn't keep an edge for long enough. So the solution was a shield sword.
My armor upgrade was mainly increasing its shield strength and battery life and making it reprocess my breath into breathable air, which shows my dissection of the ship does pay fruit, cause I definitely did not have that air processor in a blueprint, I was just stuck with a basic gasmask. Now I have a sleek silver helmet rather than what was basically just an armored gas mask and hat, I also improved my armours cameras so i can actually see underwater, heat, sonar, and electrical signals are all visible to me now, which should be more than enough to see on the bottom of a river without just shining a bright ass light everywhere.
The boat I designed is rather simple, it can carry about 1 and a half train carts worth of ore and bring it back at 35 mph, not the fastest thing I've built but fast enough for a boat that i'm trying to build for cheap, it has a small shield generator incase it hits something as the hull on the thing is thin enough to get a hole if it were to crash into something at speed.
With everything done I feel ready to begin the trip, not happy mind you but definitely prepared to swim down miles of creek and into hostile territory.
Log #24
Cat shaped logistics robots, thats the new plan, with 12 hours of fuel, the ability to spray said fuel as napalm breath, they can carry 200 pounds and still climb up a sheer slope and have very sharp claws, they have moderately thick armor for a drone and enough shielding to survive grazes and acid splash without immediately breaking, they'll need to survive at least 2 trips to the outpost to even pay themselves off but at least it means I will never have to get in that fucking river again, I hate this planet so much.
The trip started off fine, but then I figured out just why the massive bug monsters never seem to get in the water, it's because there are even larger fish monsters! What the hell kinda ecosystem is there on this damned planet anyway, the only animals are massive bugs, massive sea monsters, and some small fish, how does that make any sort of sense?
Anyway back on the whole river catastrophe, about the only reason I'm still alive is my new discharge defense, my shield sword, and my significantly buffed shields, the armors still damn near ruined though, what with the acid damage and teeth marks.
I didn't even take the river all the way to the outpost, I crawled out about a mile from the base and just followed the shoreline to the resource deposit. If I had stayed in that river I would have been torn to shreds, armour and all.
It was terrifying enough that I'm pretty sure I had a heart attack and needed the backup pump to run long enough for my heart to get its shit back together, so yeah, not currently planning on getting back in that water getting back in the water. Getting eaten by a giant tentacle shark in a river so dark I can't see anything further than 3 inches from my face is something that only needs to happen never, and the fact that it did is a valid reason to never even get near that damned river.
Even with the river being the awful thing it is, I still managed to get the outpost running, it's just that if I try to send boats down the river the giant fish will eat them, and if I don't have resources to finish my land army I certainly don't have the resources to build a navy, not that i want to either, the fish can keep their river.
So yeah cat drones, I figure that if I can't have boats take the resources back to base and i cant run a train line, that what I can do is have some stealthy bots haul the resources back, its less efficient and not very cost effective, but it's the best option I currently got.
The cats will hide in trees or fields when bugs are nearby and if they get caught will spray fire to cover their escape, a fair few will probably get destroyed but as long as more than half can make 2 trips, it should work, its slow and probably stupid but its what I'm doing.
The drones will be controlled by the logistics and assault minds, as a joint effort, with the assault mind handling the hiding and attacking and the logistics running them outside of combat, I'm making about 100 of the things to start with, and hopefully nothing goes wrong.
Log #25
My armour has been repaired and my numerous bruises have healed, so overall the river trip hasn't hurt much but my psyche long term. The cat drones have been running twice a day and roughly 60-90 percent make it back each trip, and I always bring their numbers back up to 100 with what they bring back, so the plan to get more resources is coming along, with the current rate of resource income it'll take a few weeks to finish the army, and that's if I grow the cat drones numbers above 100.
But I am planning to shift focus on finishing the command tank and making more cat drones, I should be able to finish the command tank within a week if I funnel more resources into it and cut down on some of the weapons, the command tank will be missing most of its missiles but it will still have its lasers, shields and cannons, along with the rest of the army that I have already had built, there are roughly 60 scout tanks, 40 shield tanks, and 5 drone tanks.
These forces should allow the assault mind to claim and hold a resource patch long enough for the defensive and construction minds to fortify it. Which will in turn give us the resources we need to finish the army and send it out to take even more resources.
This set back has certainly slowed us down but it definitely has not stopped us yet.
Since there isn't actually much for me to do on the war front currently, I've been spending the bulk of my time working on taking apart the ship, the decoding is frustrating, but I am making some progress on the less secure files, so I'll be able to read those soon, soon probably being after the attack to claim a new source of resources. And the actual components of the ship are enlightening in many ways. I have already designed upgrades for the train and tanks based off of what I learned from the ships engine, and I've been working on recreating its hull for use on tanks and my armor, the work isn't nearly done yet though.
So yeah the assault mind is going to finish its training before its army is completed and then its first mission will be with an incomplete army, not my best work but hopefully the assault mind can pull through, I mean I did train it for this after all.
AN-
Posted this from my phone, so any errors are now blamed on that rather than incompetence on my part
Logs 26-30
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
Log #26 - the battle
There is nothing quite as empowering as riding around in a giant tank to go blow up massive hordes of insects, and the vindictive satisfaction I got from watching those nests pop will keep me warm at night for months to come.
The attack started with the assault mind sending the scout tanks to encircle the hive cluster with fire to prevent any reinforcement or escape attempts by the bugs, then the command tank opened up with its main cannons, utterly destroying a few nests and thoroughly provoking the hive, they charged straight at the command tank to kill the threat and then got flanked by the shield tanks and the drones from the drone and command tanks, the flanking attack cut a swath through the horde, and when the remnants of the horde finally got into range of the command tank the bugs couldn't even get through its shield before getting finished off by the command tanks turrets and the flanking tank battalion, the bugs eventually decided to pull back and attack the flanking tanks but the tanks had already retreated behind the wall of fire put up by the scouts.
We only lost 2 scout tanks when making the initial fire encirclement and we didn't lose anything from the actual purging of the nest. So the first half of the operation was a success by any measure. The assault mind then set the shield tanks to destroying the remaining nests and the rest of the tanks to patrolling a defensive perimeter to prepare for the counter attack from the nearby hive clusters. And while that was happening the construction mind was running the train line the logistics mind had planned, and I had gotten out of the command tank and begun setting up a wall around the resource deposit.
I only had one half of the wall done by the time the counter attack came, well counter attacks, there were 3 separate hordes coming towards the outpost, and each was larger than the force defending the nests we had just purged, the assault mind split the scouts into two groups to harass two of the oncoming hordes by spraying the ground in front of them with fire and launching flames and bullets into the sides of the hordes, while it thinned the largest of the approaching hordes itself using its main gun.
By the time the hordes had arrived the 2 smaller swarms forces were covered in burns and the edges of the hordes were significantly wounded, while the largest horde was outright missing significant chunks, and if your wondering why I am describing each horde like an individual beast rather than a collection of individuals, I can only say that they acted more like one large animal, moving as one large beast to swarm towards our defensive line rather than as individuals.
The assault mind held up to this flood well, and while it had lost a fair few scout tanks while harassing the hordes, it still had the majority of its forces, so with the command tank leading the charge and absorbing most of the acid, the assault mind sent its forces rushing towards the largest of the swarms (even though by now it was no longer actually the largest I am still going to call it that) and began mulching the horde of bugs
While this was happening one of the hordes of bugs noticed that I was all by my lonesome, which I really should have expected, and my walls were not near ready enough to handle a horde of this size, so I stood on top of my wall and unleashed enough ordinance to make a tank blush, dozens of missiles carved swaths out of the horde while the turrets on the wall thinned the head of the approaching hoard, still I was just one man and they soon reached my wall and the larger bugs began melting and eating the wall while the nibblers and winged ones swarmed me, they didn't have shit on the fish though and the discharge fried all the smaller bugs that had swarmed me.
I then made the excellent tactical decision to jump off the wall before it fell with me on it, jumping into the horde of bugs, and with them pressed so tightly together I could actually stand on them like a particularly angry carpet, I just kept crowd surfing to dodge the acid and teeth while unloading the last of my missiles, I had just started dropping grenades when my luck ran dry and a lucky bug pulled me into the horde. So I got out my shotgun and sword and went full badass, I cannot claim any particular skill with a blade but I had strength and couldn't not hit the bugs if I had tried, activating my discharge only bought me a bit of breathing room, and I spent long enough in that horde for my sword to run out of charge, but it was still a sword and I still had plenty of ammo in my shotgun.
I decided it was a good idea to jump into the horde because I figured they couldn't leverage their numbers as well if I was moving through them, and I was right, I still had more than 10 bugs trying to take a chunk out of me at any one moment but that was still better than hundreds launching acid at me, by the time the assault mind finished off the other 2 hordes I was out of ammo for my shotgun and my sword was so dull it worked more like a club, but my shields were intact and I was intact, the horde around me wasn't significantly harmed though, and if the assault mind hadn't blown up all the bugs it could without hitting me I definitely wouldn't have been able to keep that up much longer.
The battle lasted about 45 minutes from start to finish and we ended it with 24 scout tanks, 23 shield tanks, 4 drone tanks, 1 command tank, and one battered engineer as our surviving forces, so everything important survived and the construction mind had managed to run the train line near enough to the outpost during the fight and had begun unloading supplies to build the outpost.
I left the construction and defensive minds to set up the outpost and rode a train back to the base for a well deserved nap while the assault mind parked its command tank within the outpost and sent its less damaged tanks out to patrol the perimeter of the outpost. The battle was a success by all the standards I had set it to, which was foremost surviving with actually claiming the outpost as a distant second. We did both.
Log #27
The new influx of resources means that we can finish up the army for the assault mind, and while that's being built I can focus on the ship, I managed to decode the flight path my ship was following, it looks like this planet wasnt even the final destination, that was a planet that would still be 3 years out if the ship was running, and the ship had been flying from planet to planet for years, the closest planet to where I am that the ship knows about is a 6 year trip out.
That means that IF I manage to get a satellite up into orbit, and IF a ship or station picks it up, that I will then still be on this planet for 6 more years at a minimum.
With the rate that the bugs are growing in 6 years I won't actually be alive anymore unless I manage to kill the bugs off, or at least clear the continent I'm on. So I have 2 real options, build my own FTL ship, which I have no idea how to do and the drive on my sole example is basically slag, or I need to kill all of the bugs.
Neither of these options actually seem feasible, I'm still going to try and get them both done, but it seems like I might actually die here, the planet I was apparently born on too, fitting.
Also this hell planet is apparently called navius if you cared.
Log #28
Since I am apparently going to be stuck here for the foreseeable future I will need to expand the factory rapidly while I still have the advantage over the bugs. The first part of this plan will be to push back all the bugs and establish satellite factories farther out that I can then use to make more armies and mining outposts.
With this feedback loop I should be able to push the bugs back for a few weeks before they adapt and my advance slows to a crawl.
I'll need to expand the processing power and rework the programing on the minds so that they can actually run more than one base and its outposts, so I'll be expanding their minds, eventually I plan for the center factory having nothing but a token factory, with a massive nuclear power plant, and holding the brain of my massive industrial complex, getting all the resources it needs shipped in rather than made here, but that's a long ways off.
The Assaults army has finished being built and the command tank is fully outfitted so they are ready to launch the operation whenever I give the order, and I will be doing that once I make sure the minds can actually handle an expansion of this magnitude.
Log #29
I have come to the conclusion that I have no idea what I'm doing, I know how to make things, but I don't know how or why they work. I bring this up because I took a look at the minds coding and they apparently have names? And the code has grown from what I originally wrote, I mean I knew the code adapted and could change to meet new scenarios, but none of them remotely resemble the starting code or even each other.
