James watched as people prepared to leave the village. The older waves of climbers passed information along to the new wave of climbers, explaining features of the system from the inventory and the village shops, to the Aggression Field they had learned of yesterday. Some climbers from the newest wave explained what they already knew, and shared information on the tutorial broadcast going on outside of the tower as well as the general state of the world outside.
I can use this. James thought, as he opened the recording and editing menus. Any information worth telling the new arrivals is information I should add to the tutorial broadcast. James shifted through the observers until he felt he had one of every group going over the details of the tower to the new climbers, and cut clips of the discussion before saving them to the menu. I can't go over it all right now, but having it set aside now for when I go over everything at the end of the day will save me time. More importantly, I wonder how they're going to tackle the aggression field issue.
The result, James observed, was that any parties of completely new climbers would be accompanied by another party of veteran climbers. No one would say no to being accompanied by a party of allies a whole two levels above you. Of the 77 new arrivals, 13 completely new parties formed, with the rest of the new arrivals joining existing groups. Every party stuck to the rule of having at least 4 members, including the 6 parties that would be staying within or around the village throughout the day. Made up mostly of those who had chosen to stay within the village the day before, and the more anxious of the new arrivals, the 6 parties serving as village guards for the day were led by a few level three climbers who would be guiding them in working together as a team and getting used to combat. The plan was to spend time just outside of the village walls to lure monsters to them, where they would then back up into the village to fight. This would allow them to pull mobs from the forest while ensuring they wouldn't get overwhelmed, and would be able to relax afterwards without fear of an ambush. With 6 parties staying near the village, and 13 parties of newbies led by 13 parties of mostly veterans, another 11 parties would remain made of only level 3s, that would explore deeper into the surrounding map, and a lone rogue who refused to join a party, who didn't bother to state their plans to the rest of the climbers during the assembly.
"We'll be aiming to get all of you to level two by the end of the day." One of the veterans explained, after all of the new parties had been assigned to a veteran party. "We'll hunt for six hours, just long enough to get the three quests about being outside of the village completed, at which point we'll show you how to prepare and cook the animals you've killed. We treated you all this morning to a free breakfast, but you'll be expected to hunt for yourselves from now on. We won't force you to starve if you fail to find or kill anything, we've only survived this long working together, but you'll have to settle for whatever others are willing to part with, and few of us have more than a day's worth of food stored." With that last bit out of the way, the parties set out.
Normally this is when I ask 61-3 to pull up a screen of every party, but maybe I can do this myself. The climber menu doesn't have any buttons or anything to display what party each climber is in, only listing names and levels, but I've done a lot with other menus just by thinking at them in various ways, and it's worked more often than not. Just because there isn't a visible button for it, doesn't mean I can't do it…
Display one screen from each party. James thought, and 44 screens appeared in front of him, appearing in 5 rows, 4 of them 10 screens across. Woah, that's a lot. At this rate, watching even most parties is going to feel impossible. Maybe I should limit it to one from each wave in the future? Or A few from each floor? Regardless, for now, I want to... Remove half of the screens that show a party traveling with another party. James thought at the screens, and watched as the number of screens went down to 15, in 3 rows of 5. Wait, that's not right. That was over half of the screens. It should have only taken out... 16 or so screens. A few minutes passed of James looking at the screens that remained and the ones that had closed, which he managed to reopen and set so that they'd hover in a separate grid beside the 15 that originally remained, before he figured out where things went wrong.
It included parties that were just near each other, but not planning on traveling together. I made the request too early and didn't give everyone time to spread out. It also chose which screens it would close at random, so some groups vanished entirely while I continued seeing more than one party of other groups. I need to be more specific. How about... Climber menu, show only one observer from every party less than 3 meters away from another party, as well as one observer of every party more than 3 meters away from another party. This time the number of screens changed to 13. What? This removed even more than the last one!
