I focused on it, and its description appeared in front of me.
* * *
Name: Wonder of the World
Level: 6 (Maximum)
Resources Needed: 100,000,000x Gold Units (100,000,000,000 MP)
10,000,000x Ivory Units (100,000,000 MP)
Construction Time: 525,600 minutes (315,360,000 MP)
Description: Few civilizations can claim to have reached the pinnacle of evolution and created something that will stand testament to their power and supremacy long after they are wiped away by the sands of time. This Wonder of the World will adopt a shape relevant to the guild it is built by and will greatly increase the guild's reputation across the Apocosmos.
* * *
The sheer amount of resources needed for this construction was more than anything I had ever seen. In fact, it was more than I could ever have imagined. Even if it was made of solid gold and ivory, it was going to have to be a very big building to require that much.
And considering that each gold unit cost a hundred times more than other resources in terms of MP, my choice right now was pretty simple. After all, as great as this building might be—and I had no doubt it would make us one of the most renowned guilds in the Apocosmos and bring each of us many followers—it was a project for peacetime.
I couldn’t justify this large of an MP spend on something that would give us no real tactical advantage. At least not until I’d looked through the rest of my options first, especially that new category that was just unlocked. But before that, I needed to take care of all of my promises to Aphrodite and the rest of my guildmates.
Minimizing the wonder of the world window, I focused on the tents and brought up a random house in the roster of residential buildings.
* * *
Name: Manor #96
Level: 5
Occupants: 64/64
Level-Up Requirement.: Settlement Level 6 (Met)
Level-Up Cost: 720 Lumber Units (7,200 MP)
120x Stone Units (1,200 MP)
72 Misc Building Units (720 MP)
Level-Up Time: 15,360 minutes (9,216,000 MP)
Description: A lavish manor with a multitude of amenities, twenty separate rooms, a kitchen, a dining area, and a living room. This building is able to comfortably house sixty-four humanoids, and it also has twenty-two bathrooms with magical toilets operating with small void portals. This building is considered above average in terms of living conditions and all individuals living in it get an additional quality of living and happiness boost.
* * *
I accepted the cost required to build it instantly and turned to face the direction of the building. The materials required started flying out of the warehouses and quickly being assembled into a tall structure, while the odd resident that was still inside the previous version was teleported just outside of it. After the dust settled, three more levels had been added to the manor, and all of its sides had grown significantly in width.
The building now looked more like a small settlement of its own, complete with multiple terraces, gardens, and paths connecting all of its entrances together and converging in the middle of a courtyard, where multiple stalls were set up. It almost looked like there could be several stores or taverns set up in just that one building.
The most important part, however, was still its capacity. I needed a number I could give to Aphrodite so I focused on its new Dark Energy signature.
* * *
Name: Luxurious Residential Building #96
Level: 6 (Maximum)
Occupants: 64/640
Description: The epitome of residential constructions, creating sub-communities and further binding the citizens together. This extravagant building contains 256 apartments with a multitude of amenities. Each apartment has two to three separate bedrooms, a kitchen and dining area, a living room, a bathroom, and a lavatories with small void portals. This building is able to comfortably house 640 humanoids and it also includes multiple recreational areas as well as spaces for commercial use. This building is considered excellent in terms of living conditions and all individuals living in it get a greater additional quality of living and happiness boost.
* * *
Six hundred and forty people in just one building was simply out of this world. There had to be some kind of space distortion magic in place, because there was no way a building with such a footprint like this would be able to contain all these rooms. The fact that its available slots had just multiplied by ten meant that our whole population would essentially be able to fit in less than a score of these buildings.
I didn’t need to give such an accurate estimate to Aphrodite but just for the sake of my own amusement, I thought I’d calculate just how many people would be able to live here if we built all the available residential buildings and upgraded them to their maximum. That would be one thousand six hundred buildings, times six hundred and forty occupants.
"Aphrodite? I’ve got a number for you," I said through the guild chat.
"Better be a big one, because we have plenty more people wanting to move in now that they’ve heard slots have opened," she replied. "Apparently they weren't expecting it to happen so soon, so they haven't bothered with noting their names down in the waiting list yet…"
"A million," I said, and rushed to correct myself. "One million, twenty-four thousand to be exact."