I can still edit all of the code, but I don't know how much about how it works anymore, if I even really knew in the first place, I can still see some spots to improve performance or some redundant code and I did that, but I still don't understand what I'm doing so I am not going to make any major changes, just clearing up the clutter and streamlining what I feel I can get away with.
Bulwark- my defensive wall and the first mind I built- I had called them that shortly after I had set them up 'you're to be my little bulwark against the world' if I remember correctly, and apparently they had picked it up as their name, has coding that largely fits it's namesake, a fair bit of its coding is centered around defending the digital infrastructure of the factory, against what I don't really know, but it's largely sturdy and comparatively simple in structure when compared to the other minds even with all the defenses. This simple nature means I felt comfortable making a few more changes, still nothing major but bulwark should now be able to better handle more attacks at once now.
Labyrinthine- my construction mind and the second mind I've built- named because I thought that 'the factory is going to be labyrinthine in construction'. They have more complex coding that seems to loop back and forth repeatedly without a consistent pattern, in other words its a labyrinth of code, I didn't feel comfortable making many changes here, everything looked like it had its place in one big tapestry, but I did modify the mind so that it would be able to grow more with more processing power though, as it wasnt really using the processing power it already had that often.
byzantine - the third of my minds and the one focused on actually making this factory run well- apparently named when I thought "hopefully they will make this factory less byzantine' easily the most complex of the minds, but oddly enough its coding didn't follow its name, it was well organized and formed and it was easy enough to see what each part did, if not how the larger whole worked, I made a fair few changes but largely didn't need to touch anything up, it was already running well
Balistraria- my newest mind, meant for attacking and leading armies- oddly enough I can't say that I have ever even thought of that word, much less sent said thought out onto the network the minds inhabit, oddly enough this mind uses her instead of their in her logs, so apparently she has a gender unlike the others, maybe something to do with having an actual body? Still just proves that I have no idea what's going on, well no, I know exactly what's happening, I just don't know why or how. Anyway her coding is the simplest of the 4 but she is growing in complexity with every simulator session and battle and I think she's developing viruses and malware for cyberwarfare, and it shouldn't be long before she catches up to her ... Siblings? Anyway I improved her code a bit but there wasn't that much I needed to change.
I should probably explain the whole mental network thing,in the figurative back of my mind there is always an awareness of my entire factory, I can see through the radars if I focus, and I'm always aware of attacks on the factory and how much of everything I'm producing and using, it's all being sent to the node in my brain which then processes it into something my mind can understand, as long as I'm within radar coverage of the base I will always know what's going on in the factory, this includes what the minds are doing and allows me to send orders to either individual drones or the minds themselves, and I've used the transmitter from the rocket control unit to make my armours transmit that same information, so I'm no longer restricted by the radars range as long as my suit is working and has power, I literally control the factory with my mind.
So yeah, The minds are maybe sentient, you may be thinking "oh no what if they rebel against their creators and kill you!' But honestly I'm also technically an artificial intelligence too, I was made in a tube and had all my knowledge implanted before my birth, I'm just meatier than they are. And all the coding to protect and obey me is still in place, and I'm pretty sure Bulwark could have cut it off if they had really wanted too, their defenses were no joke, and the minds still obey every thought I send into the network without hesitation, being sapient just helps them follow their orders better. Still dont think I will be making many or any more minds though, making life that will just be stuck on this hell planet with me feels wrong.
None of this changes my current plans or end goal, besides the fact I am making extra sure to have a backup of Balistrarias mind before sending her out to burn bugs in my name
Log #30
Woot! The 30th log, I got into the ship's clock and apparently it crashed 4 months ago, which considering I haven't been keeping track of time came as a fair bit of a surprise, though if I was surprised it wasn't a longer or shorter time I can't really say.
The offensive against the bugs is proceeding well, the assault mind, Balistraia is clearing out the larger hives and holding them against counter attacks while Labyrinthine builds the satellite factory, and Bulwark mans the guns as they are being built and eventually takes over the defense from Balistraia.
The artillery in the main factory is firing constantly to destroy the nests, and thoroughly provoking them into attacking our defensive walls, the bugs are attacking the main factory in absurd numbers and the farthermost wall is in pretty rough condition but it should hold out for at least another day.
The middle wall has been lined with metal and shield generators making it considerably tougher than the outerwall, even if it's not as tall, and at the rate we are destroying the nests we should have gotten everyone of the nests within the artilaries range.
I'm hopeful the attacks will shrink in number as more nests are destroyed and they cant make the bugs as fast, and at the rate the bugs are coming it's all but certain the outerwall will be breached, but I figured this would happen so the outer wall is segmented with internal walls, so the bugs that do breach will be walking into a kill box.
This hurts our production short term but the satellite factories that are being built have already started to compensate for the loss of production at the main factory, building drones, tanks, and enough ammunition to arm multiple small countries, all just to supply the army and main base with supplies to fight off the bugs, I'm not even running the decoders right now, all the resources are going straight into the war effort.
So far it looks like we are going to win though, even if it'll come at the loss of the outer layer of the main factory and hundreds of tanks and drones.
AN- next chapter is an interlude thats taking me a fair bit to write, I'm trying to write organic dialogue and part is a fairly important turning point in this story so I'm taking a bit longer to write it than usual.
There is nothing quite as empowering as riding around in a giant tank to go blow up massive hordes of insects, and the vindictive satisfaction I got from watching those nests pop will keep me warm at night for months to come.
The attack started with the assault mind sending the scout tanks to encircle the hive cluster with fire to prevent any reinforcement or escape attempts by the bugs, then the command tank opened up with its main cannons, utterly destroying a few nests and thoroughly provoking the hive, they charged straight at the command tank to kill the threat and then got flanked by the shield tanks and the drones from the drone and command tanks, the flanking attack cut a swath through the horde, and when the remnants of the horde finally got into range of the command tank the bugs couldn't even get through its shield before getting finished off by the command tanks turrets and the flanking tank battalion, the bugs eventually decided to pull back and attack the flanking tanks but the tanks had already retreated behind the wall of fire put up by the scouts.
We only lost 2 scout tanks when making the initial fire encirclement and we didn't lose anything from the actual purging of the nest. So the first half of the operation was a success by any measure. The assault mind then set the shield tanks to destroying the remaining nests and the rest of the tanks to patrolling a defensive perimeter to prepare for the counter attack from the nearby hive clusters. And while that was happening the construction mind was running the train line the logistics mind had planned, and I had gotten out of the command tank and begun setting up a wall around the resource deposit.
I only had one half of the wall done by the time the counter attack came, well counter attacks, there were 3 separate hordes coming towards the outpost, and each was larger than the force defending the nests we had just purged, the assault mind split the scouts into two groups to harass two of the oncoming hordes by spraying the ground in front of them with fire and launching flames and bullets into the sides of the hordes, while it thinned the largest of the approaching hordes itself using its main gun.
By the time the hordes had arrived the 2 smaller swarms forces were covered in burns and the edges of the hordes were significantly wounded, while the largest horde was outright missing significant chunks, and if your wondering why I am describing each horde like an individual beast rather than a collection of individuals, I can only say that they acted more like one large animal, moving as one large beast to swarm towards our defensive line rather than as individuals.
The assault mind held up to this flood well, and while it had lost a fair few scout tanks while harassing the hordes, it still had the majority of its forces, so with the command tank leading the charge and absorbing most of the acid, the assault mind sent its forces rushing towards the largest of the swarms (even though by now it was no longer actually the largest I am still going to call it that) and began mulching the horde of bugs
While this was happening one of the hordes of bugs noticed that I was all by my lonesome, which I really should have expected, and my walls were not near ready enough to handle a horde of this size, so I stood on top of my wall and unleashed enough ordinance to make a tank blush, dozens of missiles carved swaths out of the horde while the turrets on the wall thinned the head of the approaching hoard, still I was just one man and they soon reached my wall and the larger bugs began melting and eating the wall while the nibblers and winged ones swarmed me, they didn't have shit on the fish though and the discharge fried all the smaller bugs that had swarmed me.
I then made the excellent tactical decision to jump off the wall before it fell with me on it, jumping into the horde of bugs, and with them pressed so tightly together I could actually stand on them like a particularly angry carpet, I just kept crowd surfing to dodge the acid and teeth while unloading the last of my missiles, I had just started dropping grenades when my luck ran dry and a lucky bug pulled me into the horde. So I got out my shotgun and sword and went full badass, I cannot claim any particular skill with a blade but I had strength and couldn't not hit the bugs if I had tried, activating my discharge only bought me a bit of breathing room, and I spent long enough in that horde for my sword to run out of charge, but it was still a sword and I still had plenty of ammo in my shotgun.
I decided it was a good idea to jump into the horde because I figured they couldn't leverage their numbers as well if I was moving through them, and I was right, I still had more than 10 bugs trying to take a chunk out of me at any one moment but that was still better than hundreds launching acid at me, by the time the assault mind finished off the other 2 hordes I was out of ammo for my shotgun and my sword was so dull it worked more like a club, but my shields were intact and I was intact, the horde around me wasn't significantly harmed though, and if the assault mind hadn't blown up all the bugs it could without hitting me I definitely wouldn't have been able to keep that up much longer.
The battle lasted about 45 minutes from start to finish and we ended it with 24 scout tanks, 23 shield tanks, 4 drone tanks, 1 command tank, and one battered engineer as our surviving forces, so everything important survived and the construction mind had managed to run the train line near enough to the outpost during the fight and had begun unloading supplies to build the outpost.
I left the construction and defensive minds to set up the outpost and rode a train back to the base for a well deserved nap while the assault mind parked its command tank within the outpost and sent its less damaged tanks out to patrol the perimeter of the outpost. The battle was a success by all the standards I had set it to, which was foremost surviving with actually claiming the outpost as a distant second. We did both.
Log #27
The new influx of resources means that we can finish up the army for the assault mind, and while that's being built I can focus on the ship, I managed to decode the flight path my ship was following, it looks like this planet wasnt even the final destination, that was a planet that would still be 3 years out if the ship was running, and the ship had been flying from planet to planet for years, the closest planet to where I am that the ship knows about is a 6 year trip out.
That means that IF I manage to get a satellite up into orbit, and IF a ship or station picks it up, that I will then still be on this planet for 6 more years at a minimum.
With the rate that the bugs are growing in 6 years I won't actually be alive anymore unless I manage to kill the bugs off, or at least clear the continent I'm on. So I have 2 real options, build my own FTL ship, which I have no idea how to do and the drive on my sole example is basically slag, or I need to kill all of the bugs.
Neither of these options actually seem feasible, I'm still going to try and get them both done, but it seems like I might actually die here, the planet I was apparently born on too, fitting.
Also this hell planet is apparently called navius if you cared.
Log #28
Since I am apparently going to be stuck here for the foreseeable future I will need to expand the factory rapidly while I still have the advantage over the bugs. The first part of this plan will be to push back all the bugs and establish satellite factories farther out that I can then use to make more armies and mining outposts.
With this feedback loop I should be able to push the bugs back for a few weeks before they adapt and my advance slows to a crawl.
I'll need to expand the processing power and rework the programing on the minds so that they can actually run more than one base and its outposts, so I'll be expanding their minds, eventually I plan for the center factory having nothing but a token factory, with a massive nuclear power plant, and holding the brain of my massive industrial complex, getting all the resources it needs shipped in rather than made here, but that's a long ways off.
The Assaults army has finished being built and the command tank is fully outfitted so they are ready to launch the operation whenever I give the order, and I will be doing that once I make sure the minds can actually handle an expansion of this magnitude.
Log #29
I have come to the conclusion that I have no idea what I'm doing, I know how to make things, but I don't know how or why they work. I bring this up because I took a look at the minds coding and they apparently have names? And the code has grown from what I originally wrote, I mean I knew the code adapted and could change to meet new scenarios, but none of them remotely resemble the starting code or even each other.
