Chapter 1528: Minor Expansions
A/N: I realize it had been a while since I put on infrastructure chaps kek, so imma squeeze that in right now xD.
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A few days later, with the injection of huge amount of new elementalists—even more than anticipated—new buildings had indeed popped up.
However, while there was a real need for more housing, she was really reluctant to take more of her green space in the end.
So..., the long-awaited (partial) walling of a section actually commenced. She chose a sector and placed it near and around where the half-orc’s residence was.
This was because it was already ongoing construction, and this area already had the largest number of loose sentries. There were already some minor roads to the Half-orc villa as well.
She didn’t wall a big area, deciding to just build a neighborhood. She thought for a while and genuinely wondered if she should turn it into a legitimate ’gated’ neighborhood so she didn’t have to take down the walls for future circulation.
However, she opted not to in the end. She might retain a few walls, but probably not the entire enclosure. It was not wise to plan territories with patches like these, especially when she knew it’d only grow bigger.
She was a bit of a perfectionist and she wanted the urban planning for the entire expansion pat down early on—with the help of the actual experts, of course.
She used Level 3 Walls and sentries, adding more ’golden corners’ as well. Level 3 walls were not too useful against strong town mobs, but these mobs weren’t purely comprised of high-level beasts.
In order to keep the zoning uniform, she decided to divide the neighborhood the half-orcs were in into similarly large lots. These areas would be one of the places that local mercenary teams could rent out to build their base.
Eventually, because local people had such high potential, more of them would be building high-level mercenary teams. They wanted to invest in them early, make them take deep roots in Alterra early on.
That said, having strong mercenary teams was mostly good for the territory, but there were also risks, and placing them near the half-orcs would be a good deterrent.
The foreign ones would also have their own place—they were drafting a place called ’Mercenary Road’—which would appear when the actual development of the outer circle was in full swing. They would also be near this area, but for the sake of organization, it’d be a different street.
They actually had quite a few reservation notices for the lots, starting with the Rolan Mercenary Team, which Bart was a part of, as well as the Takoda Mercenary Team, where Enok was from.
That said, these lots, including the half-orc’s would have a few hundred square meters of area each, twice to thrice the size of a farmvilla. She expanded the roads here to be at least 2 lanes wide in each direction, with separate pedestrian lanes. There were also the standard roadside trees and bushes as well.
Perpendicular to that would be a commercial area these mercenaries could frequent. However, she just saved the space for now. Shophouses didn’t seem like the fitting type of shops in a place like this.
Although their mercenaries were relatively classy, they had seen how rowdy mercenaries could be—especially when drunk. Who’d want to wake up in the middle of the night due to some inebriated strongman singing out of tune?
The following blocks would be some parks and some mid-rise building complexes.
Even if she only decided to wall a ’neighborhood’ it was still fairly large and several buildings were created. These were hundreds and hundreds of new units, and they could be exposed to town-level monsters that could not be stopped by level 3 walls.
Fortunately, system buildings were not only quick to build, but also quite durable, especially the ones she customized. Even if it got attacked, only the fenestrations would give way at most—and it only required some resources to automatically repair those.
There was also another reason she dared to do this. After all, even if the buildings themselves were durable, who’d want to be woken up in the middle of the night to some mobs?
Granted, there’d be sentries, but there would definitely be some bothersome commotion even if the mob was small.
So...who’d want to live in such a place other than the half-orcs?
At this, she decided to increase the limitations of having more than three properties. However, it would require a huge contribution cost for every additional property named after the person, exponentially each time.
Anyway, a lot of people hoarded a lot of contribution points. This would be one way to get them to spend that.
This will allow richer Alterrans to own a few more properties they could rent out, but that’d only be available outside the territory for now so they’d have some liability to protect the area without having been told to.
’Stronger’ citizens could live here, and just jump down whenever they were attacked by beasts.
Although it may seem odd to some, Alterra had quite a few people like this.
Finally, she decided to build provisions for one of the new discoveries. It was not foolproof, but it worked to a degree.
After months of study and trial and error, the Research Team—particularly those in the physics department—had created a new tool.
It was a wind-powered tool shaped like a small obelisk that emitted the sounds that would shoo away monsters. After all, the sentries were great, but most people, when resting, would not want to deal with pests at all, right?
Granted, it still had plenty of limitations, but they had tested it, and it had proved to significantly reduce the appearances of monsters! This way, they could increase the ’safe’ areas even if they didn’t have walls, or even if they were outside of the territory lines!
This was how a new tool—the "Howlbreaker" —was born.