Oh, it took every party that was within 3 meters of another party, and gave me one observer, and then an observer from every other party. James realized after another moment of comparing the screens to each other. That was easier to figure out when only one screen had more than five people in it. Alright, how about…
More attempts were made, each with similarly disappointing results. It doesn't get that I'm trying to have one observer from each group. Using the word group doesn't even work, because it doesn't understand what I'm talking about. I can separate by floor, by party, and by location, but even when I try to word things by how close a party is to another, it doesn't distinguish between one group of parties traveling together, and a different group of parties traveling together, it just takes every party traveling near another party, and puts them all in one box. Wait, what if I use climbers as the key word instead? Climber menu, show the smallest number of screens possible to show every climber on floor 1. This time, 75 screens appeared. Right, some observers try to show the whole party, but often zoom in on their individual climber whenever they're in a conversation or looking through their menu... I give up. James declared to himself. I wanted to figure this out for myself, but I've wasted enough time, I'm asking 61-3 for help.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
"61-3, I'm trying to get the climber menu to display one screen for each group of climbers, but the menu doesn't respond whenever I use the word group, and any other attempts at getting it to display based on how close parties are to each other keeps misinterpreting what I'm going for. How did you do it whenever I asked you to display a screen from every group?"
[Whenever you requested I display each group of climbers moving together, I would process the data from every observer within the tower. First, I would separate the observers of any climbers within the village into a single category, and pick one of them at random. For the others, I would designate a radius from each observer, and catalog every observer that fell within the radius of another, at which point, I would identify chains from one observer to the next, and would designate every observer within a single chain as a group, until I had every observer cataloged within one of these groups, at which point I would then open the display of one observer from each group.]
"O-oh..." James said. So basically, they just looked at every observer at once and figured it out manually, just... a lot faster and better than any human could do it.
[Administrator James, would you like me to create a shortcut for using this method through the climber menu yourself?]
"That's possible? Yes, please, what would the shortcut be?"
[Affirmative. Please wait while I update the climber menu.]
"Of course." I should have just asked 61-3 about this in the first place. At least now I know I can ask 61-3 to create shortcuts of whatever I've asked it to do before. It's a little odd that the system or whatever that displays all of these menus doesn't seem to have any intelligence of its own. I sort of thought of the menus and 61-3 as a single entity, but I think it's more like the system is a program, and 61-3 is an automated administrator of it. If 61-3 and the other towers were destroyed, would the system cease functioning? Have attempts already been made to destroy them? Maybe I should pay more attention the next time new arrivals talk about what's going on in the world outside of the tower.
[Update complete. Administrator James, to use the shortcut, tell the climber menu to “display all groups on floor-” followed by the number of the floor or floors you wish to include.]
"Thank you, 61-3, this will help a lot. Now I won't have to bug you every time people leave the village."
[You are welcome, Administrator James. However, do not hesitate to rely on me in the future. I enjoy assisting you with your duties as an Administrator, and doing so is one of the purposes of my creation.]
"Right, I'll keep that in mind, 61-3, thank you." I still want to learn more about how to use the system on my own, however. The idea of sitting back and making 61-3 do everything while everyone else is struggling inside of the tower doesn't sit well with me. Plus, if anything ever causes 61-3 to become unavailable, an error, damage to the tower, or whatever else, I don't want to become useless.
Anyway, time to try out that shortcut. Climber menu, display all groups on floor 1. James thought, this time prompting the system to display 26 screens, in 5 rows of 5 with one the last screen sitting in the middle above the 5x5 grid. This looks promising, there's one screen from everyone in the village, one screen for each veteran and newbie pairing, and one for every veteran party, including the lone rogue woman. Right now the screens are all muted, which is for the best, but I wish I could get an alert whenever a group was in the middle of a fight…
"61-3, would it be possible to set up the climber menu screens, so that I could receive a visual notification from any screen when a group engages a monster, as well as a list of any deaths that happen within each group?" I think as time goes on it'll only get harder to keep track of everything, but if I can at least keep track of battles or whenever someone dies, I can at least get a good idea of what's going on, and what I might need to help people prepare against.
[Affirmative. I will begin working on updating the climber menu according to your instructions, and inform you when the update is ready.]
"Alright, thanks! This will make keeping track of everything a lot easier."
[You are welcome, Administrator James.]
"You don't have to call me by my administrator title every time you address me, you know, you can just call me James, if you want."
[Affirmative. Thank you, James.]
"You're welcome!" James said cheerfully. I don't know if it's just because I'm desperate to see them as a friend, due to the loneliness and stress of being stuck inside of this tower, but I want to believe they see me as a friend too. At the very least, it's comforting to know they actually want to help. Even if they don't care about humanity, it feels like I'm not alone in trying to help them.