Log #11

Year one Day 20

You know, sometimes I think Nauvis is trying to mess up my plans, I’d been settling in for some nice research into plasma for some other things I want to build, and it just starts raining slimes.

So I had to spend a while handling that, and it’s probably going to cause more problems later. Not to mention I have no idea how it rained slimes, and given how much stuff I have monitoring the weather on Nauvis is utterly absurd. The slimes in themselves weren’t an issue, just free resources. But the effect they are going to have on both the fish and the biters is of far greater concern to me.

Also it was distracting.

I did end up getting the plasma shields done, and made excellent progress on either improving or developing plasma artillery, turrets, and hand held weapons. The part I was struggling with, large scale shielding for ships and forts, was solved as well, the shields are actually millions of tiny shields overlapping, rather than just one big one. A bit like using a bunch of tiny light bulbs rather than one big one. This also allows dynamic movement of the shield, even if it's technically easier to pierce than the smaller tank portable shields are. Though that depends on how much its covering, as you can just make the shield overlap itself which readily solves that problem. That or position the smaller shields to intercept the attacks as needed rather than remaining static.

Work has already begun on installing that on every fort, with priority on ones that actually see combat or are of higher value. Part of a larger effort to overhaul my defense, at this point even reinforced concrete with shields is weak, and metal isn’t economical for walls. Well the main base has a few metal walls but that's the exception rather than the rule.

I’m working on a solution for that as well, it's a bit biotech but I’m not really bad at that, just not good at it. A sort of fungus that’ll convert rock into itself, capable of both generating and conducting electricity, and with my current understanding of ocean things, bug shells, and just general material science it’ll be as durable as diamond on average, while it’s outer ‘shell’ will be three times as hard and steadily grow thicker and more durable the longer it grows. Crystal and rock slime essence is really useful.

By manipulating the electrical signals it produces a terminal can guide it to grow in certain shapes, and while I can’t yet get the stuff to grow machines like fruit or organs as I’d originally planned I can have it grow places for machines to be placed. Basically making a hollow factory.

The more energy I feed it the faster it grows and given I can produce an absurd amount of power this stuff can grow like a weed, still technically slower than Labyrinthine can build, and with the limitation that any internal infrastructure will need to be installed in it but aside from the seed it has no material cost.

My current plan is to have it slowly convert the lands around my factories, serving as static defenses, and given its conductive nature I will be able to just put laser turrets on it and not worry about connecting them to the power grid, as the ground itself will already be linked in. Walls can quite literally spring up within minutes wherever a mind wants them to be.

Of greater interest is it’s underground applications, it’s harder for the bugs to tunnel through it, and my terminals can tell me when it is being tunneled through, allowing me to either have the stuff grow around the intrusion, electrocute them, or just open a path to allow drones to go kill them. Giving me home field advantage wherever it is.

It’ll also allow me to build massive underground tunnels or facilities with extreme ease, connecting all my outposts and eventually allowing it to become just one giant underground factory. Which is rapidly becoming more appealing than continuing to build them on the surface, as most of the metal and raw materials are down here anyway.

That and it’s harder for the deep fish to swim through, which will hopefully discourage them from breaking my magma drills so often.

Technically speaking I have a working sample right now, and could plant it. But I’m letting it grow so I can separate it out into more seeds so it can spread over a larger area quickly, ideally around my main base and the frontlines, the interior can wait for a while.

That was derived from my work on trying to make a self repairing ultra durable metal, which I had wanted for both my skeleton and all my vehicles and armors. As my current cybernetics are getting a bit outdated, even if my skeleton is technically a similar substance to the ground stuff. To bugs that isn’t ‘unbreakable’.

I want to update my blood, so it can function as my organs if the need arrives, I also want to completely negate my body's need for air, and…. Honestly with just those two and further armor around my brain there isn’t much else I can see helping with my survival. If that's done then as long as my brain’s intact I’ll be both alive and cognizant. Which is about the end of survivability for my body, at that point we start getting into backup brains, which I technically already have with my android pseudo-clones.

But any of that needs more research, I figure once I get the fungus to grow machines I can get a different version of it to grow organs, which isn’t quite what I want but better than my nanomachine attempt.

That somewhat leads into my next topic, Balistraia asked for me to build her a body. Not just an android one either, which she could manage on her own. No, she wants something custom built. Already my mind is boiling with ideas, pulling partially from my sentinel drones for the basic idea.

This is going to be the absolute best thing I can build with my current technology, and I know just what I want to do for it. And given I’ve finally started to reliably produce conceptual fluids out of plorts I can actually do it. It’s rare that I just let myself go and build something absurd, haven’t really done it since the tier four assemblers. And I’m going to be doing that again, because I’m not going to have any half measures.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Every conceptual fluid I can produce, I will be consuming. And then I’ll build Balistraia a body. There are only so many ways this can go wrong.