I can still edit all of the code, but I don't know how much about how it works anymore, if I even really knew in the first place, I can still see some spots to improve performance or some redundant code and I did that, but I still don't understand what I'm doing so I am not going to make any major changes, just clearing up the clutter and streamlining what I feel I can get away with.
Bulwark- my defensive wall and the first mind I built- I had called them that shortly after I had set them up 'you're to be my little bulwark against the world' if I remember correctly, and apparently they had picked it up as their name, has coding that largely fits it's namesake, a fair bit of its coding is centered around defending the digital infrastructure of the factory, against what I don't really know, but it's largely sturdy and comparatively simple in structure when compared to the other minds even with all the defenses. This simple nature means I felt comfortable making a few more changes, still nothing major but bulwark should now be able to better handle more attacks at once now.
Labyrinthine- my construction mind and the second mind I've built- named because I thought that 'the factory is going to be labyrinthine in construction'. They have more complex coding that seems to loop back and forth repeatedly without a consistent pattern, in other words its a labyrinth of code, I didn't feel comfortable making many changes here, everything looked like it had its place in one big tapestry, but I did modify the mind so that it would be able to grow more with more processing power though, as it wasnt really using the processing power it already had that often.
byzantine - the third of my minds and the one focused on actually making this factory run well- apparently named when I thought "hopefully they will make this factory less byzantine' easily the most complex of the minds, but oddly enough its coding didn't follow its name, it was well organized and formed and it was easy enough to see what each part did, if not how the larger whole worked, I made a fair few changes but largely didn't need to touch anything up, it was already running well
Balistraria- my newest mind, meant for attacking and leading armies- oddly enough I can't say that I have ever even thought of that word, much less sent said thought out onto the network the minds inhabit, oddly enough this mind uses her instead of their in her logs, so apparently she has a gender unlike the others, maybe something to do with having an actual body? Still just proves that I have no idea what's going on, well no, I know exactly what's happening, I just don't know why or how. Anyway her coding is the simplest of the 4 but she is growing in complexity with every simulator session and battle and I think she's developing viruses and malware for cyberwarfare, and it shouldn't be long before she catches up to her ... Siblings? Anyway I improved her code a bit but there wasn't that much I needed to change.
I should probably explain the whole mental network thing,in the figurative back of my mind there is always an awareness of my entire factory, I can see through the radars if I focus, and I'm always aware of attacks on the factory and how much of everything I'm producing and using, it's all being sent to the node in my brain which then processes it into something my mind can understand, as long as I'm within radar coverage of the base I will always know what's going on in the factory, this includes what the minds are doing and allows me to send orders to either individual drones or the minds themselves, and I've used the transmitter from the rocket control unit to make my armours transmit that same information, so I'm no longer restricted by the radars range as long as my suit is working and has power, I literally control the factory with my mind.
So yeah, The minds are maybe sentient, you may be thinking "oh no what if they rebel against their creators and kill you!' But honestly I'm also technically an artificial intelligence too, I was made in a tube and had all my knowledge implanted before my birth, I'm just meatier than they are. And all the coding to protect and obey me is still in place, and I'm pretty sure Bulwark could have cut it off if they had really wanted too, their defenses were no joke, and the minds still obey every thought I send into the network without hesitation, being sapient just helps them follow their orders better. Still dont think I will be making many or any more minds though, making life that will just be stuck on this hell planet with me feels wrong.
None of this changes my current plans or end goal, besides the fact I am making extra sure to have a backup of Balistrarias mind before sending her out to burn bugs in my name
Log #30
Woot! The 30th log, I got into the ship's clock and apparently it crashed 4 months ago, which considering I haven't been keeping track of time came as a fair bit of a surprise, though if I was surprised it wasn't a longer or shorter time I can't really say.
The offensive against the bugs is proceeding well, the assault mind, Balistraia is clearing out the larger hives and holding them against counter attacks while Labyrinthine builds the satellite factory, and Bulwark mans the guns as they are being built and eventually takes over the defense from Balistraia.
The artillery in the main factory is firing constantly to destroy the nests, and thoroughly provoking them into attacking our defensive walls, the bugs are attacking the main factory in absurd numbers and the farthermost wall is in pretty rough condition but it should hold out for at least another day.
The middle wall has been lined with metal and shield generators making it considerably tougher than the outerwall, even if it's not as tall, and at the rate we are destroying the nests we should have gotten everyone of the nests within the artilaries range.
I'm hopeful the attacks will shrink in number as more nests are destroyed and they cant make the bugs as fast, and at the rate the bugs are coming it's all but certain the outerwall will be breached, but I figured this would happen so the outer wall is segmented with internal walls, so the bugs that do breach will be walking into a kill box.
This hurts our production short term but the satellite factories that are being built have already started to compensate for the loss of production at the main factory, building drones, tanks, and enough ammunition to arm multiple small countries, all just to supply the army and main base with supplies to fight off the bugs, I'm not even running the decoders right now, all the resources are going straight into the war effort.
So far it looks like we are going to win though, even if it'll come at the loss of the outer layer of the main factory and hundreds of tanks and drones.
AN- next chapter is an interlude thats taking me a fair bit to write, I'm trying to write organic dialogue and part is a fairly important turning point in this story so I'm taking a bit longer to write it than usual.
Interlude - Balistraria
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
Balistraia was triple checking each of her unit's conditions, making sure that each tank and drone was fully equipped and ready for deployment, she spent extra time ensuring that the command tanks shields were operating at full capacity as the commander would be joining her during her first live mission and she refused to allow any harm to come to him if she could prevent it.
The commander was currently sitting in a chair watching her preparations through the command tanks cameras and she would not be making a poor showing during her first operations prepwork.
After she had finished her 3rd troop inspection Balistraria sent a request for her older sibling and superior Bulwark to begin opening the factories gates and allowing her troops to sally forth for their first operation, the gates slowly began to slide open and she readied her scout class tanks, they would be leading the charge to ensure that the main force wasn't surprised by any enemy forces before Balistraia managed to reach the hive cluster.
Balistraia watched through the dozens of cameras that were attached to her scout tanks and began plotting the route she would take through the forest, she would need to plot her route around any known bug patrols, thankfully she already had practice avoiding bug patrols thanks to the commander assigning her command over the courier drone network with Byzantine, and easily avoided or destroyed all of the bug patrols she had spotted.
She had begun to close in on her destination and so began to send the scout tanks even farther ahead of the rest of her force to flank and surround the targeted hive cluster. She would allow no bugs to escape her first true battle, as her scouts got into position Balistraria had the rest of her units get into a formation behind her most heavily armed and armored unit, her bastion and command tank, and as her commanders strongest unit it would have no trouble weathering the bugs strongest attacks, even if it was partly unfinished.
As Balistraia was about to begin her attack she felt her commander's gaze fall upon the cameras within her command tank, and with her commander watching her she gave the order for her troops to open fire.
Her scout tanks surrounded the hive cluster with fire hot enough to incinerate the majority of the bugs present at this hive cluster, this burst of heat and light drew the attention of the bugs and they began to charge from their hives to chase after the tanks, this cluster has not been fighting the factory as often though and as such had not been developing resistances to the extent of more violent hive clusters, so this charge straight into the flames invariably lead to death in the bugs that tried, she only lost a few scout tanks to lucky hits from spitter variant bugs from behind the wall of fire, this diversion and encirclement served its job well as the hives were left with only a token force of insects to defend them, practically wide open for her to hit with her main cannon.
And if the bugs were just going to leave their homes wide open Balistraria would take advantage of their gift and she began to open fire with her main cannon, and as each resounding boom shook the earth an explosion would erupt among the bug hives, destroying multiple hives with each shot.
The bugs attention immediately shifted towards her command tank and they began to charge towards her largest unit, which was currently sitting right out in the open, and as the bugs began to close in she opened fire into them with her main cannon to further provoke them into recklessly charging her command tank, as the bugs passed a halfway point between the command tank and the remaining hives she sent her shield tanks into the flanks of the horde with her drones as support.
With such a large force attacking them from behind the bugs had no choice but to charge towards the lone command tank, presumably thinking the main cannon was its only offensive weapon, she was delighted to show the bugs their error in approaching her main body, and once the bugs were far enough into her command tanks range to make escape unlikely she began to unload with her smaller cannons and lasers, rapidly bringing the hordes numbers down, when the bugs acid variant finally got into range of her command tank they found that their acid had no effect and soon began to try and retreat towards her smaller units, making the assumption that her other tanks would be easier targets.
She had predicted this though and had her remaining scout tanks had already cut off the bugs attack lines with a wall of fire, preventing the bugs from even testing their assumption, with their retreat cut off and fire coming in from all sides it was easy to simply unload into the horde and soon the bugs were all dead.
With the enemy's attack force dead she could safely order the scout tanks to burn the bugs bodies and have the shield tanks begin destroying the bugs remaining nests before they could produce any more bugs.
She felt her commander stand up within the command tank and he soon began walking towards the command tanks exit hatch and she received a message from her commanders mind,
"I'm heading out to build the outposts walls, the construction mind is building the rail here, we just need to hold this spot till they arrive"
She always found it odd to communicate with the commander, rather than simple words he sent ideas, thoughts, and emotions, this time though he simply sent an agreement, and she understood those just fine, but when he sent raw emotion and thought into the communication as well, she would have often trouble processing his communications into coherent words or ideas, still she often weathered her commanders thoughts, a mixture of dread, anticipation, and glee and was getting better at parsing his intentions, with this simple message received she sent back her own simple conformation.
While her commander built his outpost Balistraia sent forth her scout tanks into the surrounding forest to find and harass the incoming enemy hordes and she began to bring her main cannon into line with the largest of the hordes spotted on her radar systems, she wanted to deal with this group personally, simultaneously controlling each scout tank while aiming her main gun was a simple task for her, and she soon began to rain fire both literally and metaphorically onto the bug hordes.
These hordes were better prepared for her strategies though, the hives they came from had fought Bulwark before, and so they resisted the heat of the flames far better than the previous bugs, and began destroying any scout tank that got too close with a rapid acid strike.
She hated losing units, having one of her bodies send frantic damage reports before its feed cut off was disorienting and annoying in equal parts, but while the bugs did destroy plenty of scout tanks, she reaped a greater tally with plenty of the weaker bugs all falling to the flames, and by the time the hordes came into range of her shield tanks they were significantly weakened.
The horde she personally targeted with the her main gun fared even worse, she aimed for the largest of the bugs and would see them rapidly explode, taking out large chunks of the oncoming force and removing any of the bugs that could actually damage her command tank, which was going to be helpful considering her plan largely just involved using her command tank as a moving shield for the smaller tanks to shoot from. When this horde reached the large battle field around the growing outpost, Balistraia began to march her command tank towards it seeking to crush it quickly before turning to the other hordes.
As she did this she was worried to note that one of the hordes wasn't chasing her as planned, but instead was moving to attack her commander, she quickly opened a link to him and
"Fucking called it, knew this was gonna happen"
"Welp is not like I haven't prepared for this, I mean we have the rocket launcher and plenty of ammo"
" we are totally going to die, the walls not even a third of the way done, we only have like 5 turrets up"
"And?, so what, we have power armour and if those fucking fish couldn't get through it these bugs certainly won't"
In the few milliseconds she had been connected to her commander's mind she felt dozens of competing thoughts all planning how to survive his situation, they were not truly words but rather a mix of intent and emotions, all laced with bitterness, fear, and spite. Only a few of the thoughts had emotions that could be considered positive, if you considered glee or smugness positive. Still she had to interject her own report into the chaos- she composed her message "commander if you can hold for a few minutes I can come and evacuate you"
His mind stilled for a moment as his subconscious prepared an order,
"deal with the other 2 hordes, I will manage while you do so, we will not be evacuating and I will be fine"
While this response was very different, a single thought laced with conviction rather than a chaotic mix of thoughts constant flowing, it didn't change the fact that she now had her orders and she would follow them, she turned her attention back towards the horde she was currently racing towards and resolved to finish her enemies a quick as she could, increasing her speed in the process.
