Book 2 - Chapter 3: Base Upgrades

The question of sleep is a big one. Some high-VIT builds have skills that let them go absurd amounts of time without rest of any kind, but even they need to rest at some point. The rest of us might see slight reductions in sleep needs, but for the most part, we are in the same loop we always were.

We need a place to lay down, close our eyes, and be totally defenseless for hours on end. We need warmth, dark, and some kind of surface that doesn’t actively hurt. But most of all, we need a significant level of confidence that we won’t wake up with knives in our throats.

For better or worse, the solution to the whole sleep thing used to be other people. We had societies in place that enforced a certain level of non-violence, and we’d surround ourselves with other people we trusted. The locks on our doors were always a lie. The bad guys could have always broken them down. We were safe only because there were enough people working on the good side to make that a possibility.

Now, you can’t rely on that. There just aren’t enough people working for anything but themselves. When you find yourself alone, and you will, you’ll be tempted to invest in your own personal fortress. It’s natural. It’s even good, to the extent you’re able to do it without getting over-invested in one location and defending it against things you would otherwise run from.

You probably get it, but I’m going to state it in simple terms, just in case you don’t. Never, under any circumstances, build up a base you aren’t willing to abandon when things get sticky.

The Guide, 101 Natural Instincts That End With You Dead, page 38

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Sean had received a total of 1500 base upgrade points from killing the Junkyard Goliath and passing his entrance challenge. So far, he had only spent 50 of those on bare-bones comforts. That left quite a bit to work with in terms of making his home safer, and he was fully prepared to blow every last one of them if that’s what it took to keep himself safe from Tells wandering in and perforating him while he slept.

Base Upgrade Menu

Base Improvement Points: 1450

Defense

Defense upgrades make your base harder to invade, destroy, or otherwise screw with. You want big, heavy doors? There you go. You want alarms? We will sell you things that blare so hard your ears bleed if anyone so much as glances at your home wrong. You want those ancient-ruins that activate from a floor tile switch and shoot poison darts out of the walls? Weird, and we only carry what we think will sell. That particular trap is on you.

Defense upgrades range from cheap to absurdly expensive, and generally speaking, won’t damage anything that isn’t actively trying to break into your base. Some things have an easier time circumventing these defenses, and no upgrades will make you absolutely safe. But they go a long, long way towards making your base safer than huddling in a hollowed-out tree ever could.

Utility

Sometimes you just want to fix something, right? It’s hard to do that without tools. You can’t sew without needles. You can’t hammer things without mallets. And you can’t bore a hole without an auger. For many classes, you can’t do anything at all without a whole set of specialized tools.

Tools and other equipment you buy can’t leave the base, and for the most part can’t be used for attack at all. Sorry. Even if you buy a smelter, you won’t be able to lure cyborgs from the future into it and expect them to melt.

Comfort

A happy contestant is a lethal contestant.

Comfort upgrades are generally cheaper than other upgrades, and improve your quality of life. We have beds! We have washing machines! And we even have that one paint color your friend used to remodel their bedroom that you were always jealous of. Unless you are one of those guys who thinks morale doesn’t matter at all, you shouldn’t sleep on these upgrades.

Sean immediately started building a shopping list. Despite the fact that rational logic might disagree with him, he wasn’t going to wholly disregard the comfort category. There were some items in there that were both useless and incredibly expensive, sure, but there were also items he absolutely needed if he was going to use the base to its full potential.

Wood Burning Stove (100 Points)

The wood-burning stove is a cast iron marvel that radiates heat from a wood-fire with crazy efficiency. You can cook on it. You can warm rooms with it. And you can walk too close to it, not realize that you have, and burn your clothes on it. It’s great!

The wood-burning stove is immune to heats lower than what are typically necessary to deform iron. It’s easy to use, too. If you insert wood, it handles the burning bit by treating the wood as a quantified amount of energy it then uses at a high rate of efficiency.

It even gets rid of the smoke itself, even though it doesn’t have a chimney. More to the point, you don’t have to worry about CO2 poisoning or oxygen deficiency from it, at all.

Ever-burn Log (50 points)

The Ever-burn log burns like a log does. It’s impressive. But unlike a log, the ever-burn log doesn’t get consumed by the process when burned inside the base or fed into a machine that uses wood as fuel. It lasts for one year in any distinct role that would otherwise be filled by a flaming chunk of tree corpse.

