Lord Of The New World

As the next day rolled in, I started with giving the 10 axes to the construction group and teaching them how to cut trees with the axes without dropping the trees on top of themselves.

And as the construction group cut the trees, I smelted a unit of ore with the smithing group and made 3 saws, and a few smaller equipment that could be used in carpentry, and then stopped the furnaces, and made the smelting group help me turn the fallen trees into planks that could be used for building later.

Was I going to start building wooden houses right now? Not really.

Not because I didn’t want to start building wooden houses and other buildings, but because of 2 reasons.

First being that I did not have the slightest clue how to make a functional wooden house, which I would research probably towards the end of summer.

And the second being... well, I needed to dry all this wood.

Trees have a lot of water in them, and when you cut them down the water stays in the log, so you have to wait for a few months for it to dry, and make sure its in a ventilated place.

It doesn’t really matter if water or snow touches it, as logs don’t really reabsorb water, instead, they start rotting if they stay in water for too long.

So, as I cut the branches of the fallen trees, and showed how to turn them into planks and logs that could be used in buildings to the 20 or so Homunculi next to me, I lamented that I wouldn’t be able to use them for at least the next 2 months.

But that was fine, I wasn’t getting the research on how to make wooden houses for the next 2 to 3 months anyways.

And by the miners came back, with 6 units of malachite ore rather than the usual 3 thanks to their new copper pickaxes, we had managed to process 5 trees, which was around 1.300 units of wood or 13 tons in other words.

Yeah, I totally wasn’t going to have any problems with getting enough organic materials to make Homunculi anytime soon. Hell, I could make 130 Homunculi right now!

Not that I would, because I simply lacked the food to feed them, but I could still make 130 Homunculi right this moment.

And please do remember, this is a way, waaay smaller number than what we will get in the future. Mostly due to the inexperience of the Homunculi working with me, and the fact that more than half of them just didn’t have the tools to help process the wood.

Normally, a single lumberjack can process a cord of wood every day, which is around 2.2 tons of wood, or 5k pounds if you are using freedom units.

And today, we only managed to process 1 ton of wood per person with tools, tomorrow this number would probably jump up to 26 tons, so nearly the amount 13 lumberjacks can do by themselves.

And the day after that? Easily over 32 tons a day, if we put all of the construction group into wood working, which I wasn’t going to do.

Maybe I’d separate 5 people from the construction group, and make them lumberjacks, but those 11 people that remained in the construction group had a lot to do!

*ding*

Quest The First Swing completed! Rewards, 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

have been granted in the Empire System!

As the miners put their gain from the day into the stockpiles my quest updated, and I immediately opened my system window to research bow making, but as I was doing that, I saw that I had a new quest.

The Age Of Metal – Produce 100 Copper Tools. - Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

I already had a bit less than 30 copper tools, so I’d be able to complete that quest in, let’s see, the smelting crew can work at max 10 hours a day, and smelt 20kg of ore, and make 10kg of pure copper a day.

If we take the absolute max amount of work that they can do, we should be able to complete the quest in the next week, but more likely, it’d take 10 days or so to complete it.

Because the smelting crew were people, not machines. And, though it hurts my inner capitalist to say this, treating people as slaves is also bad, so I can’t whip them and force them to work.

The best I can hope for is 14-16 kg of ores smelt every day, so 7-8 kg of ores, or 8 tools made by day, so it will probably take 10 days to complete the quest.

Well, probably a bit less than that, as I want to make a lot of arrows.

As I clicked on the Bow-making research, the knowledge about how to make many types of bows flooded into my mind, but mainly 2 interested me, short and long bows.

And also, I got the knowledge of how to make arrows and quivers. I could make wooden arrowheads to hunt small game, and for training, and make copper arrow heads to deal with the monsters that may come at us.

Then I closed the research tab, and was about to close the empire system too, but then, I saw that 2 new quests appeared on the bottom of my screen.

Lord of War – Make 20 short bows and 30 long bows. – Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

Enough to Blot Out The Sun – Make a total of 10.000 arrows. – Rewards: 10 Exp + 1 Research Point

As I saw the lord of war, I could understand the joke behind it, after all the bow and arrow remained as the uncontested ruler of warfare for a few millennia, until the gun overtook it.

But the second quest made my mind stop for a moment—until I did the mad and was underwhelmed by the amount of resources necessary to make 10.000 arrows that is.

From 1kg of copper, I could make 40 arrowheads, so from a unit of copper, I could make 400.

And from a mere 25 units of copper, or 50 units of malachite ore which could be mined in 8 days or so, I could make 10.000 arrows.

And I didn’t even need to make them all out of metal! Remember, I have 1.300 units of wood sitting around.

