Early the next morning.
Outside the sanatorium's perimeter wall, the crowd was bustling, filled with shouting and eager calls.
"Hauling rocks from the abandoned construction site! Four-man team, looking for one more! Rental on two wheelbarrows is already paid! DM fast if you want in!"
"Any Strength-type buddies around? Looking for one more teammate to chop trees, farm cash, and level up!"
"Agility-type looking for party! Perception-types prioritized, Intelligence-types back off! Running the scavenging quest at the northern townhouses! Chop-chop!"
"Damn it, do Intelligence-types have no human rights anymore?!"
"Part-time warehouse keeper recruitment at the outpost! Fixed daily pay of 9 silver coins and 100 contribution points. Working hours are 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with a 3-hour staggered break in between. Duties include balancing ledgers, inventory counts, purchasing and selling supplies. Intelligence-types preferred, only hiring two people. Note: the manager is always watching you; any embezzlement or foul play will be severely punished... Holy shit! I'm signing up!"
"The carpentry cabin is hiring too! Guaranteed base pay of 10 silver coins and 200 contribution points daily, plus bonus commissions on tool crafting orders. Uh... requires carpentry experience, ability to process raw logs, and ability to craft furniture, bows, and spears of Good quality or higher... Never mind, I'm out."
Following the version update, every player received a starter pack of 5 copper coins from the generous Lord Manager.
What could 5 copper coins buy?
Quite a lot, actually.
For instance, one could rent an axe at the logging cabin for five hours, or rent a handcart, wheelbarrow, or other tools at the warehouse for five hours.
Besides rentals, one could also buy a jin of ram horn potatoes, green wheat, or 100 grams of jerky at the warehouse. The purchasing power was genuinely solid.
It had to be said that players were always the most adaptable creatures.
If Bet Street's scavengers heard that someone wanted to replace the chips they had used for nearly a century with pieces of metal, they would probably have risked their lives on the spot to fight that person.
But players were different.
They were a swarm of particles undergoing Brownian motion inside a bottle, embodying a duality of chaos and order. As long as they still had to repeat the twin actions of putting on and taking off their helmets, they could never leap out of this bottle.
A game had the rules of a game; updates and patches were the norm.
To the players, this was simply common sense.
In less than an hour, these self-taught little prodigies had familiarized themselves with the rules of the new version, and within those boundaries, they had begun figuring out ways to play that suited the current meta.
On the open clearing before the perimeter wall.
Fang Chang did not set off immediately. Instead, he gathered Fleeting White Horse, Ye Shi, and Gale Force 8 together, sitting in a circle for a strategy meeting.
Fang Chang: "The biggest change in Alpha 0.3 is to the economy system and the identity system."
Fang Chang: "I consulted the manager's assistant earlier. Aside from making major contributions, the only way to earn contribution points is by taking up a job. Taking the lowest-threshold job, warehouse keeper, as an example: working a day earns 100 contribution points. Starting from scratch, under normal circumstances it'll take 20 days to become a citizen."
Gale Force 8 rubbed the bridge of his nose and raised his hand.
"Let me add to that. Taking a job isn't the only way; daily active quests have a baseline. For example, felling 20 trees and hauling them to the carpentry cabin gives 80 contribution points on top of the logging payout itself... But the daily cap for contribution points from daily active quests is only 160 points. That's maxed out after roughly two quests."
Fang Chang: "Mm... Using staggered breaks from job duties to run dailies, the theoretical maximum contribution points you can earn in a single day is 260. Reaching 2,000 points would take eight days. But for the average player, that's probably nearly impossible."
Ye Shi whispered, "Holy crap, so you're saying... aren't my 3,000 contribution points kind of badass?!"
Fleeting White Horse rubbed the back of his head and chuckled. "I've got 5,000."
Ye Shi: "Fuck!"
Back when they first entered the game, contribution points for felling trees had been tallied by the wood's length and thickness: an arm-thick tree gave 1 contribution point per meter, while a thigh-thick tree gave 2 contribution points per meter.
The game's balance designer had probably botched the math, resulting in Fleeting White Horse, a Strength-type, brute-forcing his way to 800 points just by chopping wood, while even Fang Chang, who had the lowest endurance, pulled in 300 points in a single day.
That had clearly been unreasonable.
Sure enough, starting from Alpha 0.2, logging income had taken a massive nerf. Now in Alpha 0.3, felling a tree paid only two tiers based on thickness and length: 2 or 4 copper coins. On top of that, if you didn't own an axe, you had to pay a rental fee of 1 copper coin per hour, though tab credit was accepted.
Even if you chopped down 20 thigh-thick pine trees in a day, your income would only be 80 copper coins, which converted to just 8 silver coins.
Even factoring in the 80 contribution points granted upon completing 20 trees, the logger profession had suffered an epic nerf compared to the server's launch days!
Then again, the outpost wasn't really short on wood anymore anyway, and clearing trees was probably just to prepare the land for farming come spring.
"Thanks to the data overflow of contribution points in the game's early days, the four of us have the highest contribution points right now. I've already redeemed my citizen status, and you guys should go upgrade yours in a bit too. That way, we'll have 20 square meters combined, and we can stake out a plot of land near the sanatorium."
"What do we stake out land for?"
"Idiot! To build a house! What's wrong with putting a three-story building on a compact 20-square-meter footprint? As long as the height doesn't exceed the sanatorium in the middle. The first floor becomes a storefront, and the second and third floors can be partitioned into one room per person. How great would it be to have our own beds and storage chests?"
Fang Chang rolled his eyes at Ye Shi. How could this guy ask such a stupid question?
"Makes sense..." Fleeting White Horse's eyes lit up. "We can do business!"
A storefront facing the sanatorium's front entrance—the players' respawn point—was prime real estate among prime real estate. Selling practically anything there would make them a fortune!
