Industrial Zone Decree No. 0! An Epic Buff for Production Occupations?

That night, Chu Guang had a very, very long dream. He dreamed he was playing a game called The Sims—going to work, getting off work, eating, sleeping, then waking up to go to work again, eat again, and sleep again, until suddenly one day a truck plowed straight toward him and jolted him awake. "Damn... working even in my sleep. I must be losing my mind." Couldn't he have had a better dream? Heaving for breath as he woke in bed, Chu Guang instinctively reached to touch his chest and found his clothes drenched in sweat. "Did I set the air conditioning too high?" Muttering softly under his breath, he jumped out of bed and stretched his limbs. His joints popped with a satisfying crackle, leaving him feeling extraordinarily refreshed. Wait. Could he have leveled up? With a stir of curiosity, Chu Guang immediately went to the resident hall to retrieve the examination equipment and ran a full-body scan on himself. Sure enough, just as he expected, his gene sequence had grown by a level, going from LV.7 to LV.8! [ ID: Chu Guang Gene Sequence: Administrator Level: LV.7 → LV.8 —Basic Attributes— Strength: 10 Agility: 6 Constitution: 8 Perception: 7 Intelligence: 6 → 7 ] "The previous increases were all in physical motor capabilities. This time it enhanced brain cell activity?" Chu Guang flexed his arms, falling into deep thought as he looked over the examination report. "It's just as I guessed. When commanding other clones in battle, my gene sequence grows along with them." Of course, the attribute panel was only a reference. Rather than merely stacking raw stats, fully leveraging the advantages of one's physical functions was what mattered. Just like that Crawler last time—all four of its stats apart from Intelligence were higher than his, yet in the end he had pulled off a clutch kill against it. That was the best proof. "Once the players level up to around LV.10, I can toss Vault 117 to them to grind as a dungeon." He had heard there was power armor inside. Chu Guang happened to lack a suit of armor to go with his Nitrogen Power Hammer. Once his armor and weapon were fully assembled, he would truly be a walking tank. Never mind a Crawler—even if a far more formidable mutant stood before him, it would only be fit to scratch his itch. Pleased with these pleasant thoughts, Chu Guang walked to the adjacent room and woke Xia Yan, urging her out to work despite her protests. "Can't you let me sleep a bit longer? The weapons shop has zero business at this hour!" Standing in the elevator, Xia Yan smoothed down her messy red hair with her free left hand while muttering small complaints. "The whole day's work depends on a good start in the morning. What choice do I have? If you aren't diligent, how am I going to live the good life in the future? Relax, once this winter passes, your workload will lighten up." Chu Guang joked, then noticed an unruly tuft of hair sticking up at the back of her head. He reached out and pressed down on it a couple of times. "You'd better splash some water on it in the bathhouse. I don't think this tuft is going to stay down." Her roots were quite stiff; looks like she had been getting good nutrition lately. It was truly driving his OCD crazy... Xia Yan had still been drowsy and groggy, but the moment Chu Guang's fingers touched her scalp, she reacted like a cat that had its tail stepped on. Jolting sideways in alarm, she clutched her crutch and shrank warily into the corner of the elevator. "What are you doing?!" Chu Guang shrugged. He hadn't figured out how to explain it, nor could he be bothered to try. Xiao Qi, who had been squatting nearby idling and observing the whole scene, raised its camera and studied Xia Yan huddled in the corner for a moment. Then, out of nowhere, it spoke up. "According to Xiao Qi's analysis, the probability of Master harboring improper designs toward you is less than 0.3%. Based on DNA data analysis, any single chromosome preserved in Shelter 404's gene bank holds greater reproductive appeal and hereditary value than the chromosomes you possess." Xia Yan's face instantly flushed the exact same color as her hair. She glared fixedly at the robot in the corner, a manic, borderline-deranged laugh leaking from her lips. "Heh... heh, heh-heh-heh-heh!" *She's probably lost her mind.* Chu Guang was equally displeased and turned to look at Xiao Qi. "Why is there still a 0.3%?" *Are you, an AI, also doubting the moral character of someone as upright, open, and righteous as Chu Guang?* Xiao Qi tilted its camera and said with full conviction, "Because Master is a young man after all. Even if you had thoughts, it would be understandable. After all, if there weren't even a 0.3% probability, wouldn't it feel like there's something wrong with you in certain aspects?" Chu Guang rubbed his chin. "...Put that way, it actually makes sense. I don't even know how to refute it." Xiao Qi: "Right?" Xia Yan showed no reaction to the exchange between the human and the AI. She looked like she had blackened completely, standing there letting out hollow laughs. Chu Guang couldn't help feeling that the way she looked at Xiao Qi was somewhat ominous. Truth be told, this AI had probably been on standby for too long, whether due to aging hardware or whatever else. Its brain really wasn't very sharp at times, especially when it came to speaking, and its emotional intelligence was downright abysmal. Still, one thing was one thing; you were a mercenary once, so why is your mental resilience so fragile? Or can anyone with hands become a mercenary in Boulder City? Chu Guang was completely at a loss. *** Ever since Chu Guang stopped micromanaging players' login permissions and approved night logins, he no longer slept in the resident hall, choosing instead to move into the empty room next to Xia Yan. Whenever he slept, he handed over Shelter permissions to Xiao Qi while it was charging, as long as it kept the players from rummaging through his things. Outside the shelter, Old Luka was keeping watch, so whatever else the players messed around with didn't matter. All through yesterday night, the active substance extractor's furnace