"What are you talking about?" Aphrodite asked, sounding confused. "Is that the amount of lumber you need to upgrade?"
"No," I replied, without offering any further explanation.
"You're really not making any sen—"
"Holy fuck!" Ares jumped in the conversation. "I just checked the manor you upgraded. I need to see this!"
"What is so great about it?" Aphrodite asked.
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"Look, each of the upgraded buildings can hold ten times the number of people the manors could," I explained. "And we can build a hundred times the number of them we could previously. Hence, we can hold more than a million people."
"That’s incredible…" she said. "And it will make my life a lot easier. I will appoint officials to be responsible for new people coming, but we don't need to limit the numbers anymore. At least not for some time."
"Then I'd better get back to building and upgrading," I said, and closed the guild chat again.
There were a lot of things I needed to do now. If only I could remember how batch building and upgrading worked. I pulled up the list of all available projects and tried to focus on more than one of the residential buildings. Eventually, I was able to expand the number of selected buildings and so I chose all of the existing ones except for the one we lived in, since I liked our manor just fine.
* * *
You can completely skip the upgrade process of 159 Manors at the cost of 10 MP per second for each building.
Would you like to do so for a total of 1,453,600,000 MP?
Yes No
* * *
So we’d finally started touching on billions of MP. Still, we had a lot, and I'd rather people move in quickly so everything else could scale quickly as well. Perhaps I wouldn't upgrade all one thousand six hundred of them to level six just yet, since we wouldn't be welcoming one million people instantly, but we could start with the ones we had, and at least start building those we didn’t.
I chose “Yes” and a flurry of materials unlike anything I had ever seen started flying all over the town. Within a few seconds, all of the existing buildings were upgraded and everyone in town stopped what they were doing to marvel at their new homes.
While I was at it, and since I knew that the incoming people would need work once they settled in, I selected batches of tents and started placing them around the city, creating more neighborhoods—or at least outlines of them. Doing so was made easier by the fact that the footprint of each upgraded residential building didn’t change despite the increase in size on the inside, so we had plenty of space on the mountainside as a whole.
I set the positions of all the remaining buildings, all the way to the one thousand six hundredth, and left specific instructions to work on them until they were all level four. The last two levels would take significantly more time and there was no reason to spend resources there yet. We could just upgrade buildings in batches if the need for more space was created.
The only bad thing I noticed about this system was that we couldn't go directly to level four. Instead, the builders would have to set up a tent, then dismantle it and build the house in that place. They could, of course, build other buildings that could house people but in that case they wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of the benefits the place of power had to offer them. Not to mention that standard buildings would take up too much real estate and would also need to be manually repaired in case of damage. All the others could be fixed by mana workers.
I was brought out of my thoughts when I noticed the population counter in the town’s overview start to increase. In preparation for the town's upgrade and the sudden influx of new citizens—as well as the possibility of being attacked by Cronus—I had commanded that the farmers store a much larger percentage of their produce, to the extent that we sometimes had to import food from merchants through Dion.
The choice had seemed odd to my fellow guild members at that point, but since the gates had been opened much wider for new people, the stored produce would need to serve us until the production from new and upgraded farms could catch up. Which meant that getting started on those needed to be my next order of business.
I pulled up the tab of all buildings and this time selected the last farm in our roster.
* * *
Name: Farm #32
Level: 5
Livestock: 120/120
Crops: 1,200/1,200
Job Slots: 72/72
Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 6
Level-Up Cost: 12,000x Lumber Units (12,0000 MP)
Level-Up Time: 72,000 minutes (43,200,000 MP)
Description: A farm that allows for a variety of small, medium, and large-sized animals as well as a large selection of crops. Owning a farm increases the food ration production rate.
* * *
Even the last one was operating at capacity, which had initially been taxing for our coffers since livestock didn’t come for free. But since then, we’d had to turn down great deals on animals. I made a note to inform Aphrodite to track down the merchants that had offered us these deals and bring them back for renegotiations.
