The Dragon's Wrath: A Virtual Dream

Chapter 10: Planning for the Future

(Thursday, January 28nd Game Day / Sunday, January 10th Real Day)

When I had finally completed my Log Cabin I was presented with a System Prompt:

[You have created a Personal Home, do you wish to lay claim to this land?]

[Yes / No]

That was an easy one.

I quickly selected [Yes] and was shown a new tab in the Character Menu, [Land Management]. But before I could continue any further I received two more system event messages:

[The First Settler: As the first person to settle land you receive a +200 Reputation bonus.]

[This bonus is granted to the first one-hundred settlers.]

Not only did I gain a title of [The First Settler] that I could display above my head with my name if I so choose, but I received a huge Reputation bonus as well.

Taking the initiative has led to some rather sizeable bonuses.

With my curiosity piqued, I went to click on the [Land Management] tab and soon after found myself staring at a completely new menu with dozens of sub-menus. Most of them were grayed out, so I could only guess at what was contained within them but one tab caught my eye, [NPC-Recruiter].

It wasn't selectable but it was fairly self-explanatory, it seems at some point I can recruit my own NPCs. This wasn't available in the Alpha or the Beta and there was currently no information available when I tried to do a quick search on the internet.

Just by going off the theme, [Land Management] lead to a menu filled with the following tabs: [General Information], [Player Population], [NPC Population], [Creature Population], [Quest Creator], [Bounty List], [Pacts, Treaties & Terms], [Hostile Territories], [Future Development], and [NPC-Recruiter].

The amount of possibilities that opened up before me was so astounding that I couldn't help but mutter, "Wow, just wow." A Bounty List and a Quest Creator… did that mean I could eventually pay people to do my work for me?

There were a lot of possibilities running through my mind.

I could only access [General Information] and [Player Population] at the moment, so I clicked the first one like a giddy schoolboy expecting some ice-cream. [General Information] opened up and showed some very basic numbers, it was kind of a letdown really.

It showed the number of buildings, which was currently one, the amount of territory that I had claimed and controlled, which was roughly one-mile due to my reputation, and some other inconsequential things.

[Player Population] had categories to separate players by highest class proficiency or level or whatever you wanted, but currently it was nice and simple, population of one, highest class proficiency was Archer, highest profession Lumberjack. It wasn't of any use to me now, but someday it would come in handy.

This got me thinking though; I had only planned on starting up a small village that I could use as a home-base of sorts, but no one had any real idea on how to recruit or grow villages.

The assumption was that if you built buildings then NPCs would come, they would migrate or spawn or something. We figured it was like a field of dreams. There was some limited information put out that you could purchase the services of NPCs and recruit them, but it was all speculation up until now. And now that I had a better idea of the system, I decided to make a change of plans.

When it came to answering or thinking about any question, I always took my time to think it through. But when it came time to make a decision, I was incredibly quick.

Yeah, it was time I started working towards that.

I only had eleven real-world days before the "Event" and I would need at least seven of those days to climb, but I could at least start working to expand my new territory.

The first thing I wanted to do was get a large stockpile of wood going, a really large stockpile. After I finished the current 900 square-feet cabin that's half underground, I found it was only large enough for a few people to live comfortably when you factored in furniture and storage.

If I wanted to get some NPCs from that NPC-Recruiter thing, I would need somewhere for them to live, I would need buildings for them to work, and I would need storage buildings for goods.

From what was loosely explained on the Dragon's Wrath Game Info page online, trees grew back within a week in-game if the land was left undisturbed and grew at a rate of one-foot per game-week after... it was time I capitalized on that.

The next four days of my life were spent cutting down, stripping, and piling roughly five-hundred logs. I basically spent the better part of thirty-two hours in those four days working like a man possessed.

I wouldn't be able to use them for a while, but they were at least available. I would need at least three-hundred logs to complete the lodge I had designed roughly in my head.

I ended up going with a plan for a 60'x60' two-story lodge that would be primarily underground, while the basement level would be 12-feet below the surface, interlocking four times at the 30'x30' dimensions with the center left open for a large dining area.

The ground level would be 4-feet underground much like my cabin, with roughly 4-feet visible on the surface with a low-hanging roofline. The ground level would only lap the edges, sort of like a terrace, leaving open floor in the center for the stairs.

The excess wood would go into the NPC buildings, but that can all come later though, for it was now to time climb to the peak of the mountain.