hadn't stopped once. Between the 6 cannon fodder from daytime and the 21 from the night, a total of 12.3 units of active substance had been refined. Adding the 4 units accumulated previously and deducting the 1-unit deficit caused by Yaya, the active substance reserves had reached 15.3 units. One extractor could hold only 25 units; once full, it would have to be pumped out and stored in plastic bottles. Who knew whether it would spoil if stored outside? In any case, the shelter was no longer so short on active substance. As long as deaths weren't completely meaningless, acceptable combat casualties could be tolerated. Apart from forbidding them from actively picking fights with the green-skinned muscleheads on 76th Street and harassing neutral survivors in the south who could be won over, Chu Guang's restrictions on the players' range of activity were no longer as tight as before. After a while longer, he could perhaps appropriately lower the contribution point penalty for dying. When Chu Guang reached the surface, quite a few players had already logged on, bustling to and fro through the industrial zone cradling clattering piles of parts and components. At present, over 40% of the industrial zone's orders came from the proprietress of the weapons shop, including parts needed for manufacturing receivers, copper casings and gunpowder needed for ammunition, and so forth. Among the fifth batch of new players who recently entered the game, several were newcomers majoring in metallurgy who had chosen the Intelligence-type sequence. Their development path was crystal clear: they aimed straight toward becoming production occupation players. Through repeated practice and improvements by the two players Ya'er I Wanna Go to the Restroom and Who Will Smell My Athlete's Foot, the outpost's steelmaking technology had already seen substantial improvement. Right now, these fellows were tinkering with recreating the mid-nineteenth-century acid bottom-blown converter steelmaking process. Under conditions where pure oxygen could not be produced on a large scale, the Bessemer process of "air-blown steelmaking" was a decent choice. Although it was difficult to remove phosphorus from iron ore, the raw material they used wasn't phosphorus-rich ore anyway; they used scrap steel that was inherently phosphorus-free, allowing them to skip the step of adding limestone for dephosphorization altogether. As for the "blowhole" issue, it could be solved by drawing upon the experience of later generations, such as adding deoxidizers after blasting air. However, the crux of everything was that they first needed a 1.2-meter-tall furnace lined with tetravalent compounds such as silicon dioxide and zirconium dioxide as an acid lining to prevent the furnace itself from being melted by molten iron. This posed a considerable test for their sintering process. Yet these players hardly seemed bothered by the difficulty; instead, they treated it as a challenge. Previously, on the forum, everyone had bragged bigger and bolder than the next. Now that they had secured closed beta access, it was time to show their real skills. Even if they had never tried it in practice before, they had no choice but to bite the bullet and dive in. Chu Guang had nothing to complain about regarding these players' diligence, but the layout of this industrial zone was truly unkempt. The charcoal kiln was right next to the brick kiln, and just a couple of steps away sat the steel smelting furnace—there was zero proper planning. It couldn't go on like this. As everyone knew, in base-building games, if the very first building was placed in the wrong spot, the entire layout that followed would fall into utter chaos. To save his OCD from killing him and to ensure the production safety of these players, Chu Guang fetched a wooden stake and a wooden board, walked south of the sanatorium, drove the stake into the ground, and hung the board on it. Next, he took a marker and briskly scribbled lines of text across the board. Once finished, he took two steps back to admire his handiwork. [Industrial Zone Decree No. 0: 1. The area to the south of the outpost is designated as the industrial zone. 2. New facilities must be submitted via application to the Administrator or the Administrator's assistant, stating the proposed project, business type, budget, and estimated area, and may only be constructed within approved zones. 3. Structures encroaching on roads, exceeding planned boundaries, or otherwise deemed illegal will be dismantled and removed.] "Not bad." Chu Guang nodded with satisfaction. Decree No. 0 was just a rough draft anyway, so naturally, the fewer words, the better. Fewer words meant less reading hassle for the players, and it made management easier for himself, saving him the trouble of writing a massive wall of text only to have everyone claim they hadn't seen it when questioned later. Later on, provisions regarding site security deposits, rent, management fees, taxes, and the like would be added in the form of the Industrial Zone Management Regulations. The current rule was merely meant to stop the players from building haphazardly everywhere and blocking the path between the south gate and the respawn point. Before he could even walk away, nearby players spotted the sign and curiously gathered around. "Industrial Zone Decree No. 0?" "The southern area of the outpost is designated as an industrial zone... Holy crap?! An epic buff for production occupations?!" "Buff my ass! You think it's giving you a stat buff? This announcement just means we can't build whatever we want wherever we want anymore. We have to apply first, then build—build with a plan!" "Huh? Then does that count as a nerf?" "Wait, put another way... even without buying land in the industrial zone, we can obtain land-use rights through approved applications? And that space won't count toward personal land allotments?" "Holy crap! That's awesome!" "How is this a nerf? Production occupations won big-time!!" "Hell yeah, we're set!" Having finally finished deciphering the notice of less than a hundred words, the production occupation players gathered around the "NPC" instantly erupted with excitement!