Thats about it for development though, everything else is continuing apace.

The war front however has however done the thing it always does when it starts to rain. All fighting has stopped, because the rain hasn’t. That means the oceans are rising, and given the abundance of monitoring equipment I have just for this situation I can tell this’ll be a flood. Which means I couldn’t plant my fungus even if I wanted too, and that all the outposts are going into lockdown.

I’m expecting at least a few tsunamis this time as well, something has been causing massive earthquakes down in the mantle and while that's a quarter of the planet away from me I’ve learned to expect the worst. I mean the earthquakes are probably just a territorial dispute, not something coming up, which would be the actual worst case, but…. Yeah just stop thinking about things I can’t affect.

I have had some issues with androids trying to get off of the Far Far Range to go help humanity in the war, even with the fact that my singular ship has already slammed the Turians minor war effort to a halt, seriously they have forty thousand ships, and barely one hundred were sent to deal with humanity. If you're gonna do a war, do a war right, this is just odd. Though they also seem to think Eden prime is Humanities homeworld… Yeah the Turians just have awful intel, which explains some of why they haven’t sent anything like enough ships even if it had just been humanity. Not helped by Balistraia feeding them awful intel via judicious hacking.

You do have to wonder what the Turians were thinking with this little ‘war’ though, and I did. So I had Balistraia do some digging and apparently this is practically standard Turian first contact protocol. They have ‘client races’ which aren’t even citizens and really I’m starting to just dislike these arrogant little warmongers.

This whole ‘conquering other races instead of saying hello’ thing asks another question, why is the rest of the ‘council’ allowing this? I’d been lead to believe, admittedly though propaganda ridden media, that the Asari were diplomates by trade, and the Salarians were just a race of engineers and researchers.

The council is starting to seem more and more like a scam. Or at the very least a system designed to give those in power all the advantages over other species.

Which reduces my desire to actually form my own empire or announce my own presence at all. I have no desire to have these people in any way capable of planning against me, so for all intents and purposes I’m going to be a galactic bogeyman.

Android infiltrators controlling all government or scientific institutions I care about, and strike teams of androids with stealth ships to take out anything I want gone. With those powers combined I’ll be able to slowly shape the galaxy into my ideal image.

Like a well maintained garden.

The slime ranching front has also been expanded rapidly by the storm giving such a large influx of slimes, mostly on earth as I don’t have the facilities for so many on the Far Far range yet. Androids and machines taking care of the slimes and figuring out new and novel ways to use the plorts.

The moon base is putting out new ships, satellites, and space capable drones at an… acceptable rate. And my asteroid belt mining platforms are finally beginning to contribute to construction of more ship bays out in said asteroid belt, which will soon eclipse the moon bases' own construction.

I will be expanding said moon base, largely in a defensive capacity so it can shield earth, but I doubt it will reach the production capacity I’ll eventually have in the asteroid belt, just not as much material. Ideally I want to turn it into a massive shielding unit to envelope the earth in a shield, though I don’t know if I want it to be Plasma or Molecular stabilization just yet. With that, and covering the moon in as many weapon systems as I can, and its ability to house a sizable fleet and make an endless tide of disposable space capable fighters, I can safely say earth is adequately defended from space attacks. If the aliens who made the machines ever come back.

And once there is a space elevator to connect earth and the moon, or more likely just to space stations that then ferry you to one or the other I can say earths immediately space is sufficiently developed for work to begin on other planets in the system, and in preparation for that I’ve sent a few teams of spidertrons and drones to make habitats on mars, and some factories that will begin terraforming it.

Not through making plants and animals that can do it for me either, though I could. I’ll be making factories that pump out ozone, machines to make a magnetic shield to keep it from being stripped away, oxygen and water farms… might not make the planet a verdant wonderland with green plants and blue oceans, but this is more like what I’d have built regardless.

Still debating if I want to try and introduce magic into the atmosphere, I need to on any off planet ships androids or machines will be on for any length of time, but I genuinely might not have any on mars. It’s not like they’ve filled up earth in any capacity, given most of the cities are built underground at this point.

Still filled with plants and light while underground, which is jarring. At this point I have a few million drones just trimming plants. Kind of tempted to make a robotic bird that burns plant matter to run, if I make it out of crystal it’d be fairly pretty, add internal lights and I can get some flying rainbows.

For a magic world there aren’t that many magic creatures, and I think Byzantine would enjoy fixing that. Can even add it to the program Balistraia made, have the animals the androids and machines will be living with designed by said androids and machines.

Just having dragons and slimes feels unbalanced.