Log #11
I got the oil set up, I don't really know how it works, that isn't to say I don't know how the processing plants work. Those are actually relatively simple, no it's the pipes that are everywhere, it's worse than the belts because I have to go around or over these where I can just walk on the belts, it's like a forest of metal pipework. I'm making the explosives now though and have started to build up a stock of mines and cannon shells with them.
This factory is getting a bit haphazard, I was crawling through it trying to find a spot to route coal to the explosive production and I couldn't even find where the coal came from for a few hours. I just ended up pulling the coal from the end of the smelting line. I'll need to rework a fair chunk of this to expand my production more.
Since I need more room to work again so I will need to work on my defenses, I’m thinking that rather than expanding my current wall I will start making another larger wall to house some of the reworked production along with even more decoders, only having 2 of the guys is slowing me down.
Log #12
Started work on the outer wall, and noticed that some of the bugs are a different color, the bigger ones are a reddish tint now and are about 5 feet long and 3 and a half tall, I don't know why being bigger would cause them to change color, maybe different materials are making up their shells? Also an important question, why are they getting bigger at all?
Anyways the walls coming along fine, I've decided that I am going to try and mount a tank cannon onto a gun turret mount though, if the bugs keep growing this fast I will need some heavier firepower eventually, in that same vein I have upgraded the ammo I am using to armor piercing rounds, they are more expensive but I have more than enough production to handle that now.
Honestly I think I have settled into a sort of stable routine with the bugs, I am just slowly expanding my base between their attacks, unless something major happens I should be able to finish the outer wall without any major setbacks. And if the wall is up I will have the room to make both the gray and blue liquids the decoder needs and with those done I’ll have even more defensive options, the situation is still bad but it's definitely more manageable now.
Log #13
The outer wall is done and I have expanded the factory into it. I'm making blue and gray liquids for the decoders and I have 10 of them running 24/7. All the belts in the factory have been upgraded to a faster red version and everything has begun to run significantly smoother.
I have even begun to work on a basic suit of power armor, most of it has to be made with the blue assemblers but when it's done I should have some weak personal shields, night vision, and an exoskeleton to assist with running and lifting, and it'll also stop me from being pushed around on the belts which may just be its best feature yet.
My tank has finally finished, it was actually done before the walls were but I decided that I needed to sup the tank up some, I integrated a few shields for the thing, it won't stop much but it will hopefully keep my tank from going the way of my old car. It's 20 feet long and 7 feet tall, which considering it can only fit me it has a lot of room for armor, the massive turret on top, the built-in flamethrower, and the miniguns.
The reason I decided I needed to upgrade the tank is that I have unlocked trains, and added a train station so I can unload raw materials from farther outside my base than I'm willing to run belts.
I'm doing this because my mines are finally running dry, and I will need to build a mining outpost to ship ore back to my base.
The closest worthwhile patch of ore is 3 miles out, and I will not be going that far from my base without some heavier fire power, so super tank and power armor it is.
On the defensive side of things I needed to make a few improvements, the cannon shells and armor piercing rounds are useful for the bigger bugs but now some of the bugs have actually got smaller and more nibble, they can even climb my walls, they managed to partially knock out the turrets on the outer southern wall before I managed to get there and shoot them all till they died.
Thankfully my blueprints had just the solution for this, tiny hovering combat drones, they are about softball sized blue orbs that basically have a handgun shoved into them, i have squads of 10 patrolling the outer and inner walls with docking ports to reload and recharge the drones on the insides of the walls, kinda looks like a beehive from farther away. They seem to be doing an excellent job of fighting off the small bugs that manage to climb the wall, and they have fun shooting their guns into the incoming horde whenever there aren't any small bugs to shoot.
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Some more information on the bugs to, there are like 5 or 6 types running around, the small biting ones and the small spitting ones, or small biters and spitters, their larger and redder brethren, medium biters and spitters, the really tiny and fast bitey ones, nibblers, and the giant car sized blue ones, the big biters and spitters, these aren't the most clever of names but they seem to fit well enough, the minefield stops most of the big ones, the turrets get the stragglers, and the drones kill the nibblers, so far it's a great system all around.
Since the outer wall is holding off the bugs so well I decided to revisit my hobby of painting the inner wall. I've basically just been adding blue and purple swirls to it with some not at all tasteful gold trim, using actual gold for it.