As Balistraia engaged the horde she saw her commander do likewise, and they both began unloading death unto their respective hordes, she was making excellent progress through the first of her hordes when it received reinforcement from the horde that had neglected to charge her commander, she had begun losing tanks in earnest with her focus on ending this fight quickly but it was working well, she was whittling the hordes down faster than they could cut her tanks down and it was only a matter of time before she could…
Had her commander just jumped from his perfectly good defensive position straight into the horde of bugs trying to kill him? Thinking that she had faulty optics pointing in his direction she quickly turned another camera towards her commander, and no he was definitely running on top the horde of bugs while dropping grenades behind him, Balistraia began to double down on her offensive towards the bugs, she needed to get to her commander before he got himself killed she quickly opened a link to her commander to ask for a report and
"Why the hell did you do that?!?! There was a perfectly good chunk of wall behind us, you idiot!"
" The bugs were melting the damned wall, what did you want from me! If we had stayed up there those spitters would have turned us into a god damned liquid"
"That's not a good reason to jump into the center of them, we could just kite the damned things!"
"I'm gonna die"
"Probably, or is that a maybe?"
"Why isn't the discharge defense working, why isn't the discharge defense working?!!?"
"Wait it is, it's just not doing jack to bugs this big, huh"
"Just rip the damned things in half!"
"Oh I'm getting a ping from the main factory, the outer walls getting attacked"
"Does that seem important right now!, focus on the bugs trying to eat us you dumb bastard"
"I hate me sometimes, well most times, I mean I can be getting eaten alive by giant bugs but a single notification and I immediately go 'ooh shiny and check it', why? Because I hate me that's why"
" the shield isn't going down far, I'll be fine as long as I stop panicking, probably"
The stream of consciousness came to an abrupt halt as Balitraia saw a bug grab her commander's leg and pull him into the center of the horde, before it began at an even more frantic pace than before.
"Say it's gonna be fine, sure if by fine you mean utterly surrounded by massive cockroaches trying to melt me!, this is not fine"
"I don't even know how to use a sword, why did we choose to make a sword?!?!"
"still totally gonna die"
"I have made many mistakes but being born on this planet was the greatest of them"
Balistraria didn't really want to distract her commander from his… important thoughts and decided to focus back on her battle, his shields were holding strong and her commander would probably be fine till she could save him, she had lost a few tanks while dealing with her commanders influx of thoughts, but it was nothing unsustainable and after around a dozen minutes she began to finish off the bug hordes surrounding her.
Balistraria was finally free to turn the majority of her attention to her commander, who was currently beating bugs to death with his shotgun and bashing bug carapace in with his broken sword, she checked on his suits shields and saw they still had 1/8th charge and took her time to line up her shots to not hit her commander with enough shrapnel to break his shields, she opened fire after a few milliseconds and rapidly turned the bugs into bits and pieces with her fury.
Her commander immediately stored his sword and gun and went back to building the wall and Balistraia felt it was safe to interrupt him with a status report now, she entered his mental network and once again felt the weight of his emotions press down on her, now a mix of calmness and exhaustion with hints of pride and vindication.
"That went well all things considered, I didn't die and we get some new resources"
" Yeah with these I will finally have enough resources to finish the assault minds army"
"You Are aware we almost died right?'
"Then we never need to leave the factory again, or even the bunker for that matter"
"I miss the bunker, all safe and behind a nice safe wall, not this shitty not safe at all wall, this wall sucks"
"I should definitely make a bigger bunker"
With the stream of thoughts now slower Balistraria found it remarkably easier to compose her message,
"Commander, I have finished purging the attacking bug horde, what are your further orders?"
She once again felt the chaotic mess of her commanders mind speed up, ideas rapidly being sent forth and discarded by his subconscious, ranging from him having her tanks carry him back to his bunker so he could sleep, to orders to burn every bug on this "god forsaken hell planet" before his mind stilled as his conscious mind decided on an order and sent it to her "patrol the area around the outpost with your non or least damaged units while the defensive and construction mind build the outposts defenses" with her orders received she once again pulled back from her commanders mind and set about carrying out her new orders, parking her damaged tanks within the outposts walls and setting her most functional tanks to patrolling a perimeter.
The construction mind soon had the train line run to the outpost, and her commander immediately took the train back to the factory, presumably to take a nap in his bunker, if his thoughts were to be believed.
Balistraria soon felt the other minds requesting communications, communicating with the other minds was far easier than trying to communicate with her commanders thoughts, rather than a mixture of emotions, intents and, mess of random information, the minds communicated with pure ordered information, she opened a link to the other minds, and quickly sent a status report through,
"losses to tank forces are significant, mission successful, commander and command tank intact and unharmed, currently patrolling perimeter as ordered with remaining tanks"
Along with the message, she sent the states of her various tanks, intact or destroyed, so that Labyrinthine and Byzantine could begin repairs and scavenging operations.
She sent Bulwark a few reports with relevant video files, and Balistraia watched as Bulwark noted slight variations in the bugs behavior and physiology and knew that Bulwark would be adapting the factories defenses to account for these new changes, insignificant though they were.
These things weren't the real reason for this communication though, Balistraria knew that she could have sent all of her reports in information packets without a direct communication being needed, she had her suspicions though as there was only one task all the minds collaborated on, the health of her commander, so she sent a query to confirm or disprove her suspicions, "purpose of direct communications?" Bulwark sent a reply moments later
"to receive a direct assessment on the maker's current mental and physical conditions and the discussion of possible problems and solutions",
It seemed Balisraia was correct, This was about the commanders deteriorating mental health,
"The commanders physical health is nominal, His augmentations remain operational and he sustained no true damage during the attack, the only current issue is that insufficient nutrient intake is reducing the effects of the muscle enhancement, but while the commanders physical health is stable the commanders metal state continues to deteriorate, his mental activity is steadily becoming less stable and he seems to be approaching a mental breakdown",
This assessment was met with a few milliseconds of silence before Bulwark posed a question to the other minds,
"possible plans to improve the maker's mental health?"
This question drew a few seconds of silence rather than a few milliseconds, and Balistraria knew why, the other minds had no ideas, and neither did she.
After a few more seconds Byzantine sent a response,
"The creator often complains about the taste of his sustenance. We could build a new, more advanced food processor to try and improve the taste."
This prompted Labyrinthine to add on to Byzantine's statement,
"The maker seemed to prefer the taste of the aquatic lifeforms to his usual meal"
Bulwark confirmed that Labyrinthine and Byzantine could actually procure the aquatic lifeforms considering that the river was now dead and poisoned from the maker dumping the factories waste into it, and got confirmation that the 2 minds had it handled before proposing his own idea.
Bulwark reminded the other minds that humans were social creatures and needed social contact to stay sane, and that the maker had never even met another human, which would be making the stress of constant fighting significantly worse for his mental state, Balistraia listened as Bulwark proposed that the minds should retrofit a few of the courier drones with more advanced processing power and program them to act as the makers pets, as the files from the medical pod mentioned that a service animal can help with chronic stress and loneliness.
None of the other minds disagreed with this course of action and she didn't find any true flaws with this plan either, and Balistria posed her own idea, if they were already producing modified courier drones to interact with the commander, why not build artificial bodies to interact with the commander as a peer?, the other minds pondered this idea, it would provide the commander with more of the social contact he required as a member of a social species, but the idea was discarded in the end, afterall the minds couldn't make realistic human bodies to pilot nor could they interact with the commander as a human or animal companion would, the benefits to the commanders mental state would be minimal or even negative, with acceptable plans prepared the minds disconnected from the direct call and resumed their tasks, while now working on the plans to aid her commanders mind wherever possible.
The whole call lasted roughly 4 minutes from start to finish and her commander wasn't even back to the factory by the time the discussion came to a close, and with her current tasks being managing the patrol patterns of a single understrength army unit Balistraia was largely free to think back on her performance in battle, it was adequate but only just, and she knew that she could and would improve for her next battle.
AN-
not really happy with this interlude and the next few but eh
The commander was currently sitting in a chair watching her preparations through the command tanks cameras and she would not be making a poor showing during her first operations prepwork.
After she had finished her 3rd troop inspection Balistraria sent a request for her older sibling and superior Bulwark to begin opening the factories gates and allowing her troops to sally forth for their first operation, the gates slowly began to slide open and she readied her scout class tanks, they would be leading the charge to ensure that the main force wasn't surprised by any enemy forces before Balistraia managed to reach the hive cluster.
Balistraia watched through the dozens of cameras that were attached to her scout tanks and began plotting the route she would take through the forest, she would need to plot her route around any known bug patrols, thankfully she already had practice avoiding bug patrols thanks to the commander assigning her command over the courier drone network with Byzantine, and easily avoided or destroyed all of the bug patrols she had spotted.
She had begun to close in on her destination and so began to send the scout tanks even farther ahead of the rest of her force to flank and surround the targeted hive cluster. She would allow no bugs to escape her first true battle, as her scouts got into position Balistraria had the rest of her units get into a formation behind her most heavily armed and armored unit, her bastion and command tank, and as her commanders strongest unit it would have no trouble weathering the bugs strongest attacks, even if it was partly unfinished.
As Balistraia was about to begin her attack she felt her commander's gaze fall upon the cameras within her command tank, and with her commander watching her she gave the order for her troops to open fire.
Her scout tanks surrounded the hive cluster with fire hot enough to incinerate the majority of the bugs present at this hive cluster, this burst of heat and light drew the attention of the bugs and they began to charge from their hives to chase after the tanks, this cluster has not been fighting the factory as often though and as such had not been developing resistances to the extent of more violent hive clusters, so this charge straight into the flames invariably lead to death in the bugs that tried, she only lost a few scout tanks to lucky hits from spitter variant bugs from behind the wall of fire, this diversion and encirclement served its job well as the hives were left with only a token force of insects to defend them, practically wide open for her to hit with her main cannon.
And if the bugs were just going to leave their homes wide open Balistraria would take advantage of their gift and she began to open fire with her main cannon, and as each resounding boom shook the earth an explosion would erupt among the bug hives, destroying multiple hives with each shot.
The bugs attention immediately shifted towards her command tank and they began to charge towards her largest unit, which was currently sitting right out in the open, and as the bugs began to close in she opened fire into them with her main cannon to further provoke them into recklessly charging her command tank, as the bugs passed a halfway point between the command tank and the remaining hives she sent her shield tanks into the flanks of the horde with her drones as support.
With such a large force attacking them from behind the bugs had no choice but to charge towards the lone command tank, presumably thinking the main cannon was its only offensive weapon, she was delighted to show the bugs their error in approaching her main body, and once the bugs were far enough into her command tanks range to make escape unlikely she began to unload with her smaller cannons and lasers, rapidly bringing the hordes numbers down, when the bugs acid variant finally got into range of her command tank they found that their acid had no effect and soon began to try and retreat towards her smaller units, making the assumption that her other tanks would be easier targets.
She had predicted this though and had her remaining scout tanks had already cut off the bugs attack lines with a wall of fire, preventing the bugs from even testing their assumption, with their retreat cut off and fire coming in from all sides it was easy to simply unload into the horde and soon the bugs were all dead.
With the enemy's attack force dead she could safely order the scout tanks to burn the bugs bodies and have the shield tanks begin destroying the bugs remaining nests before they could produce any more bugs.
