9 House of Chests

"...Aaaaaaand 64!"

Gasp! Technoblade wanted to do an emote dance for the minor victory. Oh, wait. This is a full-body virtual reality type of sub-reality, so he can!

"This is huge!" he rejoiced. "I'm unstoppable!"

It only took him half a morning to finish deforesting the area and defacing the mountainside. The Potato King marvelled at his destruction and felt a lick of satisfaction about his handy work. As the only player in Aftercraft, Technoblade felt the absolute power to destroy the seemingly infinite world generation without consequences. There wouldn't be global warming with lesser trees or a landslide from the lack of stone foundation, right?

Whatever, by the time he defeated the Ender Dragon, he wouldn't be here to see that disaster happen. That was a problem for the future orphans to deal with.

Ping!

For the second time that morning, Technoblade received a notification prompt. This time, he stopped ignoring the system admin and decided to check out their new love letters.

"Blah blah blah, where is it?" the pig-human scrolled to the bottom, ignoring the boring message. He was here for one thing and one thing only.

"There it is!"

Smacking the claim option, not literally, Technoblade acquired the first reward from mining out 64 cobblestone pieces. He did not have a torch yet, but that did not stop him from trying to dig out a space in the mountainside for his mining base. It was probably a solved problem after he claimed the reward.

"With the power of smelting and crafting, I hereby declare a furnace be made!"

Of course, it didn't work on voice command. Technoblade had to manually input orders in the workshop after he unlocked the recipe for it in the crafting book. However, he soon discovered something horrific.

"I understand if you wish to take an entire stack of cobblestone to craft a furnace," Technoblade started off diplomatically. "However, I don't understand why you would take my only crafting slot available and tell me to wait eight hours while you work on it! I can do that in less than two seconds on Minecraft. HOW DOES IT TAKE YOU EIGHT HOURS?!!"

The level of incompetency was unbecoming. How hard was it to craft some furnace? He could understand the number of resources it would take. However, eight hours was too much!

Cancelling his crafting order, Technoblade growled unhappily. He needed something that could cook his fish and maybe make charcoal while he was at it so that he could make some kind of torch for the mining base and eventually mine shafts.

Looking at his other mail from the admins, Technoblade claimed the rewards without reading a single word from the mail. He was thoroughly upset, but setbacks were only temporary.

After acquiring his [Smelting] and [Tree Felling] skills, Technoblade decided to look through the beefed-up Crafting Book to find a suitable recipe that he could use. Maybe he was missing some key materials to unlock the real items he needed. He refused to waste eight hours in the day waiting for the furnace to craft itself. He could do that at night while he slept or something.

Thankfully, he had more recipes to look through after claiming his reward for chopping down 64 logs. In truth, Technoblade probably punched a few more logs than required because he hated the idea of floating trees. It was a cursed image that tortured his mind constantly. Even with gaming bugs and logic, that sight should be illegal!

Browsing the crafting book, Technoblade learned about the new item requirements, quantities of crafted items and time needed to create them in the workshop. More queue order slots and the ability to prioritise crafting items could be unlocked by purchasing them from the shop. Although he did not like how the new system in Aftercraft worked, Technoblade had to admit the system administrators were very good at pitching their sales using quests.

"Whatever," he rolled his eyes and closed the system shop menu. "That's not very important now."

Indeed. What Technobladed needed wasn't more crafting queues or a crafting priority. He needed items that were useful in surviving the next night. Unfortunately, beds were not in his recipe book. He lacked wool, but until he had a pair of shears, Technoblade refused to risk killing possibly the only sheep in the world.

According to his knowledge, zombies were capable of breaking down doors in Minecraft. He had no idea if they could still do that in Aftercraft, but it was better to err on the safe side.

Logically, if zombies were strong enough to break down doors, they should be able to break down anything made from wood. However, Minecraft was a game that did not rely on logic. If he built a house out of crafting tables, theoretically, these monsters would be unable to get to him.

The only problem with Aftercraft was how long it would take him to craft anything. He had plenty of cobblestone and some wood logs. However, not all of them were blocks that he could place and fully utilise.

"You know what," he told himself. "I'm going to make one chest and dump all the items. Sorry, but not tonight, boys. I refuse to torture my sinus with the scent of decay tonight."

Fortunately for him, the chest he wanted could be crafted solely from wood in several steps. As usual, he turned a healthy amount of logs into planks. There was no real point in keeping wooden logs unless it was for a build. He did not have a furnace yet so turning them into charcoal was impossible.

The quantities in Aftercraft were a little strange, and Technoblade refused to practise Maths in the afterlife. Why would the same wooden log give varying quantities of wooden planks? The 'quality' of each log looked exactly the same to him, so the logic was a little lacking in this department, but Technoblade gave the system admins the benefit of the doubt. Life was full of unpredictabilities, so the afterlife was similar.

