The next few months passed quickly, the first and most urgent task was cleaning up all the radiation left over from a few dozen nuclear barrages. Radiation was the main threat of a nuke and leaving a bunch of it everywhere for the bugs to adapt too? No, keeping my theoretical ability to area deny by coating an area in radiation was staying.

That task took a few weeks, excavating all the contaminated materials and either cleaning or using them. By the end there were a few more quarries for stone production and more irradiated dirt than I could do anything with, so it was just piled up near an outpost. The air scrubbers purged the atmosphere of any radiation before it could progress very far.

My space holdings expanded, the one construction satellite finished the orbital habitat and began multiplying into more and more satellites. Some just housed extra computational power and others focused on data storage. Even a few weaponized satellites were created, either dropping heavy rods or firing lasers from orbit.

The spy satellites mapped out the world, there were 3 major continents, I was on the second largest and most temperate. The smallest continent was nearly entirely a desert, one that reached 220 degrees fahrenheit, while the largest was a blizzard ridden hellscape, as in it was nearly always covered in a blizzard. I had needed a higher powered spy satellite to actually pierce through it and get an accurate map.

And each and every square mile of land had at least one biter on it. Sure the ones in the desert looked different from the ones in the blizzard, and they both looked different from ‘my’ biters, but they were the same species, hives and all. And they weren’t the weak kind I had fought when I first arrived, meaning the biters evolved on a global scale, sure they were smaller than the ones directly around my outpost, but only by around half.

I had thought there was an island without any biters, not a large one sure but at least four thousand square feet of isolated biter free land, then the island moved and I realized it was a giant fish.

The main base expanded even more, the few remaining biters underground were routed and the tunnels were routinely explored to prevent any new outcroppings.

The perimeter was finished within two and a half months, significantly ahead of schedule but by destroying so much the biters had essentially given us a free reason to redesign everything larger, and the ore veins exposed by the fighting gave the materials needed to supply the larger factories.

Eventually the inside of the perimeter was finished, and with the underground guarded and purged of any insects the interior was finally safe from the constant attacks, freeing up Balistraia’s armies for bug clearing missions to lessen attacks on the perimeter and prevent any massive hordes from growing and attacking.

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More command tanks were built, the first command planes were unleashed, more battle groups designed, the vehicles were upgraded with every new improvement the decoders found or every new design I produced. I even figured out how to get the decoders to refine my personal designs rather than just the ones I had been created with.

The inefficiency of the radiation and molten turrets were fixed after a few weeks of the decoders working on power efficiency and durability. Letting me outfit more tanks with the stronger weapon variants.

That same breakthrough with the decoders allowed me to get the same improvements on walls, reactors, turbines, electric poles, drones, ect. Basically everything in the factory could be improved by at least a few percentages through the decoders, though often it would take too long to actually make substantial improvements for it to be worthwhile.

Making the inserter arms faster and more energy efficient was not as important as making the solar panels or air scrubs better, but the inserter arms would take twice as long as either of the other improvements for only a minor increase to their effectiveness. Sure, making the inserter arms use .5% less energy saved quite a lot of power but it wasn’t as good as a 4% increased yield for new solar panels.

The limiting factors on the improvements were time and diminishing returns, as much as I wished it wasn’t true there was only so much you could improve something before you hit a limit. Then you’d need innovation or a breakthrough with tech or materials to improve it more.

Eventually we started to expand outside the perimeter, it wasn’t that I was running out of space or materials within it, it was just that the more I expanded the safer I was against the bug’s. Ideally I would push them off the continent entirely. Though that goal was a long ways away. Even with the perimeter I only controlled 3 percent of the land. The rest was bug territory.

That was another reason to expand, the knowledge that if every single bug attacked me at once I wouldn’t even have enough ammunition, bombs, or power production to fight them off. Even if ‘only’ all the bugs in 500 kilometers of the factory decided to attack I would be forced to flee.

The only solution to that problem was to grow larger, quicker. Not to mention it just felt right.

The train network expanded by new construction trains, each guarded by a battle train as they paved the way to new land. Underground railways were constructed within the perimeter as the older outposts began to grow both higher and deeper.

Geothermal power plants were built once I had dug deep enough for the mantles' heat to begin permeating the crust, at around 80 kilometers down. A bunker was constructed 40 kilometers down as well, just in case the space one didn’t work out.

It wasn’t that the factory extended that deep, it only went about half a kilometer down, it was just a project specifically attempting to drill that far down for longer term access to metals and a relatively cheap and reliable source of energy.

The denser earth down there took longer to harvest, but I found it hard to imagine I would run out of resources from there any time soon.

And eventually 4 months after the colossal biter had destroyed half the factory the spy satellites detected an anomaly a few hundred kilometers north of one of the more distant outposts.