She felt her commander stand up within the command tank and he soon began walking towards the command tanks exit hatch and she received a message from her commanders mind,
"I'm heading out to build the outposts walls, the construction mind is building the rail here, we just need to hold this spot till they arrive"
She always found it odd to communicate with the commander, rather than simple words he sent ideas, thoughts, and emotions, this time though he simply sent an agreement, and she understood those just fine, but when he sent raw emotion and thought into the communication as well, she would have often trouble processing his communications into coherent words or ideas, still she often weathered her commanders thoughts, a mixture of dread, anticipation, and glee and was getting better at parsing his intentions, with this simple message received she sent back her own simple conformation.
While her commander built his outpost Balistraia sent forth her scout tanks into the surrounding forest to find and harass the incoming enemy hordes and she began to bring her main cannon into line with the largest of the hordes spotted on her radar systems, she wanted to deal with this group personally, simultaneously controlling each scout tank while aiming her main gun was a simple task for her, and she soon began to rain fire both literally and metaphorically onto the bug hordes.
These hordes were better prepared for her strategies though, the hives they came from had fought Bulwark before, and so they resisted the heat of the flames far better than the previous bugs, and began destroying any scout tank that got too close with a rapid acid strike.
She hated losing units, having one of her bodies send frantic damage reports before its feed cut off was disorienting and annoying in equal parts, but while the bugs did destroy plenty of scout tanks, she reaped a greater tally with plenty of the weaker bugs all falling to the flames, and by the time the hordes came into range of her shield tanks they were significantly weakened.
The horde she personally targeted with the her main gun fared even worse, she aimed for the largest of the bugs and would see them rapidly explode, taking out large chunks of the oncoming force and removing any of the bugs that could actually damage her command tank, which was going to be helpful considering her plan largely just involved using her command tank as a moving shield for the smaller tanks to shoot from. When this horde reached the large battle field around the growing outpost, Balistraia began to march her command tank towards it seeking to crush it quickly before turning to the other hordes.
As she did this she was worried to note that one of the hordes wasn't chasing her as planned, but instead was moving to attack her commander, she quickly opened a link to him and
"Fucking called it, knew this was gonna happen"
"Welp is not like I haven't prepared for this, I mean we have the rocket launcher and plenty of ammo"
" we are totally going to die, the walls not even a third of the way done, we only have like 5 turrets up"
"And?, so what, we have power armour and if those fucking fish couldn't get through it these bugs certainly won't"
In the few milliseconds she had been connected to her commander's mind she felt dozens of competing thoughts all planning how to survive his situation, they were not truly words but rather a mix of intent and emotions, all laced with bitterness, fear, and spite. Only a few of the thoughts had emotions that could be considered positive, if you considered glee or smugness positive. Still she had to interject her own report into the chaos- she composed her message "commander if you can hold for a few minutes I can come and evacuate you"
His mind stilled for a moment as his subconscious prepared an order,
"deal with the other 2 hordes, I will manage while you do so, we will not be evacuating and I will be fine"
While this response was very different, a single thought laced with conviction rather than a chaotic mix of thoughts constant flowing, it didn't change the fact that she now had her orders and she would follow them, she turned her attention back towards the horde she was currently racing towards and resolved to finish her enemies a quick as she could, increasing her speed in the process.
As Balistraia engaged the horde she saw her commander do likewise, and they both began unloading death unto their respective hordes, she was making excellent progress through the first of her hordes when it received reinforcement from the horde that had neglected to charge her commander, she had begun losing tanks in earnest with her focus on ending this fight quickly but it was working well, she was whittling the hordes down faster than they could cut her tanks down and it was only a matter of time before she could…
Had her commander just jumped from his perfectly good defensive position straight into the horde of bugs trying to kill him? Thinking that she had faulty optics pointing in his direction she quickly turned another camera towards her commander, and no he was definitely running on top the horde of bugs while dropping grenades behind him, Balistraia began to double down on her offensive towards the bugs, she needed to get to her commander before he got himself killed she quickly opened a link to her commander to ask for a report and
"Why the hell did you do that?!?! There was a perfectly good chunk of wall behind us, you idiot!"
" The bugs were melting the damned wall, what did you want from me! If we had stayed up there those spitters would have turned us into a god damned liquid"
"That's not a good reason to jump into the center of them, we could just kite the damned things!"
"I'm gonna die"
"Probably, or is that a maybe?"
"Why isn't the discharge defense working, why isn't the discharge defense working?!!?"
"Wait it is, it's just not doing jack to bugs this big, huh"
"Just rip the damned things in half!"
"Oh I'm getting a ping from the main factory, the outer walls getting attacked"
"Does that seem important right now!, focus on the bugs trying to eat us you dumb bastard"
"I hate me sometimes, well most times, I mean I can be getting eaten alive by giant bugs but a single notification and I immediately go 'ooh shiny and check it', why? Because I hate me that's why"
" the shield isn't going down far, I'll be fine as long as I stop panicking, probably"
The stream of consciousness came to an abrupt halt as Balitraia saw a bug grab her commander's leg and pull him into the center of the horde, before it began at an even more frantic pace than before.
"Say it's gonna be fine, sure if by fine you mean utterly surrounded by massive cockroaches trying to melt me!, this is not fine"
"I don't even know how to use a sword, why did we choose to make a sword?!?!"
"still totally gonna die"
"I have made many mistakes but being born on this planet was the greatest of them"
Balistraria didn't really want to distract her commander from his… important thoughts and decided to focus back on her battle, his shields were holding strong and her commander would probably be fine till she could save him, she had lost a few tanks while dealing with her commanders influx of thoughts, but it was nothing unsustainable and after around a dozen minutes she began to finish off the bug hordes surrounding her.
Balistraria was finally free to turn the majority of her attention to her commander, who was currently beating bugs to death with his shotgun and bashing bug carapace in with his broken sword, she checked on his suits shields and saw they still had 1/8th charge and took her time to line up her shots to not hit her commander with enough shrapnel to break his shields, she opened fire after a few milliseconds and rapidly turned the bugs into bits and pieces with her fury.
Her commander immediately stored his sword and gun and went back to building the wall and Balistraia felt it was safe to interrupt him with a status report now, she entered his mental network and once again felt the weight of his emotions press down on her, now a mix of calmness and exhaustion with hints of pride and vindication.
"That went well all things considered, I didn't die and we get some new resources"
" Yeah with these I will finally have enough resources to finish the assault minds army"
"You Are aware we almost died right?'
"Then we never need to leave the factory again, or even the bunker for that matter"
"I miss the bunker, all safe and behind a nice safe wall, not this shitty not safe at all wall, this wall sucks"
"I should definitely make a bigger bunker"
With the stream of thoughts now slower Balistraria found it remarkably easier to compose her message,
"Commander, I have finished purging the attacking bug horde, what are your further orders?"
She once again felt the chaotic mess of her commanders mind speed up, ideas rapidly being sent forth and discarded by his subconscious, ranging from him having her tanks carry him back to his bunker so he could sleep, to orders to burn every bug on this "god forsaken hell planet" before his mind stilled as his conscious mind decided on an order and sent it to her "patrol the area around the outpost with your non or least damaged units while the defensive and construction mind build the outposts defenses" with her orders received she once again pulled back from her commanders mind and set about carrying out her new orders, parking her damaged tanks within the outposts walls and setting her most functional tanks to patrolling a perimeter.
The construction mind soon had the train line run to the outpost, and her commander immediately took the train back to the factory, presumably to take a nap in his bunker, if his thoughts were to be believed.
Balistraria soon felt the other minds requesting communications, communicating with the other minds was far easier than trying to communicate with her commanders thoughts, rather than a mixture of emotions, intents and, mess of random information, the minds communicated with pure ordered information, she opened a link to the other minds, and quickly sent a status report through,
"losses to tank forces are significant, mission successful, commander and command tank intact and unharmed, currently patrolling perimeter as ordered with remaining tanks"
Along with the message, she sent the states of her various tanks, intact or destroyed, so that Labyrinthine and Byzantine could begin repairs and scavenging operations.
She sent Bulwark a few reports with relevant video files, and Balistraia watched as Bulwark noted slight variations in the bugs behavior and physiology and knew that Bulwark would be adapting the factories defenses to account for these new changes, insignificant though they were.
These things weren't the real reason for this communication though, Balistraria knew that she could have sent all of her reports in information packets without a direct communication being needed, she had her suspicions though as there was only one task all the minds collaborated on, the health of her commander, so she sent a query to confirm or disprove her suspicions, "purpose of direct communications?" Bulwark sent a reply moments later
"to receive a direct assessment on the maker's current mental and physical conditions and the discussion of possible problems and solutions",
It seemed Balisraia was correct, This was about the commanders deteriorating mental health,
"The commanders physical health is nominal, His augmentations remain operational and he sustained no true damage during the attack, the only current issue is that insufficient nutrient intake is reducing the effects of the muscle enhancement, but while the commanders physical health is stable the commanders metal state continues to deteriorate, his mental activity is steadily becoming less stable and he seems to be approaching a mental breakdown",
This assessment was met with a few milliseconds of silence before Bulwark posed a question to the other minds,
"possible plans to improve the maker's mental health?"
This question drew a few seconds of silence rather than a few milliseconds, and Balistraria knew why, the other minds had no ideas, and neither did she.
After a few more seconds Byzantine sent a response,
"The creator often complains about the taste of his sustenance. We could build a new, more advanced food processor to try and improve the taste."
This prompted Labyrinthine to add on to Byzantine's statement,
"The maker seemed to prefer the taste of the aquatic lifeforms to his usual meal"
Bulwark confirmed that Labyrinthine and Byzantine could actually procure the aquatic lifeforms considering that the river was now dead and poisoned from the maker dumping the factories waste into it, and got confirmation that the 2 minds had it handled before proposing his own idea.
Bulwark reminded the other minds that humans were social creatures and needed social contact to stay sane, and that the maker had never even met another human, which would be making the stress of constant fighting significantly worse for his mental state, Balistraia listened as Bulwark proposed that the minds should retrofit a few of the courier drones with more advanced processing power and program them to act as the makers pets, as the files from the medical pod mentioned that a service animal can help with chronic stress and loneliness.
None of the other minds disagreed with this course of action and she didn't find any true flaws with this plan either, and Balistria posed her own idea, if they were already producing modified courier drones to interact with the commander, why not build artificial bodies to interact with the commander as a peer?, the other minds pondered this idea, it would provide the commander with more of the social contact he required as a member of a social species, but the idea was discarded in the end, afterall the minds couldn't make realistic human bodies to pilot nor could they interact with the commander as a human or animal companion would, the benefits to the commanders mental state would be minimal or even negative, with acceptable plans prepared the minds disconnected from the direct call and resumed their tasks, while now working on the plans to aid her commanders mind wherever possible.
The whole call lasted roughly 4 minutes from start to finish and her commander wasn't even back to the factory by the time the discussion came to a close, and with her current tasks being managing the patrol patterns of a single understrength army unit Balistraia was largely free to think back on her performance in battle, it was adequate but only just, and she knew that she could and would improve for her next battle.
AN-
not really happy with this interlude and the next few but eh
Interlude
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
The day after the battle the minds began to implement their plans, the maker was spending the day working alone to decode and reverse engineer the ships parts so they could act with relatively little supervision.
Byzantine had previously noted that the maker's passive awareness of their actions lessened when the maker was focused on a complex problem and little was more mentally challenging for the maker than working on his crashed ship.
With the bulk of the makers attention elsewhere the minds could divert their own attention to their projects, Bulwark and Labyrinthine were working together to retrofit and improve the makers nutritional processor, designing artificial flavorings and colorings to enhance the makers meals, while also allowing the processor to incorporate fish and sea monster flesh into the meals, rather than being separately cooked.
