Log #71

I got the tier four assemblers working, which solves most of the issues with making complex parts. Meaning I can finally make more ‘mega vehicles’ like command tanks, command planes, and rockets. Like spaceship rockets, not the explosive kind, I have explosive rockets for days.

Labyrinthine already had the main base designed with a rocket pad, and construction on the first satellite and accompanying rocket have begun, and they’ll be launched within the day. I already had rocket fuel, control modules, and low density alloys. I just needed to make something that produced solar panels that work in space. I have the smaller ones that run on some of the drones and used to power my suit but those are a bit small for space work, and some production of larger ones for the perimeter towers, so I need to make the big ones that can survive the vacuum of space for an extended period of time.

On that same note Labyrinthine has started making solar panel towers on the roofs of the inner outposts, it's just a tower with solar panels on the outside and holding accumulators on the inside. Relying on nuclear powers fine but adding some extra power for only a little effort isn’t ever going to be a bad thing.

Figuring out the 4th tier assemblers was actually simple once I had figured out what was holding me back, I had been trying to make sense of the assemblers and how they worked, forgetting one of the most fundamental truths of my existence, that I didn’t know how or why anything I did works.

By ignoring my own instincts and trying to apply logic to something that I fundamentally didn’t and couldn’t understand I had built a wall preventing me from actually making a working tier 4 assembler.

Once I had realized that I went to My workshop and started working with the sole intention of ‘improving’ rather than understanding or solving, I just did what felt right without thinking about why I was doing it. And it worked, well it kind of worked.

It started with me drinking a few dozen vials of every liquid, well drink was probably inaccurate as the fluid disappeared before it hit my stomach but the point stands, I stopped thinking and did what felt right, which was drinking the liquids which could dissolve metal and turn armor into cubes. And then I didn’t die.

If the cameras hadn’t been recording the whole thing I wouldn’t have had any idea what had happened, the hours after I’d nearly killed myself were entirely blank. And the camera feed didn’t exactly help with understanding. I’d just started having the minds send me different metals, gems, modules, inserters, belts, various amounts of oil, and three nukes. Honestly it would be quicker to mention what things didn’t go into the 4th tier assembler. Which now resides where my old workshop used to be.

By the 4th hour of building I had entirely disappeared from the camera as the assembler had gotten large enough that I had to be inside of it to continue construction, and I hadn’t come out of the thing for another 8 hours, the only sign’s I’d been doing anything in there were the noises and requests for more parts and tools.

By the end of it the 4th tier assembler had taken more resources than a command tank to build and drew on 2 reactors to power itself, which was concerning considering it implied the nuclear material hadn’t gone into powering the inserter, or that multiple nukes and miniature reactors were insufficient to actually power the thing.

But the thing worked really well, just put in oil, iron, copper, coal, and uranium and it would spit out whatever you asked for, as long as it was small enough to fit, otherwise it would just build the thing in chunks. In the time it would take a tier 3 to build an engine the tier 4 would have built a whole shield tank.

Still doesn’t change the fact that I was bedridden for a day after that, blood loss and a vitamin deficiency, which is concerning considering I had been getting fed automatically that entire time and had somehow used 2 weeks worth of calories and nutrients in 14 ish hours.

Don’t think I’m going to make another one of those anytime soon, even if the minds hadn’t vetoed it.

The underground battle is still at a standstill, so I decided to come up with a plan of my own. The minds think we need to kill the bugs with tanks and drones, in a battle. It makes sense considering that's how I trained them but the point stands, I however am bad at fighting, so actually getting into a battle is a lose scenario.

This brings me to my point, why do we need to fight the bugs in the caves? We need them dead sure but there are definitely better ways to kill them, as long as we don't care about also destroying the caves, and we don't need the caves.

I’ve started placing nuclear charges on key parts of the bedrock around where the bug caves are, and if my instincts are right it should cause a massive earthquake within that area, with only minimal damage to the surrounding underground outside of a certain radius. It’ll damage a few outposts and part of the perimeter but it will also collapse the caves the bugs are hiding in.

What finally pushed me to the dramatic action is the simple fact that the underground tunnels are starting to overwhelm the perimeter defense’s. They have to have bug hives down there producing the things, so destroying it will cripple the bugs offensive capabilities for a while.

Sure this will probably only work once or twice before the bugs figure out how to stop it or adapt to the earthquakes it’ll still hurt them right now.

The bombs will be planted within a week, so the satellite will already be up in the sky and I can watch the massive earthquake from a space eye view.

Log #72

It may have been a poor idea to cause an earthquake, sure the plan worked and the bugs were forced out of the collapsing tunnels or they died, crushed under thousands of tons of earth. It's just one of the bugs that was forced out by the collapse was large and underneath the perimeter. The first sign of the thing was when the soil didn’t collapse to the same depth in an area, and then that lump of soil started to rupture as a massive bug crawled out, along with a few thousand smaller, but still large, bugs.

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Immediately it was treated like a command bug and nuclear bombardment began, but well the nukes didn’t do much of anything, sure they blew chunks off its shell and incinerated a few of the other insects close to the colossus, but the explosions didn’t blow large enough chunks out of it to actually reach any important organs.

