An hour and two ore pickups later I my stomach started rumbling and I noticed my mouth being extremely dry.

Hungry and Thirsty

All stats reduced by 30%

Oh great, a game where you needed to keep your character nourished. I mentally gave the developers a thumbs up for realism and the finger for the annoyance of the mechanic. Swiveling my chair to grab some food and water I promptly banged my knee again on the console.

I cursed, kicked the offending corner and walked into my bunk room. I grabbed the cup that hung on the wall next to the fridge door looking thing and filled it with water and emptied it in one drag. How had I gotten so thirsty without noticing it? The debuff changed from Hungry and Thirsty to just Hungry. The stat reduction remained though.

I opened the drawer and found stacks of green and brown bars stacked in it. I took one and smelled it. No smell whatsoever. I took a careful bite. A slightly sweet taste but nothing I could place. I guessed that not having a smell interfered with the taste. It seemed edible though and after I finished that bar I felt quite full on my debuff disappeared.

I contemplated the debuff for a moment and was sure that this could impact me badly in all kind of ways. 30% stat reduction was quite a lot. So I made a mental note to keep an eye on the time it took my character to get hungry or thirsty again and went back to work.

After another 7 hours I decided to call it a night. My basic mining skill was up to 5 and I had delivered a total of 1500 ore to the collector. I also figured out that the thirsty debuff happened every 6 hours and the hungry every 8. I was curious if different environments or levels of activity would change that. Or if I could eat before the timer was up and that would reset it.

Now to the thing that felt weirder than anything else. Going to sleep in game. I mean I had spent nights in the game. My longest session ever was 36 hours. I even enjoyed sexy time with in leisure locations in the Hub. But I had NEVER consciously slept in an online environment. It just wasn’t done. Why would you? The games were meant to be played, the online worlds to be experienced. You logged out to sleep. So I felt completely weird when I crawled into my bunk not bothering to get undressed.

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As I lay there staring at the ceiling I thought about my day. I found out that I would be able to mine about 1k ore more than the daily quota. That by itself was really awesome in terms of quickly getting out of this asteroid belt. However… This ship and equipment was charged to my account at 15k ICU.

Taking previous gaming experience into account, I assumed that about 10k were for the ship itself and another 5k for the equipment. If I wanted to do more in this game then sitting in asteroid belts and cutting up rocks, I needed money for better equipment and a better or at least a different ship. Since I lacked all knowledge of prices I had no clue how much I would need.

I remembered that I could exchange any mined material above the daily quota could be sold to my ‘slave masters’ at a rate of 1.5 to 1. That meant I could make about 600 ICU a day. But that would also mean that I needed to stick around here for the full 12 days I had previously calculated for the 10k requirement.

“Personal Log. New Entry.”

The personal log section of my interface flashed open.

New Entry: Malcolm Solo.

1. Get an idea what an ICU is worth in terms of living and gaming expenses.

2. Get an idea how much new equipment and possibly a new ship costs.

3. Decide how much ore I want to exchange for credits.

4. Keep raising my skill level in case it proves to be a worthwhile money making scheme.

5. Mine my ass off to get out of here.

I closed the personal log. Then I contemplated my mining skill increases. It seemed that for every new skill point I needed to mine previous requirement + 100 ore. Which meant I could probably raise this to a decent level. The question remained, what would that give me?

At that point I must have fallen asleep to the slight humming and vibration of the rust bucket. I dreamt of asteroids and lasers digging into space rocks.