4-8: Fruits of Our Labour

It's been two weeks since the gang started building their base. So far, I've skimmed over a lot of the process, but with the walls up, I think it's a good time for the gang to kick back and show off what they've built so far.

An aerial shot of the base. The whole thing is enclosed by a vaguely circular ring of beige and white metal wall with an indentation that would make one walk for a brief stretch between parallel walls to approach the tall portcullis gate. Passing through the gate, one would be met with a circular tent directly in front of them with a row of buildings to their left and a hill to their right with all the mining and refining machines perched on top.

The area I chose has admittedly made building a little awkward, with a hillside dividing the buildable land into upper and lower halves. The top of the hill is where all the mining takes place, bearing the two copper ore deposits at the back, the stone mine and refinery, and the ironworks. The lab is up there too, which seems a bit thematically unrelated but there is a reason for it we'll get to soon.

A massive ore drill in the middle of the pile of ferrous scrap makes iron mining much more efficient, needing only a single person to operate where three used to have to mine by hand. The iron situation is somewhat problematic, though; the gang has built a steel refinery to refine iron plates into steel beams for weapon and crossbow crafting, which is eating up all the iron plates. Plates that are still needed to build things. They'll have to choose whether to build a second iron plate refinery or accept some inefficiencies in iron-related activities.

At the bottom of the hill sit the farms: Wheat, hemp, and cactus. Food production is shakily positive, still limited by wheat production. It'll do for now but the farms will need to expand even further in the long term.

Between the farms and the front gate, a round tent stands over the food storage, a reinforced barrel characters will automatically run to when they get hungry. The tent serves a purely aesthetic purpose. While the practical use of tents like that is to build while you're travelling to huddle under and stay safe from acid rain, it does not acid rain here in Shem and it wouldn't matter if the food storage got rained on anyway.

Two corpse disposal furnaces sit away from everything else to the right of the front gate. These are essential for keeping the base clean. Corpses smell and attract flies and beak things. If I'm playing without listening to anything else at the same time, the flies are actually the worst part; if any of your characters are near dead bodies for a length of time, the game will start playing a gratingly loud buzzing sound effect until your character moves or the corspe does.

The row of buildings down by the farms form the heart of what the gang hopes to grow into a small town. Let's take a look at the closest one first.

An interior cutaway of a medium-sized building shaped like a wedge with the thin end lopped off. It empty but for a couple rooms at the back half that have four beds each.

This is still quite barebones—I'm not planning on putting any crafting in here so I'm not quite sure what to do with the rest of it—but this is where the gang sleeps. There will be more beds here eventually, likely turning the thin corridor at the back into another room or two. I had some space to use here so I wanted to find a decent compromise between space efficiency and privacy. Bars and barracks across the world tend to just cram as many beds as possible into an open room, but the gang will be living here, you know? I think they deserve a little better.

Admittedly, cramming beds into two or three rooms isn't exactly the level of privacy I would want for myself, but there simply isn't enough room here to build separate houses for everyone. Not unless I want to start building crooked houses on dramatic slopes or expand the walls to the point the game would start causing problems.

The next building, by far the closest to being fully furnished, houses a wide variety of crafting.

The ground floor of a large two-storey building with the entryway curving out from the side of a large, circular central area. It's called a Snailhouse if that helps envision the shape. This one is divided up into several rooms, each quite full with crafting benches. In the entrance corridor, there's a single table. Riddly and Beep are sitting there. The second storey of said building, in which the indoor area is just the main circular part. The head of the snail, so to speak, forms an oddly-shaped balcony. The interior part here is much more sparse-looking and less full than downstairs but it has crossbow crafting equipment in a central room, a weapon smithy in its own room on the far side from the balcony, and a small room adjacent to both with two beds.

Starting on the ground floor: The room closest to the door has a crafting station for splints and medkits, as well as a pair of skeleton repair beds. Next to that is the clothing and leather armour room. The back half of the ground floor is for chain and metal plate armour. Keys has been hard at work tanning hide into leather, beating raw iron into metal plates, and working steel bars into chainmail. While she hasn't actually made any armour yet, making these armour components has been her way of grinding Armour Smithing xp. Her skill is already high enough to make Standard-grade armour and she shows no signs of slowing down; High-grade armour won't be too far off.

The top floor has a weapon smithy and crafting stations for arrows and crossbows. The two beds up here may seem strangely placed—it doesn't seem very restful to sleep where you'll hear machines buzzing and hammers ringing—but they're here for a very specific reason.

Something I haven't really mentioned is that being injured applies penalties to your skills. Among non-combat skills, this is felt most keenly with smithing; after all, the quality of your product depends on your skill level. Your current skill level. It takes penalties from injuries into account. I don't always remember to check every character after a fight if they're conscious and not obviously limping or otherwise mangled, which on occasion has led to a smith finishing a piece while injured and making a far cruder product than they're capable of, wasting time and materials. The two beds up here make for a quick and easy place to send the smiths to rest up if I catch them working hurt.

The last two buildings at the bottom of the hill are a couple small houses I'm much less certain about.

Two small square buildings with a grain silo between them and a well off to the side. The one on the left has a bunch of metal storage tanks and a machine with tubes sticking out of it on the roof. The one on the left, in cutaway view to show the interior, is largely empty but has a bread oven, a pile of flour sacks, and two cooking stoves along the right wall.

The house on the right is Ells' kitchen. As you can see, it's a bit sad and empty right now. I think I'm going to replace it with a much larger building that can hold not only a kitchen but a brewery, a hashish processor, and a shop counter. If I go through with that, I'll decorate the rest like a bar.

The other house is sort of a backup power station. The base thus far uses entirely wind power, which is fantastic when the wind's blowing but less so when the wind dies down. The usual solution for periods of insufficient wind is to rely on excess power stored in batteries. The gang has built a few of these—you've seen a couple already, the white rectangular things under the stairs in the crafting house. I got nervous about whether or not batteries would be sufficient, though, so I built a couple small fuel-run generators in this building with a biofuel distillery and some fuel tanks on the roof.

The biofuel has been completely unnecessary. I might end up replacing the stuff in this building with hydroponics once the gang researches it—the only way they're going to be able to grow rice and greenfruit in this arid region.

Finally, the lab up on the hill.

An L-shaped building interior. At one extremity is the door and copper sheet workbench; at the other, the large and small research benches fill the space beside the stairs. The crook of the L is empty.

The lab houses the main research bench at the back with an adjoining small research bench for an assistant. While research of higher tiers needs a bench of equal or higher tier to begin, additional researchers on lower tier benches can still pitch in and shorten the time needed. Frankly, the benefit of the small research bench has been pretty marginal, but what it has done is provide a way for a second person to grind their science skill. I'll take it.

Next to the research area is a station for crafting copper into electrical components, with a bench for hammering out copper alloy sheets close to the door. I like pairing the electrical crafting with the research benches since both use the Science skill; it feels thematically appropriate. The copper alloy fits a bit less well but it's the only other thing that uses copper. We might as well keep them in the same place.

There are plenty more things to build in the game but this is a decent place to let the base kind of coast for a bit. A few members of the gang sit idle now, the various mining and refining operations having been improved to the point where far fewer people are needed to run them. The base can finally spare enough people for another adventure!

4-9: NONE BUT THE DEAD ⮞