Baby Boom

Keeping his word to create a book for every baby, Technoblade even prepared signs to name the bookshelf for every villager born. Presently, he had six babies running about in the nursery that was still under construction. Honestly, he gave up thinking of names for them. They were given numbers and job titles instead because it was easier for Technoblade to keep tabs.

Thankfully, these villagers remained in bed when it was night. It was as if there was a curfew with severe consequences if they defied it. Everyone hurried to their assigned beds when the sun went down. Even without a view of the sky above, Technoblade had no problems differentiating the hours as he constructed his villager killing chamber.

His idea was probably overly simple, but it was definitely effective. After much experimenting, he concluded that Aftercraft villagers had better intelligence than Minecraft villagers. For a start, the new jobs and quest tree gave Technoblade a huge hint about how he could defeat the ender dragon.

It was not meant to be a solo effort. If anything, the final boss fight was akin to a turn-based RPG game with an NPC party. However, he had to complete this kingdom-building or town-building saga to unlock the MVP of this storyline – the wandering trader.

"They don't walk over trapdoors easily, can use doors and don't interact with blocks. Staging their murder is uselessly hard."

Initially, the grandmaster of schemes wanted to lure 'useless' villagers into a drowning chamber, so he tested it on an innocent kid by flooding the nursery. However, the child did not die, and the plan fell through. He tested the different methods of death and learned that villagers could regenerate much like witches, although at a slower rate if they had food with them. Falling from thirty blocks high did the trick. Burning them would not work as they would put the fire out by jumping into the 'well' that Technoblade had to build for all villagers.

Eventually, Technoblade designed something simple after several redstone designs failed. Villagers were capable of starving to death in Aftercraft. Technoblade also knew how they could not climb up if they fell into a hole without the help of ladders or stairs. He initially wanted to eliminate them using suffocation, but the pistons in Aftercraft did not work the way they did in Minecraft.

There were several problems with growing a village population. The housing issue could be easily resolved when the system admin simplified requirements. Every villager needed to be assigned an accessible bed. Unlike the previous villager mechanic, the system admin took pity on Technoblade and only made the bed compulsory. That made sense. As for jobs, Technoblade needed to manually craft specific items to give brown-clothed villagers.

It was probably better than making workstations. Villagers in Aftecraft could perform their assigned jobs within Technoblade's town. He claimed the whole mountain and little fortress area as his town. Naturally, the area can increase indefinitely with its population. This meant he could eventually rule all of Aftercraft as the first king in its history if he wished for it.

Technoblade dug out a huge corridor similar to a strip mine to place rows of beds on both sides. Presently, he had enough beds for a hundred villagers. However, he did not have the food to feed all these mouths, so he paused the village breeding production upstairs. Adam and Eve took less than a week to make all these babies, and before Technoblade knew it, he was struggling with clothing everyone.

Under the new clothing and food mechanics, every adult villager must be fully clothed, but children only needed pants for some reason. The adult villagers would refuse to breed or take on jobs if they were not given clothes. The children would simply remain unhappy and grow into unhappy adults. It did not seem like much at first, but Technoblade read in the updated guidebook that villagers will grow unhappy without proper or sufficient clothes. When the unhappiness meter reaches a certain level, they become evil and will murder their own kind.

As for food, adults needed food that gave six saturation points, and children only needed two saturation points worth of food. If a loaf of bread offered two saturation points, children only needed one loaf and adults needed three. However, thanks to the modification of requirements, Technoblade could feed them with things like a cooked salmon sandwich a day or even just four juicy berries for children. It made things easier, so Technobalde quickly added a ton of surplus baked potatoes and carrots to his underground food silos. For now, he had to feed them manually because there were no scribes to assign villagers to respective chests to get their food rations from. By that, he meant throwing things at their faces and watching them pick them off the floor to eat.

The one thing that made him pause the baby production was the lack of clothes. Those were hard to make. The only clothes Technoblade knew how to craft required leather. However, villagers could make clothing out of wool under the tailor job class. Technoblade needed that, but there were a few things he had to do to take care of the immediate problems.

The most important villager job in Technoblade's eyes was the scribe. It was almost the equivalent of a librarian in Minecraft. However, they were more useful than that. Scribes were like human resource managers. They could recruit, direct, train and fire villagers on Technoblade's behalf. The first baby that turns into an adult would definitely be a scribe because Technoblade did not want to remain here for long.

Of course, the career progression path was interesting in Technoblade's eyes. Aftercraft's new villager system was slightly more complex, but it was a challenge Technoblade looked forward to. Villager automation mechanics were impossible in Minecraft but not in Aftercraft. Once he had his first scribe, who only required a journal to suddenly become literate, Technoblade would assign it sorting duties.

Villagers could follow schedules and access certain blocks that Technoblade or a scribe assigned them to for certain tasks. For instance, he could allocate a woodcutter villager to chop certain logs in a certain perimeter if it detected them and place them in a specific chest. Tools were unbreakable in a villager's hand, so Technoblade need not worry about replacing them. Unfortunately, that also meant that once a villager was employed, they were employed for life. Job change was not an option, although career advancement existed.

Presently, Technoblade had plans for four scribes. One to help him segregate the useful adults from non-useful ones. Two for creating more capable villagers and the last as a personal assistant. Following that, he needed someone to chop trees on his behalf and create new bookshelves or beds. Then, he could proceed to the resource collections for expanding living spaces. Eventually, when the village population expansion was under control, he could focus on getting them clothed and fed in a system that would sustain itself.

However, that was something far into the future. Staring at the six sleeping children in their beds, Technoblade placed mass orders with his crafting workshop. He also prepared a separate chest to store all the work tools that the villagers needed. Children are the future, and Technoblade thought back to the children he left behind.

"No," he smiled. "They can't be considered children if they are attending college."

That's right. Even if he wasn't there, they would live well without him. He made sure of it, and a master tactician never failed.