I have a few more experimental weapons I plan to try on the thing, as it’s still currently ripping apart the outposts along the perimeter, and a few weapon plans that should work if they are built, but already it's destroyed more than half the perimeter and eaten 2 battle trains.

Even whittling the thing down doesn't seem viable, as it regenerates fairly quickly. It's only been 2 hours since the first nuclear barrage and already the tears in its shell are fading.

The first weapon is the drill artillery, it'll use projector tech to carve a hole deep into the bug before the nuclear charge in it detonates, hopefully with its shell holding all the force in the nuke can pulverize the bugs internals.

In case that weapon fails Balistraia is currently assembling all three of her command tanks and accompanying armies and air forces to try and kill or stall the massive bug and its army while I make the next weapon, a nanite swarm.

Something tells me I shouldn’t build this, but something else in me wants to build it even more than the other thing wants me to not, and really a self replicating swarm of nanites just sounds like a very potent weapon, I have a blueprint to let the nanites be produced inside my body to both work as an immune and repair system. I mean the bodies already capable of building machines that small, they are just organic and used for reproduction, and since I can't reproduce in the first place I might as well repurpose those systems towards something more productive.

But before I can go through the surgery I need to kill the massive bug outside, so the tier 4 fabricator is currently making the nanite slurry. I just need to finish the programming and control systems and it’ll be ready to go in 3 hours.

Since the nuclear barrage wasn’t killing the big bug anyway the next salvo will be wiping up the other survivors of the tunnel collapse, at this point there actually is enough radiation out there to be worrying for unshielded life, even if my nukes are clean launching 58 of the things leaves an impact. Something does tell me that the plants out there will handle it fine though.

It is kind of a wasteland in that area though, just upturned dirt and stone with smaller chunks of bugs and plants, and with how much I have been bombing that area the whole place is either actively burning or a charred wasteland. And that area of destruction is just following the bug horde as the bombers and artillery keep up the constant barrage.

The space front is doing much better than the ground one, already 3 surveillance satellites have been sent up, one to monitor the area around the factory, another the scout the land around the factory in an increasing radius, and the third to give less detailed scans on the whole world.

In a week or so that third satellite should provide a map showing any land mass larger than half a kilometer, and in a month more a detailed map of any landmass on Nauvis, even if it wont have resources and animal populations. The second satellite will be getting that information though, which is why it’ll take around the same time to explore a much smaller area, and even then it won’t tell about the deeper resources that the radars can find, just surface level ones.

Still helpful but radars will not be fazed out anytime soon, especially as they also serve as a constant surveillance network for everything in a few miles of them.

Log #73

The new artillery shells worked, to an extent. I thought just one would do the trick but we ended up needing to launch 4 of the things to finally kill the bug, which then began dissolving into a goop that the other bugs ate, causing them to grow larger.

They didn’t grow large enough that nukes stopped being effective, but they did continue the colossal bugs destruction spree long enough to basically negate any progress I had on the perimeter. I still have 3 outposts and ten towers, but that does not a make functional defense. If bugs of that size continue to be a thing I’ll need to start putting up more high grade artillery shells and bombs, as well as higher payload nukes.

I don’t really know what I could have done to prevent that from happening though, how was I supposed to reasonably prepare for a bug larger than most of my outposts when the largest other example was barely a quarter the size of one.

The bugs scaling like that makes getting a safe fallback position they can’t reach even more of a priority than it already was, and in that vein I sent a construction satellite into orbit to start turning the old rockets into a functional space station, it won’t be large enough for long term habitation until I can send up a few more rockets to bring materials and serve as scrap metal, but if there had been a few more of those bugs or they had started towards the main base I’d have been forced to consider fleeing while the minds handled it. And I didn’t exactly have a safe place to flee besides ‘away’.

So a hydroponics bay and living quarters up in orbit is now a high priority task now that it’s feasible, and with the development of a communications satellite I can see about setting up outposts and factories on other landmasses. Well I could already do that but this makes it far more viable, even if an outpost a few thousand miles away won’t really be able to do anything to support the main base.

I also learned another new thing about my ability to store stuff, I already instinctively store and reload ammunition via that system, but I hadn’t considered the fact that I could store my armor the same way I store guns and bullets. Meaning I can now have both my construction and combat suits on me at all times, and that I can swap between the two without the need to go and physically climb out of one and into another.

This prompted me to upgrade both suits with the tier 4 assembler, increasing power output and durability on both and giving the construction suit the ability to craft like a tier 2 assembler, and I might be able to push that into tier 3 if I’m willing to go fully into it like I did with the tier 4 assembler. That alone doubled my personal production speed by allowing me to build two things at once, one using the suit and another using my ‘inventory’.

The combat suit also got increased laser strength, range and accuracy, along with a fair boost to its movement speed and agility, but that's less interesting than being able to double my personal production.

I also have a vial of nanites now, its less than a milliliter of the things in the vial but exponential self replication could solve that problem rapidly. Needless to say this is going with the other last resort weapons or tools.

Sure I could probably use the thing to rebuild the destroyed perimeter and finish the rest of it in less than a week, but I really don’t think I should. Just having the ability to do that if I need too is good enough. Still plan on giving my immune system some though, and my body the ability to produce them, or more accurately give my body to produce some for my immune system if and when I need it. A last resort repair mechanism.

these past few days have only reinforced the fact that your never really secure on this planet.