A Beginner's Guide to Constructing Your Phase Two Outpost. Section 3.1: Basic Base Building for Beginners

Interview Conducted by Colonel Jefferson Ames, U.S. Army.

Interview subject, Daronda Velross, Former Base Planner (note: sources indicate they were fired by three previous conglomerates for incompetence and have since been working as a dishwasher in a dive bar on the Hub)

Early mistake people make is overextending. You’ve got to get your core base built and set up before you start trying to claim smaller nodes or take resource spawns. I know, that sounds obvious, but people are always making that mistake. It’s a real art to decide what to construct first, second, third. If you don’t get your defenses up, your combatant miners are tied down defending the base from the spawn. If you don’t build a miner respawn point, you come back far away from the base and are out of the fight for ten times as long. If you don’t have your buff buildings, you’re fighting at a disadvantage.

It’s an art form. You earthlings just don’t have the experience to know how much you need me. It’s fortunate for you I’m available right now.

No, I don’t want to give away my secrets.

Ok, I’ll give you a hint. Autonomous Self-Replicating Miniature Attack Millipedes. SWARM for short. Huh? Well, it does in my language. You have to get as many of the basic base-cleaning miniature attendant kits as you can, then hack them with a military-grade AI. I know the backdoors to remove the safety features. They’re much better than static guns. Just imagine your foes being devoured from the legs up by a swarm of tiny metal bugs! And that’s just one of my innovations. My hourly rates are very reasonable…

(Note: sources were VERY EMPHATIC that we do NOT want to hire Velross. We have offered them a small stipend to answer questions on a standby basis).

The other downside of dying is when you respawn on the boat and don't have any landing craft to get you out of there, you have to sit around waiting for 40 minutes for someone to get back. I had plenty of time to start on a new hobby. One of the NPC sailors showed me how to whittle.

By the time we all made it back to our island, we had forty minutes until our wave clear timer expired, so we went and took out the spawn before taking a break. I was tired and ready for more than a short rest. We still had 16 hours, 32 minutes before the node was ours.

Everything had taken less than 8 hours. It was hard to believe. I ate a boxed meal Mama Grace had sent along while reclining in the grass by our node capture point.

Sage had burned through her lunch and a whole pile of snacks and was now jumping up and down, reenacting the raid for the benefit of Team Ragtag. Her version was even more exciting than the real one, since there were about three times as many aliens and they had Death Ray Blaster 9000 weapons, whatever those were. She was just giving a reenactment of my dying fight against the final alien as the rest of the team sailed triumphantly, yet sadly, away from the beach, Sage weeping sadly into the waves as I perished.

I had to interrupt. "I did not say, ’Tis better to die a thousand deaths than live in ignominy.’ I don't even know what ignominy means."

"Well you should have said it if you'd taken any time to think about these things. You're going to have a lot of opportunities to die, apparently, Shad. You need to start thinking of good last words."

"They're not last words. You just respawn. It's not that big a deal."

"It is if you do it too many times," Grandpa said. "I’ve been looking through the ruleset provided by the System. You may have missed the section that says more than three times your number of team players' deaths in a single 24-hour period will incur a one-hour respawn cooldown permanently. And it stacks."

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I blinked. "Which section?"

Grandpa gave the citation. I pulled it up and read through trying to understand. "So if we have fifteen people on the team," I gestured at everyone around the node, "and we die, uh, forty-five times in one 24-hour period, then after that we have a one-hour respawn timer forever."

"Do it again. Two-hour timer," Grandpa reminded me.

"That could get really ugly really fast. Oof." I started skimming through the rules. "There's got to be a way to reset that, surely. It's just begging for some griefer to take advantage of."

"There's an upgrade for our player respawn beacon," Sage said after a minute. "It's in section 14.9.3.7, allowed tertiary building modifications. It's expensive, though. Forty thousand soul coins."