I can literally do this in a few days... that is if I had the manpower, but alas, I could not afford to make more Homunculi, lest we go hungry this winter.

But I should be able to complete this quest in 2-3 weeks.

Normally I’d say only a week, but I also had to make 70 more copper tools, and while the arrow heads are being cast, the smithing group would also need to make more tools to replace the ones that are destroyed or damaged because copper is a soft metal.

And soft metals are... well, soft. With some quick repairs most tools would become usable, but with time, some would become unusable, and they’d need to be replaced.

So, maybe completing Enough to Blot Out The Sun would take a month from now.

But Lord Of War? I should be able to complete it in... let see... 2 weeks.

Assuming I don’t conscript a poor Homunculi to help me make them that is, and I am totally doing that.

But I think I can only take 1 more person from the construction group, otherwise they’ll be too slow in their work.

As the day ended, and another begun anew, I quickly stole another Homunculi from the construction group and started teaching him how to make bows, arrows, and basic carpentry.

I didn’t have time to teach him all the ins and outs of carpentry, but I was able to put the knowledge of how to make bows, arrows, and basic carpentry into his mind in a day.

And as the night rolled, I stole him once again after dinner and we made 2 sleds before going to sleep.

Why sleds? Well, all the wood and logs were downhill, where they were being cut, but we needed them up hill, where the actual town was.

The next morning, me and the new carpenter started working on making short bows and wooden arrows, and I saw the a few members from the construction crew using the sleds we made last night and carrying logs up the hill.

And why were they carrying logs up hill you ask? Well, as you may or may not have guessed, it was to make a log wall!

The logs they were using were around 7-8 meters long, so just the whole body of a tree, and the final wall would be around 5-6 meters tall as they’d be burying the trees a few meters down so they wouldn’t be knocked down by normal animals.

This project would take quite some time, but it was, like everything, mainly a shortage of labour that messed with our plans, and not anything else.

As I turned back to work on the short bow in my hand, I wondered about how many gates I should make on the wall.

I mean, they’d be nothing more than big doors, but they were going to be used as gates, and as they were going to be the only entrances into the village, I was unsure that I wanted one that was directly pointing towards the forest.

Maybe one pointing west and another pointing south? Hmm... possible but might want to still not make the one pointing south as that might be problematic because of its closeness to the forest.

Then I pulled the string of the bow I was working on a few times and checked it for any mistakes I might’ve made.

“1 down, 49 more to go!”

....

By night, I was able to complete 10 short bows, while James, the Homunculi I stole from the building group, was able to make 120 wooden arrows which may seem like a small number, but I was honestly quite impressed by his work speed as fletching and putting the arrowhead in place took 20 minutes for me, and he did all that in 10 minutes!

But I had to stop him myself as he had worked for longer than 12 hours, and he seemed kinda sad that he couldn’t continue but if he did, he might’ve hurt himself.

Then, I got 3 people from each of the 3 groups of hunters, and yes, I had made another group, and gave them the short bows and started teaching them how to fire a bow, which took all night, and the next one, but after 2 nights of training they were... somewhat decent.

They’d definitely miss some shots, but they’d be able to probably do something right.

In the morning, I gave all 9 who I had been teaching how to shoot their short bows, and 20 wooden arrows each, as we still had not started copper arrow production, and as the day progressed, and I was sat there making more bows while occasionally looking at James, the construction group and chit chatting with Rae, I suddenly bypassed Hunting.

Research bypassed, Hunting.

And as the knowledge about hunting flooded into my mind, I realized that hunting basically consisted of what humans usually did in the stone age, persistence hunting and just throwing their spears.

I could probably have gotten this myself, but from the moment I learned trapping, conventional hunting methods were not really useful to me anymore.

But me getting hunting made me wonder, why hadn’t I gotten gathering?

“Because neither you, nor your people learned how to gather plants and mushrooms dum dum.” Rae said, while stuffing her mouth with some berries and, yes, she could eat. She didn’t need to, but since we had planted a few bushes of Opal berries near the village, she was occasionally helping herself to some.

“Wait— weren’t gatherers doing that already? I thought they just hadn’t found any plants or mushrooms that were safe to eat.”

“And why would they? Remember, they don’t have the years of life experience you have. They know some things, but they don’t know that some mushrooms and plants are safe to eat, and neither do they have the reason to think so because they’ve only seen you gather and eat fruits and nuts that grow on trees and bushes.”

“Huh that—that makes sense... guess I should’ve seen that coming the moment you compared Jonathan to a really mentally challenged person... oh well, will do that tomorrow... can I get some berries?”

“No! Go get your own!”

“...Well, I tried.”