While converting his logs into planks that only took ten minutes, Technoblade realised how easy it was to craft a chest. Compared to the furnace, he needed way fewer materials and time. The crafting workshop must have a master carpenter at work behind the scenes because the first chest was ready for collection in under five minutes. Moreover, Technoblade learned he could stack quantities of the same item in order without needing an extra item crafting slot in the queue.

Ping!

Technoblade raised a brow at the strange window before him while he was leisurely browning his crafting book recipes.

[Crafting Workshop Item Queue is paused due to insufficient materials in the inventory. Would you like to pause the progress or cancel it?"]

Oh. Ohhhhh…

That's right. He spammed the numbers without doing Maths. Of course, it would be impossible to craft a hundred chests without that many planks in his inventory. How silly of him.

"What was I hoping for?" he lamented. "Of course, the system admins wouldn't pass up on the chance. Can't you give me a freebie? I'm a newbie!"

Grumbling under his breath, Technoblade was forced to cancel the ridiculous order of chests. However, he added the rest of his logs to the crafting queue to be transformed into planks.

Plopping down one of the many chests he now had, Technoblade emptied most items from his inventory. He needed more logs for more chests for hoarding because that was how Minecraft worked. The man with the most resources at his disposal was more likely to survive any disaster. Being poor was synonymous with being weak, especially on Skyblock.

How many times had he been poor and mocked in the lobby for having $0 in his bank because TimeDeo spent it all? For twenty seconds, when he had $50 million in the co-op bank, he felt like the most powerful character on the server. No fully enchanted Superior Dragon Armour could make him feel stronger than a maxed-out bank account. Technoblade reminisced those memories as he hacked down tree after tree with the amazing [Tree Feller] ability.

Little by little, he added the logs to the crafting queue. Before he knew it, he had an even more ridiculous amount of chests. That resolved his storage issues for a while. Yet, there was a more urgent matter than the slowly expanding area of deforestation by the foot of the mountain.

He needed a house.

Zombies or not, Technoblade needed an actual house. He could not tolerate the idea of sleeping in the wilderness unprotected, even if monsters did not spawn without tools in his inventory.

The sun was going down, and Technoblade sighed at what he had. Yes, exactly. Apart from some dirt blocks, saplings, planks, a ton of chests and some random things he picked up along the way, there wasn't much he could use to build that house.

Thinking back to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, Technoblade went through his options at light speed. The art of war summarised several key points in decision-making. While he had many famous sayings, the philosophy of victory is derived from effective and efficient decisions. Every successful tactician aims to maximise the advantage of every move with minimal effort and the biggest impact.

"Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances – Sun Tzu. Just because other people's houses were built from stone and wood doesn't mean I have to follow the trend."

Using that reason, Technoblade worked and devised three plans as he built his house made from chests.

Although it looked hideous, nobody was around to judge his aesthetic appeal. A house was a house, and if it could provide him refuge from the zombies that would spawn when night came, it was his win. Besides, the array of chests making up the perimeter of his starter house could double as storage. He did not have to spend extra time or effort calculating the space requirements for a dedicated storage area. It worked splendidly, and he could organise everything later when he had the motivation.

Besides the basic functionality of chests, Technoblade was curious about the zombies' ability to break down doors and chests. It was why he crafted a singular door using the planks he had and placed it outside of his chest fort to test if zombies could break it down in Aftercraft. He didn't have a door to the chest fort presently, so it would be difficult to get in or out of it without the help of some old-fashioned dirt block steps.

If the zombies broke through his chest fort, Technoblade made two backup plans. The first plan was to chuck his axe out of his inventory if he had no time to throw it in any chests. The second was to stack a tower of blocks beneath him and wait until the sun came up for the monsters to despawn. Although he had no way to confirm if the stench he smelled was affected by the range of their spawning near him, Technoblade knew that they would only approach him and become aggressive if they were within a five-block radius of him.

Farming experience levels at night was a good way to help him afford more items in the system shop, but Technoblade did not feel like subjecting his sensitive sense of smell to torture with these monsters. If anything, he prefered farming other undead mobs later in the game, like skeletons, if they were less stinky.

"That sounds like a lot of work to make a mob farm. Eh, I'll get to it eventually."

Holding onto his axe and retrieving the stack of cobblestone from his chest, Technoblade placed the order for a furnace to be crafted. If the night was going to be long, he wanted it to at least be productive.

Climbing up his wall of chests, Technoblade built a temporary roof using planks and watched as zombies spawned around him. There were far fewer zombies than before, and Technoblade noticed how they were not making that strange patrol. Even after climbing out of the ground, these mobs simply stood at their spawn spot and stared at the moon.

Huh. With a single tool, these zombies wouldn't even move. That was going to be a problem.