For the next two weeks I was mostly preoccupied with building up glucose, gathering up resources, and setting up defenses.
The Prospectors continued to buzz around, looking for new minerals to mine, and the drones kept mining away or clearing more trees.
Two days after I had built the glucose reservoir and the waste treatment plant, I decided to start spawning queens to start spreading creep tumors. The creep tumors now resembled short shrubby trees, and I worked on expanding the creep out to the mines, as well as around the area.
Two weeks after my arrival to this place, the creep had spread to about 30 square kilometers around me, clearing out all of the trees around me. The place looked like a huge green clearing in the middle of the jungle.
The mines were about 75 meters into the earth by now, and at a few new locations I had ordered the drones to form a strip mine. About 40 Overlords were flying around, and 200 zerglings patrolled the area, killing any animals that came too close.
A week and a half after my arrival, I decided to spawn 10 Spine Crawlers and 20 Spore Crawlers, placing them in strategic locations around my base, just in case I encountered something that my zerglings couldn't easily deal with, such as flying beasts.
After two weeks of this constant work, I finally started to feel somewhat secure. I had a good store of resources, didn't have to worry too much about fuel, and was relatively well defended. Now I could turn my attention to other things weren't as pressing.
OO
The Lodestone was starting to become a problem. It worked well for what I needed it to do, but it was terribly inefficient. For every 10 units of Psionic energy it extracted from the Khaydarin Crystal, 9 of those units were lost, wafting up from the extractor like a hazy mist. Thankfully the Crystal itself reabsorbed most of the energy, but the remainder that it didn't absorb was starting to create a weird warping effect around the Lodestone. The warping effect damaged the extractor itself, so I had to turn it off every now and then so it could repair itself.
Clearly I had made mistakes somewhere, so with my new found free time I set about figuring out where I had gone wrong.
Psionics required a very specific genetic sequence to work properly, and it turned out I had made a few errors when spinning up the new genetic code. After a few hours of fixing the code, I ordered the existing lodestones to reconstitute themselves, causing them to turn into the normal building cocoon. After an hour, the new and improved lodestones emerged, and I felt a sudden influx of Psionic power.
The lodestone was now working properly. The zerg now had a surplus of Psionic energy to catalyze our essence.
I mentally eyed the Lodestone with one of my overlords eyes. Supply was now keeping up with demand, and I had a small surplus. If I made another lodestone, I might be able to use Psionic energy as a fuel source as well, in addition to glucose. Or perhaps replace glucose altogether.
The other Khaydarin Crystals were still laying on the creep, gathering energy from the sun. they had grown bigger, and by now I had replaced the crystal inside the hive.
I ordered two drones to return and pick up two of the larger crystals, and then turn into lodestones. They did so, and when the lodestones emerged a few hours later, my hunch was proven correct. I no longer was dependent on glucose.
I gave a mental sigh. Well it was nice while it lasted. At least my zerg wouldn't be pooping all over the place now. I gave orders for more Lodestones to be made, and for the last of the glucose to be consumed, and when that was done and the zerg weren't pooping anymore, for the glucose structures to be reabsorbed back into the creep. I kept the creep green, however, for camouflage. I would figure out how to disguise my hive, and how to make tree like structures, later.
With that out of the way, I turned to another problem that had cropped up: digestion. The mouths at the base of my hive were having problems chewing up resources. They weren't really designed for hard rocks, dirt, and chewy trees. They were meant to crush up fragile mineral crystals and swallow soft sacs of Vespene gas. This, along with the fact that they were basically working 24/7, meant that the teeth were starting to crack and break under the strain.
In addition, the mouths took time to chew up each morsel, meaning that my drones were forming queues to deliver their loads. I was reluctant to make another hive to ease up the load because I felt that it wouldn't solve the fundamental problem. Plus, I had other problems with the hive that I will get to later.
My solution was as brilliant as it was simple, make a new structure that was a digestive system. It wasn't modeled exactly after animal digestive systems, but that didn't mean I couldn't steal a few ideas from evolution.
The first part of the structure was the Gizzard. The Gizzard was made with the strongest muscles and teeth I could find in the zerg genetic memory. It had a storage volume capacity of 5 cubic meters, could quickly and easily grind up stones and trees to a paste. It was mostly underground, leaving it's opening at ground level for drones to easily drop things into it.
When it was done grinding things into a paste, it would pass this paste to the next part of the digestive system: the Digestion Pool. The Digestion Pool was a large pool of the strongest acid in the zerg genetic memory. The Digestion Pool was much bigger than the Gizzard, and had a storage volume capacity of 25 cubic meters. The walls of the Digestion Pool were protected by a thick mucus, like a normal stomach. It was open air, and small tentacles, also covered in mucus, would dip into the pool and flick out stuff that wasn't corrodible, to keep the pool clean. The noncorroding stuff would then be dumped into one of the empty mines, until I could figure out what to do with it. The nutrient slime from the pool was then sent to a nutrient storage structure until it was ready to be used.
When I had finished designing this structure, I ordered five of them to be made, close to the active mines so that the drones didn't have to travel long distance. With that out of the way, I turned my attention to the last major problem on my list: unit production.
I didn't like the way larva spawned and grew. My ginormous Hive could only spawn about 6 larva per hour, for about 120 larva per day. And that was if I had a queen attending to it with spraying the growth hormone. Once the larva were spawned, they had to spend about an hour eating creep before they were ready. After that, they spent another hour inside a cocoon before they finally turned into what ever unit I needed.
I knew I could do better, but the question was how. I cast about through the old Overmind's genetic memory, hoping to find an answer there. No such luck, the Overmind had been doing it this way for as long as it could remember. Whatever solution I came up with, it was something I was going to have to figure out myself.
