Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!

Chapter 58 One cooldown away from completion!

"Come on..."

Standing in front of the wall of furnaces, Theo could do nothing but tap his foot impatiently as he waited for the copper he had just recovered from the mine to smelt through.

Just like iron alone allowed the young man to take his first few steps into industrialization, doing so properly simply couldn't be done without the help of the copper... and all the different items it could be crafted into.

The main problem, however, remained the same.

While crafting, even if Theo ultimately would want to automate it, was something that he could still do directly in his inventory, turning the ores into ingots... actually required him to use a proper smelter.

This downside, something rarely ever introduced to factory games and, if even, often only for much higher grades of materials, was now his greatest limiter when it came to expanding.

One that he could still circumvent with the blocky-era furnaces, but an obstacle nonetheless.

'In the end, though, I can still tell why that is the case,' Theo sighed out as he thought, imagining the scenario when even the smelting of ores could be done out of his inventory.

'It's all so I have an actual pressing reason to move beyond smelting everything by hand,' Theo thought, smiling lightly as he recalled the countless times when playing factory games when, rather than automating things that he needed, he would resort to crafting them by hand, simply because it was often cheaper and faster to do than setting up a whole factory just for this one or two items he needed.

It was a way of thinking that often came back to bite Theo in the ass once those seemingly simple and unimportant parts would turn out to be crucial for some higher-tier goal. In his current situation, however, this limiter was nothing but a source of rather extreme mental anguish, for it felt like nothing else but a loosely covered alternative version of a cooldown.

No matter how much he hated it, though, Theo had no other choice but to abide by the rules set by his system.

'No matter how annoying it might be at times, it's not like I have it bad, is it?' Thinking back on all that he could do and all that he had to endure, Theo couldn't help but shake his head in silent defeat.

'Now, I can save a workpoint each on every connection I make,' Theo thought as he started the belt at the miner and dragged it over to the first of the smelters... only to notice quite the obvious problem with such a setup.

"Ugh..." Holding back a curse, Theo forced a simple, empty smile on his face. "Right, I don't have splitters to divide a belt into two."

Sighing out, Theo ended up removing the other smelter as he opted to move its assigned workpoint to the first smelter instead.

[Construct a smelter: 1/1]

[Construct a smelter: completed!]

As the notification popped up before his eyes, Theo glanced over at his crafting queue.

'Still seven minutes, huh?' he thought before turning his eyes over to the list of the requirements for his tutorial quest.

Normally, this would be the point at which Theo would venture out to his copper mine, where he would place down a smelter and then drag a belt all the way back to his mining base so that he could centralize where all of his resources would gather...

But that's what Theo would do in a game.

In real life, however, as all the walking, all the excitement, and all the pressure started to mount up and turn into exhaustion, when faced with the prospect of another nearly half-a-kilometer-long stroll...

Theo opted to just sit down by the working miner and watch how the fires in the smelter's bellow started to light up, all the while just... waiting for the first of the constructors to finish.

'While that might be lazy of me, I think I'm going to take a nap as soon as I get this tutorial thingy out of the way,' Theo thought, curling up under the stone wall of his iron-working room, trying to use whatever was left out of his prison clothes to keep as much of his internal heat from escaping. 'I'm working with heavy machinery, so doing so while in perfect control should be a must! If anything, this earliest period of industrialization is exactly when most of the workplace-related accidents started to show!'