"Exactly! That's precisely what I had in mind!"
Fang Chang snapped his fingers, a confident smile spreading across his face.
"The new version is clearly encouraging players to tap into their creativity and spontaneously organize production and trade! Do you remember what the dog—cough, the lead designer emphasized from the start? Wasteland OL aims to create an economic system that truly reflects supply and demand. That also means in the future, a huge portion of player gear and supplies will likely have to come through player-to-player trade!"
If they didn't stake out land now, when would they?
It was a pity that the identity system capped the amount of land each player could purchase; otherwise, Fang Chang would have loved to save up and buy all the land around the sanatorium to develop wasteland real estate outright.
Wouldn't that offer way more bang for the buck than buying property in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou?
Was there any chance this game wouldn't blow up once open beta launched?
"Badass!" This time, even Gale Force 8 couldn't resist giving a thumbs-up.
The analysis was spot-on!
Ye Shi and Fleeting White Horse exchanged a glance, their faces brimming with excitement.
"How much does the land cost?"
Fang Chang smiled. "I looked into it. It's only 10 silver coins per square meter. What we need to do right now is pool 200 silver coins together before any other player does! Buy up that 20 square meters closest to the sanatorium!"
Fleeting White Horse hesitated. "What if someone beats us to it?"
Fang Chang made a helpless expression. "If someone really does, we just recruit them into our crew."
Hardly anyone had reached citizen rank yet anyway. Even if someone beat them to it, how many could there be? An extra person or two wouldn't hurt.
The three nodded, having no objection to bringing others on board.
"I've got another question," Ye Shi said, raising his hand. "What are we going to do to save up money? I checked: burning cement pays the best among the entry-level jobs with no experience requirements, but a day's income is only 10 silver coins. Even adding the 20% production bonus, that's 12 coins at most... And they only need two people."
Gale Force 8 pointed in that direction and reminded them, "And there aren't any spots left anyway. Look over at the cement kiln... Smoke is already rising. It's probably been full for a while."
Although the cement kiln had been built by Fleeting White Horse and his friends, after the land system was updated in Alpha 0.3, facilities within the perimeter wall were classified as public facilities.
As the builders of the facility, Fleeting White Horse and Fang Chang both enjoyed a 30-day right of first refusal.
However, the cement kiln's location was far too out of the way, right up against the base of the wall. Who knew if one day enemies might invade and wreck it with a single spray of bullets?
Neither planned to waste their precious "land purchase quota." After all, the technology wasn't all that advanced to begin with. They might as well wait thirty days for asset disposal: once the fixed assets on the land were officially requisitioned, the manager would compensate them with money and contribution points.
They practically wished it would be requisitioned right now so they could take the relocation payout and buy land.
Fang Chang stroked his chin. "Even if they weren't fully staffed, I wouldn't recommend applying for those fixed positions. If we want to outrun the other players, we have to blaze a new trail."
Ye Shi looked at him. "Like what?"
"Like hunting!"
"H-Hunting?"
Fang Chang nodded. "Yeah. I saw by the warehouse entrance earlier that a mutant hyena carcass fetches 5 silver coins. If the quarry weighs over thirty kilograms, every extra kilogram yields another 2 copper coins."
Ye Shi's eyes widened. "5 silver coins? That much?!"
And that was based on the bare minimum!
Although mutant hyenas generally weighed around thirty kilograms, it was autumn now, and most prey were storing fat, generally making them heavier than usual.
On this point, the game was remarkably detailed.
"...Yeah. Besides mutant hyenas, mutant reindeer are also on the procurement list, and each carcass goes for at least 12 silver coins! Essentially, with the four of us teaming up, as long as we bag 8 mutant hyenas a day, we'll comfortably out-earn what the four of us would make firing cement! Any extra is pure profit!"
This was the fastest way Fang Chang could think of to amass 200 silver coins.
"But... where are we going to find that much game?" Fleeting White Horse asked hesitantly. "Wetland Park seems to have mostly birds and small animals. We'd have to leave Wetland Park and head into the city ruins to find larger prey, right?"
Before Fang Chang could answer, Ye Shi, sitting beside him, raised his hand.
"No need to worry about that! I've been hunting with Lord Manager these past few days, so I remember where it's dangerous around here and where game is plentiful. Plus, Lord Manager and I spotted a migrating deer herd yesterday. As long as we follow their tracks, finding game will be a breeze!"
Gale Force 8 nodded. "Yeah. Our Ye Shi is Perception-type, and his 9 points of Perception are the highest among all players right now. Tracking game shouldn't be too hard. The question now is: how do we hunt? The weapon vendor hasn't even opened for business yet."
Fang Chang smiled confidently. "No need for guns. Javelins, slingshots, bows, crossbows... Used properly, these weapons aren't any worse than guns at close-to-medium range."
Gale Force 8 frowned. "Have you ever used a bow? Those things aren't easy to hit anything with."
Back when his university organized a team-building trip to an archery club, he had tried the sport once, using bows equipped with professional sights.
Never mind hitting the bullseye on a target twenty meters away—shooting a quiver of ten arrows and having even one graze your own target was considered talent.
Countless people clearly aimed at their own target, only to hit someone else's, or embed their arrows in the protective foam on the floor and ceiling.
If it was a bow without sights...
Gale Force 8 couldn't imagine how tear-jerkingly atrocious the hit rate would be.
Yet Fang Chang did not seem troubled in the slightest, the confident grin still on his face.
"Don't worry about that. Leave the archery to me; I've got a bit of a foundation. You'll handle crafting traps and finishing blows, Fleeting White Horse will take the front line, and Ye Shi will handle scouting and sentry duty."
"Trust me, this comp is rock solid!"
Chapter 48