Before building the rest of the available farm plots—now three hundred and twenty—I selected all thirty-two of our existing farms and batch-upgraded them. Lumber came flying out of our warehouse and the barns expanded in front of my eyes, as did the fences and the ground underneath them.
Within seconds, all of our farms were at maximum level and all the animals were very confused, since their surroundings had changed so fast. I focused on a random farm in my field of view to see what we had to work with.
* * *
Name: Farm
Level: 6 (Maximum)
Livestock: 120/1,200
Crops: 12,000/12,000
Job Slots: 720/720
Description: A farm that allows for a variety of small, medium, large, and exotic animals as well as a large selection of crops. Owning a farm increases the food ration production rate. The farm can now also support breeding of the animals that live there.
* * *
It seemed that a tenfold increase in numbers was a pattern for when buildings reached their maximum level. And they came with an additional benefit too, it seemed. I hadn’t yet considered whether breeding animals was possible in the farms we’d already owned. In fact, I only ever visited them to check on the people working there, never to look into how effective they were.
All I knew was that this was the place our mortal citizens could get the vegetables, dairy, and meat products they needed to survive. Making a business out of it by breeding our own animals was never something I’d considered, but having seen this new “feature” now, I was sure it would be used to the best of the farmers’ abilities.
The problem with farms compared to houses was that they weren't ready to use straight away. Whereas residential buildings were ready to move into, the farms still needed work after they were upgraded in order to reach their full potential. The space for more animals and plot for crops were there, but someone still had to bring in the animals and plants to fill them.
This made my decision to keep a good stash of food rations in our warehouses seem even more wise. Of course, it would only seem wise to someone who didn’t have all the available information like I had. After all, I had seen the same scenario play out before on previous upgrades. Just never quite on this scale.
Since I was already working on the plan for farming, I figured I might as well set up the place where the remaining farms—almost three hundred of them—would be constructed. I placed them all close to each other, making sure that they never strayed too far from the warehouses and also that they weren’t too close to the walls.
Having them some distance away from enemy fire was important—not being able to sustain ourselves was one of the biggest threats in all scenarios where towns were besieged. At least, that was what I knew from the stories of battles carried out by the titans against their enemies.
With the outlines of the new buildings ready and visible, I left the farms waiting to be built. The livestock and crop slots would take a lot longer to catch up however I built them, but I wanted to make sure that this was prioritized right after the construction of the new homes.
The next buildings on the list were the storage buildings. That was an easy pass for the time being. We hadn’t yet reached capacity with the six that we already had and we were still taking out materials a lot faster than we were putting them in. In the end, warehouses were peacetime buildings and we were heading to war. Perhaps if we ramped up imports in preparation for battle, we might need to build more or upgrade the ones we had. But at the moment we needn't worry about that.
That finally brought me to the buildings connected to the wishes of my dear guildmates. The lumberyard and mining camp were Artemis's responsibilities, or rather the people working there were, so it made sense that she wanted the best for them. I looked at the lumberyard first since I hadn’t checked its status in a while.
* * *
Name: Lumberyard
Level: 5
Output: 2,000 Units/hour
Job Slots: 120
Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 6
Level-Up Cost: 20,000x Lumber Units (200,000 MP)
Level-Up Time: 9,600 minutes (5,760,000 MP)
Description: A lumberyard is the focal point of a community's woodworking business, be it imports, exports, treatment, or processing. Owning a lumberyard significantly increases the lumber unit production rate.
* * *
The cost was actually very low compared to the billions of MP I’d just burned on upgrading only a tenth of our available manors and farms. But before I upgraded it, I wanted to see if their mining counterpart was in a similar situation.
* * *
Name: Mining Camp
Level: 5
Output: 2,000 Units/hour
Job Slots: 120
Level-Up Requirement: Settlement Level 6
Level-Up Cost: 40,000x Lumber Units (400,000 MP)
20,000x Iron Units (200,000 MP)
Level-Up Time: 9,600 minutes (5,760,000 MP)
Description: The mining camp is the beginning and the end of every miner’s working day. This is where ores will be crushed, ground, roasted, smelted, refined, and cast. Owning a mining camp significantly increases the metal and ore unit production rate.
* * *