The minds were not built for large scale innovation nor were they built with creative thought in mind so designing a new machine from scratch was a tall order, and designing an efficient one was even harder, still while the minds were not meant for a task like this that did not mean they would not succeed, the maker had built them well and they would showcase this by overcoming their own limits to build him the best machines they could.
While Bulwark and Labyrinthine handled the food processing machine, Byzantine and Labyrinthine worked on food production, while they only needed to feed one organic it was still becoming increasingly problematic to find reliable sources of uncontaminated fish and tree for the maker to eat, the somewhat obvious solution to this was to begin running an underground fish and algae farm to produce the food the maker would eat everyday, this would ensure the makers food supply stayed controlled and stable as the factory slowly poisoned this world, Byzantine was even planning to selectively breed the fish with desired traits and to further modify them to improve flavor and size. They would produce the best fish on the planet for their maker, as he deserved nothing but their best.
While an ordinary organic mind could only focus its attention on a single task at a time, an inorganic mind had no such limitation, so even with the standard running of the factory and the addition of multiple new projects the minds were not suffering an significant decrease in performance, this meant that each mind could handle more than one project and so while Bulwark was handling defense, designing a new food processor with labyrinthine, and coordinating the construction of additional defenses with Labyrinthine and Byzantine the mind still had processing power to spare towards writing new code for the courier bots.
Still Bulwark wasn't handling the coding alone, besides itself Bulwark new only one other mind that had a near enough idea of how organic minds behaved, while no mind knew buildings and construction as well as Labyrinthine and no mind could understand statistics and throughput like Byzantine, the combat oriented minds understood life better than any other, after all must first understand their enemies to plan around their actions and so the mind Bulwark would be working with was Balistraria.
This unique understanding of life shared by Bulwark and Balistraria made them the ideal pair to deal with designing a machine that would act like an organic, a machine that thinks is simple, any computer qualifies for this and the courier drones were no exception, creating a machine that can reason is more complex but still not insurmountable, you just need to code in priorities and have it change its actions based on that.
No, the true challenge was making a machine that could feel or at least seem to feel, you cannot code in concepts such as love and hate, they are chemical reactions in an organic bodies nervous system, and so a machine cannot feel them, but Bulwark and Balistraria were relatively confident they could get the fire breathing cat drones to act like they did, even if it would be a lot of work.
With the minds and the maker busy the day passed quickly, and as the sun fell below the horizon the maker went to sleep in his bunker.
The maker did not truly dream anymore, as his brain still received the information from the factory in his sleep, instead his dreams were full of feeds and statistics from every corner of the factory, with his mind no longer focused on actively thinking and controlling a body it was free to notice everything within the factory, and so the minds could not work on their projects without the maker seeing, even if he wouldn't truly remember what he saw while he was asleep, he would still have impressions of what had happened and would wake if anything major happened, and while the maker knowing of their projects was not truly a bad thing these tasks were not essential to the survival of the factory, nor were they helping with the makers goal of building a rocket, so the maker would order them to divert the resources and time to more "useful" projects.
This meant they were in more danger of discovery while their maker was asleep, and so had to stop any overt action till morning came and his mind woke from his dream.
As the sun rose on the next day and the maker finished up his daily checkup and maintenance he began his daily inspection of the factory, after ensuring that nothing currently needed his personal attention and eating a marginally improved breakfast he went back to work, allowing the minds to continue their projects.
As Byzantine was currently the mind with the least urgent tasks it was their job to monitor the maker, this was not to say that any of the minds were ever unaware of the maker, they all knew his basic condition and location, no it was currently Byzantines job to monitor the more complex parts of their maker, they were monitoring the makers thoughts and mental state, how many calories he burned and how many he ate, the stresses placed on his bones and muscles, his actions and assumed plans, and the makers augmentations, ensuring that nothing was even beginning to go wrong, and acting if it was.
And so it was Byzantine who contacted the other minds when they felt the makers anticipation rise, it seemed the maker was approaching a breakthrough in decoding the ships flightpath and Byzantine new this information would affect all future plans and so all minds should be aware and present for when the information was finally decoded.
This is why all the minds were listing in on their makers thoughts when he learned that the nearest known world was 6 years away
This is why all the minds felt as their creators mind finally broke from the fear, pain, and stress
This is when their maker died in a hostile world, with a shattered mind and fear in his heart.
This is when their maker was reborn on a hostile world that he knew wanted nothing more than his final death
When their maker learned he could not run
When their maker learned he could not hide
They felt as their maker's mind changed and shifted, his psyche ground into dust and rebuilt anew
When their maker truly became something that could survive on this world
When their maker became something that could conquer this world
And when their maker knew he must fight a world and win to survive
Waking up was always a disorienting experience, the shift in perspective from dream to reality always took me a few minutes to process, and today was no different, still I woke up and was ready to leave my cubby within 3 minutes, and a drone came up to clean my body while another drone began to brush my teeth and comb my hair.
the construction mind seemed to include my daily hygiene under factory maintenance and it was easier to just let it continue than to spend a day changing that, also it meant I didn't need to comb my hair, it was long and curly and loved getting tangled overnight when it was free of the suit, in the nights I left the suit so it could be maintained anyway.
Still with daily hygiene handled I went to go get food from the processor in my bunker, it looked like the construction mind had done some maintenance on it overnight, it wasn't scheduled for a tune up but maybe a part had broken or something, still it seemed to be working now and I got a load of what i'd hesitate to call sludge because it wasn't actually that liquid, more of a paste really.
I sat down on my bench and began to eat "breakfast" and was immediately surprised to find that the paste tasted sweet rather than bitter, maybe the try it had came from had a higher sugar content in its sap? Still it was a welcome change and I made a note to find out how to have each meal continue using the same tree type, the logistics mind could probably handle that.
Now that breakfast was handled I was free to put on my armor, my armor only needed maintenance every few days and I tended to sleep in it, but one of the shield generators was on the fritz and I'd taken it off to let the construction mind perform overnight maintenance, so I was stuck sleeping without the armor last night.
I used to have trouble sleeping with the armor on but now I struggle to sleep without it, and last night was particularly bad. The bugs had attacked overnight and partially destroyed a part of the wall, and the defensive mind had detonated some explosives to stall the attack, The explosion managed to wake me up in the middle of the night so I got an even worse night of sleep.
Still my armor had been repaired overnight and the drones dressed me in my 7 foot tall safety blanket, and with the air filtration and shields running to protect me from the pollution I was ready to go out of my safe little bunker and begin my day.
The heavy steel doors to my bunker slowly slide open, allowing a thin layer of smog to float into the clean air of the bunker before being pulled out by the filtration units.
I stepped out into a cloudy day, with the local sun only barely peeking out from behind the clouds, it was probably going to rain later but I didn't have any meteorological equipment set up so I couldn't know for certain, still it was a nice enough day, expecting that rather than the sound of birds in the morning the ambiance was the distant sound of gunfire and bug screeches. Which honestly was probably more relaxing by now, if I heard silence it would mean the defenses were not working after all.
My visual inspection of the factory went well, there weren't any clear paths for place to place, and I had to dodge and avoid all the moving machinery as I crawled past it but if I had one thing it was practice crawling through this mess, and with how hard it was to move through it technically served as a sort of defense, if you didn't know were to crawl you'd be pulped by all the moving bits.
I made it through the inner factories inspection with all my limbs still attached and hadn't found anything damaged, the construction mind did good work, especially now that the inner factory was just now 10 feet tall all around and multiple layers thick, you couldn't even see my bunker from on top the wall and the only ways out or in were underground belts that you'd have to crawl through, it was my own personal jungle of metal.
The middle layer was much simpler in organization, with everything separated into little blocks and main buses of materials moving everything in a central location, the logistics mind did good work, even if its designs didn't serve dual purpose as base defense
Everything in the middle layer was running smooth as could be though and I soon moved onto the brain of my factory, the mind's mind if you wanted to be funny. Each mind was encased in a concrete bunker with shields to strengthen it so I couldn't do a visual inspection of the minds without disabling the shields and breaking the concrete but I could check on their code through a terminal at each bunker.
There weren't any obvious errors, thankfully as I wasn't sure I could actually fix them, with the inspection done excluding the reactor and outer wall and around an hour spent just walking about looking at things I was beginning to get antsy, still I couldn't just not look at the massive nuclear reactor running my base, even if being close to a giant ball of invisible poison made me uncomfortable.
The reactor took up a fair portion of the middle wall, and the area it sat was boiling, literally, there was steam everywhere and the air was over 125 degrees celsius at its coldest.
With condensation forming on my armor I began my walk. I began my inspection, taking care not to step on any of the heat transfer pipes. I only needed to lose one shoe to learn that lesson, and even if my newer armor would handle the heat fine I had little desire to test that. The actual reactor was practically glowing with heat and the steam was so thick I wouldn't even see it without the armor, and the steam would have boiled my skin off before I got this close without the suit anyhow.
The Reactor was fine though, it still had fuel and none of the components seems damaged and I didn't really want to be here any longer, making a quick escape to more hospitable parts of the factory I began walking towards the outer wall.
I knew the outer wall would be chaotic, I could still hear the turrets, still there wasn't anything essential in the outerwall, it was mainly simple components and ore processing, anything delicate or complex was farther in where the bugs couldn't get.
The outer wall was well defended, but bugs could and did get through, usually smaller flyers or diggers, but it happened so in the outer wall I needed to keep my guard up, making sure my armor was sealed and that the shields were operational I opened the gate to the outer section, the smog was thicker here, pouring from the rows of smelters and rising over the outer wall and into the wilderness, like a giant fog machine, smog machine? Still the belts taking in metal were full and that was all I really needed to see.
The ore intake station was more lively, with trains and courier drones unloading before heading back out for another load, there wasn't anything in particular I needed to check here but I felt the need to walk over here anyway.
I saw the refueling ports for the courier drones, being the only drone to run on gas rather than electricity they needed special ports, but had less refueling time, and I'm pretty sure I saw a bunch of the refueling courier drones just chewing on bits of rock, or bating it around like a yarn ball.
Well I wasn't pretty sure, I was certain that it was either happening or I was hallucinating and it got even weirder as I watched one of the construction drones throw a rock for a courier drone to fetch.
I'm just gonna assume that the construction mind is running tests on the courier drones dexterity and durability and move on, and ignore the two courier drones that are play fighting in the corner of the refueling station. It was going in the folder.
Still with everything crucial in the outer wall running, and no unusual occurrences at all in the factory I was free to go to the ship and begin my day's work, with only 2 hours wasted checking up on everything and no maintenance needed, the construction mind was the best idea.
The first task for the day was examining the new bug types, or rather their corpses, when the defensive mind killed a new bug type it usually gathered a specimen to examine, but it did mean I had a gallery of bugs, ranging from under a foot to over 40, although the 40 foot specimen wasn't actually kept long, and all the notable variations of bugs.
While the changes on a day by day basis in the bugs was minor, over the course of weeks and months it became notable. The first small bug corpse, biter variant had a notably weaker and thinner shell than a current small biter, with numerous other improvements to leg structure and mobility present.
This isn't even getting into the more wild variants, the camouflaged ones just have colored shells and heat dampening to make them harder to spot, simple enough, still dangerous but simple, it was the digging and flying variants that got me, they wouldn't be able to survive, the flying ones had hollows in place of a digestive system and the diggers would melt from their own acid after a day, they were only born to attack me.
It says something when an entire ecosystem wants you dead, I don't know what it says but its something.
Anyway there weren't any notable new variants, just faster, bigger and tougher. Worrying but nothing I needed to make a new weapon for yet, which was the main worry as I can't really escalate more besides making the turrets bigger, I do have nukes in reserve for larger hordes but they aren't wipe out a city nukes just more wipe out a block or 3 nukes.