I tried to do some math, but failed. One peculiarity of this rule set was that you could not bring soul coin currency in from elsewhere in the Reality Engine. Any soul coins you spent to upgrade your buildings had to be earned in this map. However, at the end of the phase, if you were holding an outpost, you got back all the soul coins invested in it. It was an incentive for people to improve their outposts and then hold them.

"We'll definitely pay for that upgrade if it becomes necessary," I said. "But for now, I guess we should try not to die so much."

"Speak for yourself," one of the Smiths said. "You're the only one who's died twice. The first time definitely wasn't necessary."

"I was trying to save everybody else a wasted trip back to the boat," I said in my own defense. "Besides, I wanted to know how it worked before I told anyone else to go through it.”

Smith looked taken aback. "Really?"

"Yeah?"

"Interesting." He didn't say any more, but went back to eating his packaged alien MRE. I knew Mama Grace had offered Team Mongoose some of her delicious homemade lunches and wasn't sure why they had refused. Didn't matter. Sooner or later, they would get a better look at all the snacks Sage was eating, and then they'd be hooked.

After our break, we fought off another two waves of skeleton pirates and cannibal pigs, and then Grandpa instructed all of us to lay down and try to nap for 45 minutes or so. He and Jones would keep watch. I agreed on the condition that he'd take a shut eye once I was done.

I lay down and was asleep instantly. That's one benefit of having been through basic training. You can sleep anywhere, anytime. We swapped off after 45 minutes. I felt much better for the shut-eye.

I let Grandpa snooze while Sage and I started looking over our haul. "We have so much stuff," Sage gloated. "We're going to be able to create an awesome, awesome defensive line here."

“Yeah. Hopefully there's not too many repercussions from this," I said. I was starting to feel a little bit of buyer's remorse as the adrenaline finally drained away. "That other team is not going to be happy."

"Maybe they didn't figure out who we were," Sage said.

"Pretty sure they'll figure that out."

"Whoa, cool," Sage said as she pulled out a crate and examined it. "Look at this! It's my own personal skeleton pirate army." She held up the box. It was labeled "Standard NPC Recruit Squad, Appropriately Themed for Map," and then underneath in a different font, it said "Skeleton Crew! This contains the pattern for one unit of NPC troops that may be commanded by a sponsored team member."

There was more detail listed. It was an item which could be equipped here in this map and reused indefinitely. It just had a cool down after each use. It would generate a squad of skeleton pirates, melee style, ranged, or a group of both. The pirates would have 40 health each and attack at the direction of their summoner.

"Are there more?" Sage asked. She dug around through her inventory. "I’ve got another one. What about you, Shad?"

"No, nothing that cool. You should ask Grandpa."

"I will," she said, as soon as he's awake. Oh, this is so cool, Shad. I'm going to have my very own skeleton army. I need to figure out if I can buff them up somehow." She buried herself in her inventory again, cataloging the contents.

It seemed like we had really accomplished something here. We had our foothold underway and we had made a move nobody would expect. I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Grandpa brought me back to earth quickly. "We got lucky," he said. "If we’d been attacked during the raid, we could have lost everything."

"Then why’d you agree?"

"It was a gamble worth taking. We’re never going to upset the status quo by playing it safe. I don’t care what Veda wants, I don’t even much care what Ames wants.” He leaned back against our stockade wall, arms folded across his chest. “I’m personally grateful to the aliens that took us. I’d be dead by now if they hadn’t. But that doesn’t give them the right to turn us humans into slaves. We’re one of the only earthling teams here, and we just told anyone who’s watching that we’re more than pawns." He walked over to the node and laid a hand against it it, as he looked up at the timer. "They’re here to take our land and push us out. Maybe they will, we haven’t got much chance of winning. But at least we will make them remember our names, remember that we fought back."

I nodded. There wasn’t much else for me to say. “If all we manage to do is write ‘Twofeather was here’ all over their records, that’s enough for me.”