Taming the new continent

Keith made sure his ship would not budge by an inch before starting his exploration of the new world. Although this place was like heaven to him, he still needed to find out where he would be building his base exactly.

There were multiple criteria to take into account. First, he needed easy access to water for his own needs and those of his machines. For that reason, he had to find another water source large enough to fill all of his future needs. Although the ocean was appealing at first glance, the fact that it was full of salt made it not proper for his own use.

Not only would he not be able to drink it in any shape or form, the composition of salty water made it so he would be restricted in its uses for chemestry purposes. In a lot of cases, Keith would require pure water for his future plans and he could not afford to build a desalination center right off the bat.

Secondly, the young man also needed access to a lot of wood and other kinds of natural resources. Thanks to the way this planet was modelized by its developers, there were a lot of forests around the world so Keith did not really worry on that end. However, what he really needed was a place that combined everything at once. He wanted easy access to mountains, a water source, trees, and even a kind of flat landscape where he could easily build his base.

It was that specific combination that made the perfect place he envisionned so hard to find.

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'Hmpf...' Keith breathed out. After a long week of scanning the landscape in hundred of miles, the young man finally found a place he wanted to settle onto. It was a small hill, not too far away from a mountain range and most importantly a few hundred yards away from a pretty large pond. There were also wooded areas around this place so there were no problems concerning this essential resource. Although it was not quite as perfect as he wanted it to be, there were easy access to most of the resources he foresaw uses for and he could not really delay his establishment on this new continent any longer.

On a side note, Keith was only five miles away from a river leading to the ocean, several dozen miles further to the east. That was why, he did not really worry about his future as there were obvious extension paths.

The young man returned to his ship using his small automobile and started the long and tedious task of shipping everything all the way to his new place. To help him out, Keith building back his land locomotive thanks to the enormous amount of resources he had embarked with him on his journey. Actually, his current car was a small copy of the main wagon his old locomotive so he could be using that as a base to recreate everything.

Before doing so, however, he needed to resupply his stockpile of wood. He had used up most of it during the travel, burning off this natural resource to power the engines of his ship. Thus, for a few hours Keith started cutting down some trees while hunting the local wildlife to resplenish his food stocks at the same time.

The whole operation of building back his locomotive lasted for another couple of weeks, but it was a necessary time expenditure as he needed to transport about thirty tons of various materials from his boat all the way to his newly founded base.

'This brings back some memories...' Keith realized as he activated the engines of his locomotive one after the other. It has been months since he last left the first continent, but after all this time he was navigating through the landscape the same way as he did before.

In the meantime, Keith also thought about how he should be making his future base. It was not going to be the same as his previous bases since he had not one to fear this time around. For that reason, he had planned to use up a lot of space and actually implement large buildings such as factories all around the area. As for his base itself, it would partly be buried underground. This was a nice advantage in terms of foundations because the ground would hold off most of the structure by itself.

As for the materials he would be using, he thought about making some strong stone walls and some strong alloy pillars to reinforce the whole structure. Keith also had to keep in mind a few details regarding the designing of his base because it would need to easily evacuate both smoke and heat thanks to a clever positioning of vents.

Finally, the young man wanted his base to be as discrete as possible while being able to defend itself, unlike the previous one. No more human-made traps and other shenanigans, Keith wanted to go full out on the offensive. Although this would be requiring a lot of time, the young man has thought about using an automated defense system using turrets and other deadly weapons.

Those were all the troubles he went through while designing his new base. This one would be permanent, no more fleeing around the continent to avoid human interaction. He was going to work really hard to produce some really detailed plans  to have a good idea on how he could be expanding his base in the future.

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In the meantime, the situation at the world spawnpoint had settled down quite a bit. Some of the most ancient guilds had already been repelled off by the coallition of the new players wanting to establish a prosperous and peaceful civilization.

Through a community effort, the premices of a beautiful town had been erected around the spawn area and a giant hub was made to welcome the new players to this unfamiliar landscape. Various signs were placed to indicate where to find basic resources and agreements were made between this new civilization and the top guilds of this game so the battlefiels would not extend nowhere near the World Spawnpoint. This resulted in a really nice atmosphere unscathed from any conflicts whatsoever.

As for the Pioneers, the largest guild existing in Project Overworld, they quickly aligned with the vision of these new players. Not because they adhered to their values, but because they knew they could not even hope and win against such a large community of determined players. They were about four times their size and had the advantage of being able to respawn at any time.

Although the Pioneers could do the same, they did not really have anything to do at the World Spawnpoint. The best they could ensue would be an everlasting war between their members and the rest of the world. However, they had nothing to gain from this and would essentially lose their position and stature as the largest guild of Project Overworld over time.

For that reason, they also helped a lot during the construction of the spawn city, baptized Midgard in reference of the way Earth was described in the ancient northern culture. They furnished materials as well as manpower to erect some community buildings all around the spawn area.

The Pioneers became true pioneers in the eyes of some of the new players, and tens of thousand of them decided to join this guild as a result. In fact, people still were interested in being able to fight against each other so the popularity of this game's guilds never really went down at any point.

However the biggest changes that occurred throughout the continent were regarding the social interactions. Players stopped being afraid to come out of their base, and they started exploring the region and visiting other players' bases. This, in turn, ensued a real technological boom within Project Overworld.

From prehistoric tools to medieval warfare, players were now building beautiful houses and perfected tools to help in that matter. Some of them even started trading off their resources and creations to other players, in exchange for some other tools and materials.

It was the true beginning of civilization.

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A few weeks later, Keith had already settled down all of his resources on top of the hill where he wanted to establish. It had been quite the hassle but he finally made it.

From being trapped in a cave to building a mansion out in the open, the young man was now experiencing true and peaceful loneliness. He was actually quite excited about this new lifestyle because he would be able to fully focus on his projects from now on.

'Let's start assembling back that old drilling machine, shouldn't I?' Keith decided to take his first steps in the grand scheme of taming this wild continent to his own use.