So I'm still good for now but some of the bugs are hitting 65 feet long and 30 feet tall, they aren't common but they are terrifying, still targeting them with artillery before they even get near the wall seems to work for now.
With the examination and worrying done for now I'm free to move to my second task of the day
Ignoring the slowly fading sounds of screams, chittering and gunfire I began to walk back to the middle layer. I had dragged the ship here when the attacks started getting worse so I would have somewhere safe to examine it.
The ship has been the source of numerous breakthroughs, in new types of metal and the rare bits of machinery I can reverse engineer, so spending a day just trying to puzzle it out is a good use of time when there is nothing urgent that needs my attention.
What isn't necessarily useful is trawling through the ship's logs to find out more about myself, but that's what I'm doing today. You can't have a book in front of you that explains where you come from and why you were born and then not read it, it's impossible.
So rather than doing something definitely useful with my time, I'm spending it instead doing something maybe useful if I'm lucky, and considering that I am on this world in the first place, I am probably not very lucky.
Decoding the ships logs is tedious and annoying work, It takes awhile to get any progress but I have been working on this for a few days now so I'm expecting to get something today, specifically the ships map base, or at least the nearby map, It seems to have multiple separate maps for different areas of the galaxy rather than one big one, still know where I am can only be helpful.
If I am lucky I will find out there's a colony just a system over.
The map loads and I begin searching through it, checking each system for markers showing a colony, I don't see any colonies directly near navius none even a few months of travel out, but I wasn't really expecting there to be, habitable worlds are rare after all, but I had been hoping for a refueling station nearby at the least but I didn't seem to have any luck.
Still there was plenty of map left to search, and there wasn't a need to be worried until I got to the years of travel rather than the months. I still didn't find any planets at 1 years travel, then 2 years, then 3 years.
It was at that point my dread and fear reached a crescendo and I instead began to use the maps search feature to check for any planets at all in this sector, it was a portion of the galaxy that took 10 years to cross, there had to be a planet with people somewhere.
The index showed that there were 2 planets in the sector with people, and it was with great trepidation that I checked the travel time, one was 8 years out, straddling the edge of the sector and the closest was 6 god damn years out.
6 years, I didn't even have 6 months before the damned bugs were taller than my walls and I'd be lucky to even make it 3 months if the bugs kept up their growth rate. And that was 6 years at best speed, the average ship would take 12.
It was as this realization dawned on me that I realized another thing, I was going to die here.
Sure there were long shots, I could kill every bug on this planet before they killed me, or I could try and escape without FTL, maybe I could even whip up my own FTL ship and fly to the nearest colony myself.
But those weren't real plans, the bugs were not something I could fight in mass and kill, I had no cryogenics to make a non FTL flight, and I had literally no idea how FTL worked, and not a single blueprint for it.
Those ideas were prayers, and as my mind realized this, as it finished thinking up any plan it could, any idea no matter how ridiculous to survive, and as all of those ideas failed it would just try more and more.
The thoughts and panic stilled and I didnt even notice as the factory went silent with me, every belt, drone, train, and gun stopped as my mind snapped under the strain. As it was squeezed and squeezed till it broke into pieces.
My body took a slow breath and exhaled as the factory started again, and with it my thoughts, no longer tinged with panic and fear. Instead an odd calmness and certainty arose.
It didn't matter if help was 6 years away even after I had a distress beacon running.
It didn't matter if the bugs would have me dead within a year.
It didn't even matter that everything I had ever built and done would be destroyed before another human could ever see it.
None of the horrible relizations and theories I had come up with truly changed my situation, I would still fight, I would still struggle, and I would still die.
I was a clone sent to build a world alone, so what
The bugs were smart, so what
The minds I built could act on their own, so what
I had magic factory building powers that turned me into a living gray goo scenario, so what
I'd be dead 5 years before help could come, if help would even come for a mass produced drone, so what
None of those things changed what I was going to do, they just changed how hard it would be to survive.
It just meant I would need to step up my game and try harder.
With this realization in my mind my state of calmness solidified and I began planning and issuing orders
I set the minds to planning attacks, expansions and redesigning the outer wall in case it fell, and then I planned for more modifications to my body.
I had thought with the assault mind operational that I'd be free to slowly grow my factory, that was no longer viable.
I had thought that with my walls and turrets I would be safe, that was wrong.
I had hoped that I was a person, but I knew I was a tool.
And if I was a tool I was no longer enough, and so I must be changed and upgraded to suit my new situation, or at least my new understanding of it.
My organic eyes were weak, my human skin tore too easily, my blood could leak, my brain could stop.
If my current modifications lost power from my suit the mechanical ones would stop running, so I needed a power source in my body.
If a part got damaged and I didnt have a medical bay I couldn't fix it, so my body needed the ability to repair itself.
My shields couldn't work on my skin nor flesh, so I needed to weave metal and wire throughout to let the shields work.
If my brain lost blood or oxygen it would stop, so I needed an implant to supply oxygen to my brain no matter what.
There were many ways I could improve my body, there were many ways I could improve my factory.
I had 3 months before the bugs were stronger than me, so I planned to use them well.
If the bugs would grow stronger, if they would change their flesh and bodies just to fight me, I would do the same.
If my enemies evolve then so must I.
3 months to gain ground I could afford to lose, not so hard if you think of it like that.
AN-
we are officially at the point crossovers could happen, where the engineer isn't to OP for most settings, still gonna just be writing more factorio for a few more chapters though, also you guys should talk more, I want some criticism of my work.
Byzantine had previously noted that the maker's passive awareness of their actions lessened when the maker was focused on a complex problem and little was more mentally challenging for the maker than working on his crashed ship.
With the bulk of the makers attention elsewhere the minds could divert their own attention to their projects, Bulwark and Labyrinthine were working together to retrofit and improve the makers nutritional processor, designing artificial flavorings and colorings to enhance the makers meals, while also allowing the processor to incorporate fish and sea monster flesh into the meals, rather than being separately cooked.
The minds were not built for large scale innovation nor were they built with creative thought in mind so designing a new machine from scratch was a tall order, and designing an efficient one was even harder, still while the minds were not meant for a task like this that did not mean they would not succeed, the maker had built them well and they would showcase this by overcoming their own limits to build him the best machines they could.
While Bulwark and Labyrinthine handled the food processing machine, Byzantine and Labyrinthine worked on food production, while they only needed to feed one organic it was still becoming increasingly problematic to find reliable sources of uncontaminated fish and tree for the maker to eat, the somewhat obvious solution to this was to begin running an underground fish and algae farm to produce the food the maker would eat everyday, this would ensure the makers food supply stayed controlled and stable as the factory slowly poisoned this world, Byzantine was even planning to selectively breed the fish with desired traits and to further modify them to improve flavor and size. They would produce the best fish on the planet for their maker, as he deserved nothing but their best.
While an ordinary organic mind could only focus its attention on a single task at a time, an inorganic mind had no such limitation, so even with the standard running of the factory and the addition of multiple new projects the minds were not suffering an significant decrease in performance, this meant that each mind could handle more than one project and so while Bulwark was handling defense, designing a new food processor with labyrinthine, and coordinating the construction of additional defenses with Labyrinthine and Byzantine the mind still had processing power to spare towards writing new code for the courier bots.
Still Bulwark wasn't handling the coding alone, besides itself Bulwark new only one other mind that had a near enough idea of how organic minds behaved, while no mind knew buildings and construction as well as Labyrinthine and no mind could understand statistics and throughput like Byzantine, the combat oriented minds understood life better than any other, after all must first understand their enemies to plan around their actions and so the mind Bulwark would be working with was Balistraria.
This unique understanding of life shared by Bulwark and Balistraria made them the ideal pair to deal with designing a machine that would act like an organic, a machine that thinks is simple, any computer qualifies for this and the courier drones were no exception, creating a machine that can reason is more complex but still not insurmountable, you just need to code in priorities and have it change its actions based on that.
No, the true challenge was making a machine that could feel or at least seem to feel, you cannot code in concepts such as love and hate, they are chemical reactions in an organic bodies nervous system, and so a machine cannot feel them, but Bulwark and Balistraria were relatively confident they could get the fire breathing cat drones to act like they did, even if it would be a lot of work.
With the minds and the maker busy the day passed quickly, and as the sun fell below the horizon the maker went to sleep in his bunker.
The maker did not truly dream anymore, as his brain still received the information from the factory in his sleep, instead his dreams were full of feeds and statistics from every corner of the factory, with his mind no longer focused on actively thinking and controlling a body it was free to notice everything within the factory, and so the minds could not work on their projects without the maker seeing, even if he wouldn't truly remember what he saw while he was asleep, he would still have impressions of what had happened and would wake if anything major happened, and while the maker knowing of their projects was not truly a bad thing these tasks were not essential to the survival of the factory, nor were they helping with the makers goal of building a rocket, so the maker would order them to divert the resources and time to more "useful" projects.
This meant they were in more danger of discovery while their maker was asleep, and so had to stop any overt action till morning came and his mind woke from his dream.
As the sun rose on the next day and the maker finished up his daily checkup and maintenance he began his daily inspection of the factory, after ensuring that nothing currently needed his personal attention and eating a marginally improved breakfast he went back to work, allowing the minds to continue their projects.
As Byzantine was currently the mind with the least urgent tasks it was their job to monitor the maker, this was not to say that any of the minds were ever unaware of the maker, they all knew his basic condition and location, no it was currently Byzantines job to monitor the more complex parts of their maker, they were monitoring the makers thoughts and mental state, how many calories he burned and how many he ate, the stresses placed on his bones and muscles, his actions and assumed plans, and the makers augmentations, ensuring that nothing was even beginning to go wrong, and acting if it was.
And so it was Byzantine who contacted the other minds when they felt the makers anticipation rise, it seemed the maker was approaching a breakthrough in decoding the ships flightpath and Byzantine new this information would affect all future plans and so all minds should be aware and present for when the information was finally decoded.
This is why all the minds were listing in on their makers thoughts when he learned that the nearest known world was 6 years away
This is why all the minds felt as their creators mind finally broke from the fear, pain, and stress
This is when their maker died in a hostile world, with a shattered mind and fear in his heart.
This is when their maker was reborn on a hostile world that he knew wanted nothing more than his final death
When their maker learned he could not run
When their maker learned he could not hide
They felt as their maker's mind changed and shifted, his psyche ground into dust and rebuilt anew
When their maker truly became something that could survive on this world
When their maker became something that could conquer this world
And when their maker knew he must fight a world and win to survive
-------------------------------------------------------
Waking up was always a disorienting experience, the shift in perspective from dream to reality always took me a few minutes to process, and today was no different, still I woke up and was ready to leave my cubby within 3 minutes, and a drone came up to clean my body while another drone began to brush my teeth and comb my hair.
the construction mind seemed to include my daily hygiene under factory maintenance and it was easier to just let it continue than to spend a day changing that, also it meant I didn't need to comb my hair, it was long and curly and loved getting tangled overnight when it was free of the suit, in the nights I left the suit so it could be maintained anyway.
Still with daily hygiene handled I went to go get food from the processor in my bunker, it looked like the construction mind had done some maintenance on it overnight, it wasn't scheduled for a tune up but maybe a part had broken or something, still it seemed to be working now and I got a load of what i'd hesitate to call sludge because it wasn't actually that liquid, more of a paste really.
I sat down on my bench and began to eat "breakfast" and was immediately surprised to find that the paste tasted sweet rather than bitter, maybe the try it had came from had a higher sugar content in its sap? Still it was a welcome change and I made a note to find out how to have each meal continue using the same tree type, the logistics mind could probably handle that.
Now that breakfast was handled I was free to put on my armor, my armor only needed maintenance every few days and I tended to sleep in it, but one of the shield generators was on the fritz and I'd taken it off to let the construction mind perform overnight maintenance, so I was stuck sleeping without the armor last night.