These two items were a no-brainer, and he bought them immediately. The stove would make it so he could cook inside, with actual physical comfort as a cherry on top. The log would mean he didn’t have to gather wood to keep it going. Both were convenient, but both also meant he didn’t have to do things like cooking outside where things were trying to kill him. It was a quantifiable improvement to his safety, and at 10% of his total points, a no-brainer.

Toiletries kit (5 Points)

This kit has toiletries. Wooo!

It includes a razor, a tiny little bottle of shaving cream, fingernail clippers that work on the stat-enhanced, little weird soaps, and scissors. There’s even a toothbrush sized for use by unrealistically tiny people.

No deodorant. That’s extra. And also, for the record, there are a lot of different toiletries we’d have included in this for free if you were built different. You aren’t. Deal.

Washer/Dryer Combo (100 Points)

Note: Requires improved energy generation to operate.

If you put clothes or lumps of fabric in this, it washes and dries them. It does a very good job of this, doesn’t damage fabrics, and doesn’t break down.

The toiletries kit was cheap enough that he bought it without a second thought, but the washer/dryer was a good example of the kind of thing he wasn’t going to buy until he had more points. With a year’s supply of detergent available at a single point and with a working shower, he just didn’t need it. Did he want it? 100%. But it had no benefit he couldn’t get with slightly more work.

It did, however, teach in him something anyway, in that it revealed the base didn’t have unlimited power to work with.

Improved Energy Generation (1000 points)

Note: Your base is currently equipped with Inferior Energy Generation.

Improved Energy Generation bridges the gap between being able to run shitty fluorescent lights, novelty singing fish, and refrigerators and takes you directly into the rarefied realm of being able to own a toaster oven, an air conditioner, or even a high-end gaming computer so long as you don’t try to play any new, not yet patch-fixed games on it.

For heavy industrial or commercial purposes, like a supercomputer or an electric forge, you would want to take a look at Superior Energy Generation, which is basically a baby’s first fusion reactor type of situation.

One day, Sean hoped to buy Superior Energy Generation, the washer and dryer combo, and get his clothes supernaturally toasty. Maybe he'd even get a cat to appreciate the warm laundry with him. He could name it ShanKitty, or something. But at least for now, laundry facilities were out of his price range. He tucked those items, the Fully Cold Minifridge, **and That one fancy robot pressure cooker your married friends have away for later consideration.

That left defenses, and utilities. Right now, Sean’s defensive needs were pretty low. The Tells were shit at close quarters combat, so his needs were more in the “keep them from getting in and tell me if they do” realm of things as opposed to the “big giant boulder that rolls down your hallway” zone.

Reinforced exterior door (50 points)

You already have a door. It’s inforced, I guess. Only one single inforcement in that bad boy. What if you wanted more of that? We have that.

Every reinforced door upgrade you buy will upgrade your exterior door significantly. It will make it heavier, tougher, and overall just better at keeping things out. You can buy this upgrade as many as five times, but your door is already honestly pretty inforced, so you are limited to 3 of those.

A fully reinforced door opens up the option of further door upgrades.

For 150 points, Sean immediately bought the three door upgrades. It was an easy choice. He arguably needed it right now, but would absolutely need it in the future. The door itself looked the same, except for being generally shinier, heavier, and generally more respectable after the upgrade.

The door upgrades that revealed themselves after that were mainly of the This Door Is Literally On Fire All The Time genre of upgrades, and were prohibitively expensive. The only one in his striking distance, and one he ended up buying, was Chameleon Door, an enhancement that made the door itself slightly harder for anyone but him to see. At 50 points, it was more than he wanted to spend, but felt like a good investment of his entrance-way.

The next purchase was pricier but also necessary for his long-term needs.

Blaring Alarm (200 Points)

Your door can be bypassed. Your walls are no perfect guarantee that someone won’t infiltrate your base in the middle of the night and garrote you as you dream of that one girl you saw at the coffee shop who didn’t notice you at all.

The blaring alarm doesn’t help keep people out, but alerts you when those protections fail. And guess what? It’s still not perfect. Some skills or specific preparations will allow people to bypass the alarm. But it’s still a layer of security, one that you don’t have now, and one that in many situations will let you know that someone has blundered into your home with a sledgehammer and overall ill-intent.

See our Improved Blaring Alarm for even better security.

Were there better security options available? Things that would actively attack people who got in? There were, but the kinds of things he’d need to actually make a dent in things like the Tells were prohibitively expensive for now. He absolutely wanted them, especially the one with the drop-down AI talking turret that tried to freak out invaders with ominous computer-threats before it shot them. But they’d have to wait until later.

Utility upgrades were next, after all. And he was going to spend an enormous amount on those.