I have been thinking about replacing the inner wall with marble but the rain is getting kinda melty lately and I don't want to put so much effort into something that will just get ruined by a bad storm.
Log #14
So important news out of the way first, power armor is the best thing ever, and I am never going to take it off.
Now for the less important news, I have gotten the trains running, there were some sacrifices from hundreds of brave drones and a few trains blew up, but I have a functioning train depot now, and it stops by every few hours to unload before heading back to bring back more ore.
I've never seen anything more beautiful than a train full of raw materials coming into the station to fuel my bug killing warmachine.
The adventure to get the mining outpost set up was a harsh one, I mean it was only 3 miles out and I was in a tank that can go 50 kph and it took me over 3 hours to drive out there, I had to avoid boulders, cliffs, way to many trees, and what felt like endless hordes of giant bug monsters.
I swear I ran over at least 100 of the bastards and gunned down significantly more than that. If I hadn't brought a couple dozen of those tiny drones squads I might have actually had to turn back, as it stands though by the time I made it to the ore deposit I was running low on ammo and more than half of my drones were just gone.
I made my wall and began building the turrets while the remainder of the drones fought off the few bitters that remained of the massive horde and almost had the defensive wall done by the time the next wave hit, it was probably a good thing that the wall wasn't done though as the bugs will swarm to any open hole in a wall and that made it really easy to focus fire on just one spot, I just threw down the rest of my mines and sprayed the entrance with my flame thrower.
It worked to clear out the small ones but a bunch of the big ones made it through, which is when my new power armor came into play, you see I had a bazooka and with personal shield didn't need to worry so much about small things like shredding myself with shrapnel, so i aimed at the oncoming horde and unloaded what felt like 76 rockets into them. That solved that problem handily.
After that wave was fought off it was simple to finish my defenses and plan how I was going to run a train line through what looked like an active warzone, then I remembered I had bullshit building powers and just sat in a train while laying the tracks in front of it, occasionally shooting a boulder or tree with my rocket launcher. A few of the trains I was in either got melted by bugs or got blown up when I misjudged how far away a rock was when I went to blow it up but such things happen in the pursuit of progress, it took 5 hours to actually run the train line and about 4 trains died in the process, but I had power armor so I was only somewhat crispy by the 4th explosion.
Actually setting up the automated trains resulted in another 2 trains exploding as they rammed each other at very high speeds and almost resulted in me actually dying by train, trains are dangerous little buggers apparently and I now have a few robotic fingers, which is dope but if I had walked just a little quicker I would have been giblets, gonna need to put railings up or something, but I probably won't bother.
Now that I actually have resources again I can begin new and better projects. I will need a nuclear reactor first though, everything I'm building is going to be power expensive and steam just won't cut it anymore.
It's almost time for operation robo lasers, where I will build robots that will help me build more robots and then some laser turrets, and I will finally be free from repairing the walls by hand. I will have a swarm of robots to do it for me! Why even leave my bunker when I can just control them with my mind! And if I actually bother to set up flamethrower turrets I will have one of each type!
Log #15
This log is going to be a bit more dull than the last one. I have gotten parts of the reactor set up and I am building the supply line I’ll need to build the robots and lasers.
The chaotic mess that is this factory is getting bad enough that I keep seeing parts that I don't remember actually building or parts that just don't do anything so I have been going through and making sure each part is actually necessary and trying to make this mess a bit more organized but its largely a futile effort at this point, if I take to much of it apart the defenses lose ammo and the bugs start pushing harder, so the only thing I can do is mitigate the problem.
I took a closer look at my robo buddies to get a better idea of how they function and what I could do to improve them, and I had a wonderful idea, if the bugs get to have a hive mind my defenses should get to have a hive mind too.
so I repurposed some decoders and linked them up to transmitters and receivers by the robots charging ports and made a sort of linked robo mind between the drones and turrets, the decoders hold most of the actual processing power and I just input goals and instructions for the drone swarm to follow, it has a limited learning power, no true reasoning but if a bot gets destroyed or a turret misses it will try to correct the issue for the next try.
It seems to be helping coordinate my defenses splendidly, the turrets aren't just shooting at whatever's closest and hostile and the drones don't just float still while shooting at a bug eating them, turrets pick their targets and the drones cover them and doge the bug attacks, occasionally intercepting them if they would have hit something vital on a turret. This whole thing is taking up a bunch of power but that's what I'm building the reactor for.