I used to have trouble sleeping with the armor on but now I struggle to sleep without it, and last night was particularly bad. The bugs had attacked overnight and partially destroyed a part of the wall, and the defensive mind had detonated some explosives to stall the attack, The explosion managed to wake me up in the middle of the night so I got an even worse night of sleep.
Still my armor had been repaired overnight and the drones dressed me in my 7 foot tall safety blanket, and with the air filtration and shields running to protect me from the pollution I was ready to go out of my safe little bunker and begin my day.
The heavy steel doors to my bunker slowly slide open, allowing a thin layer of smog to float into the clean air of the bunker before being pulled out by the filtration units.
I stepped out into a cloudy day, with the local sun only barely peeking out from behind the clouds, it was probably going to rain later but I didn't have any meteorological equipment set up so I couldn't know for certain, still it was a nice enough day, expecting that rather than the sound of birds in the morning the ambiance was the distant sound of gunfire and bug screeches. Which honestly was probably more relaxing by now, if I heard silence it would mean the defenses were not working after all.
My visual inspection of the factory went well, there weren't any clear paths for place to place, and I had to dodge and avoid all the moving machinery as I crawled past it but if I had one thing it was practice crawling through this mess, and with how hard it was to move through it technically served as a sort of defense, if you didn't know were to crawl you'd be pulped by all the moving bits.
I made it through the inner factories inspection with all my limbs still attached and hadn't found anything damaged, the construction mind did good work, especially now that the inner factory was just now 10 feet tall all around and multiple layers thick, you couldn't even see my bunker from on top the wall and the only ways out or in were underground belts that you'd have to crawl through, it was my own personal jungle of metal.
The middle layer was much simpler in organization, with everything separated into little blocks and main buses of materials moving everything in a central location, the logistics mind did good work, even if its designs didn't serve dual purpose as base defense
Everything in the middle layer was running smooth as could be though and I soon moved onto the brain of my factory, the mind's mind if you wanted to be funny. Each mind was encased in a concrete bunker with shields to strengthen it so I couldn't do a visual inspection of the minds without disabling the shields and breaking the concrete but I could check on their code through a terminal at each bunker.
There weren't any obvious errors, thankfully as I wasn't sure I could actually fix them, with the inspection done excluding the reactor and outer wall and around an hour spent just walking about looking at things I was beginning to get antsy, still I couldn't just not look at the massive nuclear reactor running my base, even if being close to a giant ball of invisible poison made me uncomfortable.
The reactor took up a fair portion of the middle wall, and the area it sat was boiling, literally, there was steam everywhere and the air was over 125 degrees celsius at its coldest.
With condensation forming on my armor I began my walk. I began my inspection, taking care not to step on any of the heat transfer pipes. I only needed to lose one shoe to learn that lesson, and even if my newer armor would handle the heat fine I had little desire to test that. The actual reactor was practically glowing with heat and the steam was so thick I wouldn't even see it without the armor, and the steam would have boiled my skin off before I got this close without the suit anyhow.
The Reactor was fine though, it still had fuel and none of the components seems damaged and I didn't really want to be here any longer, making a quick escape to more hospitable parts of the factory I began walking towards the outer wall.
I knew the outer wall would be chaotic, I could still hear the turrets, still there wasn't anything essential in the outerwall, it was mainly simple components and ore processing, anything delicate or complex was farther in where the bugs couldn't get.
The outer wall was well defended, but bugs could and did get through, usually smaller flyers or diggers, but it happened so in the outer wall I needed to keep my guard up, making sure my armor was sealed and that the shields were operational I opened the gate to the outer section, the smog was thicker here, pouring from the rows of smelters and rising over the outer wall and into the wilderness, like a giant fog machine, smog machine? Still the belts taking in metal were full and that was all I really needed to see.
The ore intake station was more lively, with trains and courier drones unloading before heading back out for another load, there wasn't anything in particular I needed to check here but I felt the need to walk over here anyway.
I saw the refueling ports for the courier drones, being the only drone to run on gas rather than electricity they needed special ports, but had less refueling time, and I'm pretty sure I saw a bunch of the refueling courier drones just chewing on bits of rock, or bating it around like a yarn ball.
Well I wasn't pretty sure, I was certain that it was either happening or I was hallucinating and it got even weirder as I watched one of the construction drones throw a rock for a courier drone to fetch.
I'm just gonna assume that the construction mind is running tests on the courier drones dexterity and durability and move on, and ignore the two courier drones that are play fighting in the corner of the refueling station. It was going in the folder.
Still with everything crucial in the outer wall running, and no unusual occurrences at all in the factory I was free to go to the ship and begin my day's work, with only 2 hours wasted checking up on everything and no maintenance needed, the construction mind was the best idea.
The first task for the day was examining the new bug types, or rather their corpses, when the defensive mind killed a new bug type it usually gathered a specimen to examine, but it did mean I had a gallery of bugs, ranging from under a foot to over 40, although the 40 foot specimen wasn't actually kept long, and all the notable variations of bugs.
While the changes on a day by day basis in the bugs was minor, over the course of weeks and months it became notable. The first small bug corpse, biter variant had a notably weaker and thinner shell than a current small biter, with numerous other improvements to leg structure and mobility present.
This isn't even getting into the more wild variants, the camouflaged ones just have colored shells and heat dampening to make them harder to spot, simple enough, still dangerous but simple, it was the digging and flying variants that got me, they wouldn't be able to survive, the flying ones had hollows in place of a digestive system and the diggers would melt from their own acid after a day, they were only born to attack me.
It says something when an entire ecosystem wants you dead, I don't know what it says but its something.
Anyway there weren't any notable new variants, just faster, bigger and tougher. Worrying but nothing I needed to make a new weapon for yet, which was the main worry as I can't really escalate more besides making the turrets bigger, I do have nukes in reserve for larger hordes but they aren't wipe out a city nukes just more wipe out a block or 3 nukes.
So I'm still good for now but some of the bugs are hitting 65 feet long and 30 feet tall, they aren't common but they are terrifying, still targeting them with artillery before they even get near the wall seems to work for now.
With the examination and worrying done for now I'm free to move to my second task of the day
Ignoring the slowly fading sounds of screams, chittering and gunfire I began to walk back to the middle layer. I had dragged the ship here when the attacks started getting worse so I would have somewhere safe to examine it.
The ship has been the source of numerous breakthroughs, in new types of metal and the rare bits of machinery I can reverse engineer, so spending a day just trying to puzzle it out is a good use of time when there is nothing urgent that needs my attention.
What isn't necessarily useful is trawling through the ship's logs to find out more about myself, but that's what I'm doing today. You can't have a book in front of you that explains where you come from and why you were born and then not read it, it's impossible.
So rather than doing something definitely useful with my time, I'm spending it instead doing something maybe useful if I'm lucky, and considering that I am on this world in the first place, I am probably not very lucky.
Decoding the ships logs is tedious and annoying work, It takes awhile to get any progress but I have been working on this for a few days now so I'm expecting to get something today, specifically the ships map base, or at least the nearby map, It seems to have multiple separate maps for different areas of the galaxy rather than one big one, still know where I am can only be helpful.
If I am lucky I will find out there's a colony just a system over.
-------
I finally manage to get the map file decoded and sit in anticipation as it loads, it's taking awhile and I feel my anticipation rise even higher, the culmination of a few days effort is finishing right before my eyes.The map loads and I begin searching through it, checking each system for markers showing a colony, I don't see any colonies directly near navius none even a few months of travel out, but I wasn't really expecting there to be, habitable worlds are rare after all, but I had been hoping for a refueling station nearby at the least but I didn't seem to have any luck.
Still there was plenty of map left to search, and there wasn't a need to be worried until I got to the years of travel rather than the months. I still didn't find any planets at 1 years travel, then 2 years, then 3 years.
It was at that point my dread and fear reached a crescendo and I instead began to use the maps search feature to check for any planets at all in this sector, it was a portion of the galaxy that took 10 years to cross, there had to be a planet with people somewhere.
The index showed that there were 2 planets in the sector with people, and it was with great trepidation that I checked the travel time, one was 8 years out, straddling the edge of the sector and the closest was 6 god damn years out.
6 years, I didn't even have 6 months before the damned bugs were taller than my walls and I'd be lucky to even make it 3 months if the bugs kept up their growth rate. And that was 6 years at best speed, the average ship would take 12.
It was as this realization dawned on me that I realized another thing, I was going to die here.
Sure there were long shots, I could kill every bug on this planet before they killed me, or I could try and escape without FTL, maybe I could even whip up my own FTL ship and fly to the nearest colony myself.
But those weren't real plans, the bugs were not something I could fight in mass and kill, I had no cryogenics to make a non FTL flight, and I had literally no idea how FTL worked, and not a single blueprint for it.
Those ideas were prayers, and as my mind realized this, as it finished thinking up any plan it could, any idea no matter how ridiculous to survive, and as all of those ideas failed it would just try more and more.
The thoughts and panic stilled and I didnt even notice as the factory went silent with me, every belt, drone, train, and gun stopped as my mind snapped under the strain. As it was squeezed and squeezed till it broke into pieces.
My body took a slow breath and exhaled as the factory started again, and with it my thoughts, no longer tinged with panic and fear. Instead an odd calmness and certainty arose.
It didn't matter if help was 6 years away even after I had a distress beacon running.
It didn't matter if the bugs would have me dead within a year.
It didn't even matter that everything I had ever built and done would be destroyed before another human could ever see it.
None of the horrible relizations and theories I had come up with truly changed my situation, I would still fight, I would still struggle, and I would still die.
I was a clone sent to build a world alone, so what
The bugs were smart, so what
The minds I built could act on their own, so what
I had magic factory building powers that turned me into a living gray goo scenario, so what
I'd be dead 5 years before help could come, if help would even come for a mass produced drone, so what
None of those things changed what I was going to do, they just changed how hard it would be to survive.
It just meant I would need to step up my game and try harder.
With this realization in my mind my state of calmness solidified and I began planning and issuing orders
I set the minds to planning attacks, expansions and redesigning the outer wall in case it fell, and then I planned for more modifications to my body.
I had thought with the assault mind operational that I'd be free to slowly grow my factory, that was no longer viable.
I had thought that with my walls and turrets I would be safe, that was wrong.
I had hoped that I was a person, but I knew I was a tool.
And if I was a tool I was no longer enough, and so I must be changed and upgraded to suit my new situation, or at least my new understanding of it.
My organic eyes were weak, my human skin tore too easily, my blood could leak, my brain could stop.
If my current modifications lost power from my suit the mechanical ones would stop running, so I needed a power source in my body.
If a part got damaged and I didnt have a medical bay I couldn't fix it, so my body needed the ability to repair itself.
My shields couldn't work on my skin nor flesh, so I needed to weave metal and wire throughout to let the shields work.
If my brain lost blood or oxygen it would stop, so I needed an implant to supply oxygen to my brain no matter what.
There were many ways I could improve my body, there were many ways I could improve my factory.
I had 3 months before the bugs were stronger than me, so I planned to use them well.
If the bugs would grow stronger, if they would change their flesh and bodies just to fight me, I would do the same.
If my enemies evolve then so must I.
3 months to gain ground I could afford to lose, not so hard if you think of it like that.
AN-
we are officially at the point crossovers could happen, where the engineer isn't to OP for most settings, still gonna just be writing more factorio for a few more chapters though, also you guys should talk more, I want some criticism of my work.
Last edited:
answered questions #1
- Pronouns
- That/Thing
The only reasons he hasn't is he still has room to expand on the surface and smelters need oxygen to run so they don't work well underground.
Expanding on the surface is easier than digging to expand, moving that much stone and dirt is a big project.
If he ever upgrades to electric furnaces it becomes significantly more viable though
Last edited: