Chapter 777.1: Ruh Roh
Chapter 777.1: Ruh Roh
On the official Wasteland Online website.
[Announcement: The southern seas are now open. Players who possess a VM and have downloaded the electronic access-pass plugin may freely enter and leave the various settlements.]
[Recommended Gameplay]
[Lifestyle Profession Players may register mining companies locally. Purchase a cargo ship and a resource-prospecting pod, and you can head into the deep sea to explore ruins of underwater facilities from the era of the Federation of Humans and discover undeveloped seabed mineral deposits! (Recommended for advanced players)]
[the islands in the north of the South Sea are currently undergoing reconstruction. The Southern Sea New Alliance welcomes players to invest, start businesses, and seek employment there. Supporting local reconstruction will earn generous rewards in silver coins, regional reputation, and contribution points. There are endless bricks to haul and screws to tighten! (Recommended for beginner players)]
[Scientific Expedition Team and Biological Research Institution missions: The New Alliance’s Scientific Expedition Team and Biological Research Institution have established research stations in Coral City. The Heavenly Court space station near the entrance to Shelter 70 is now open for investigation. Once you reach the vicinity of the map, locate the relevant mission NPC or accept the mission directly through your VM.]
[...]
[The above are merely gameplay recommendations. Please explore the rest of the content yourselves in-game!]
Not long after the announcement was posted, the comments section instantly erupted. Lifestyle Profession Players in particular were ecstatic!
The last several updates had all strengthened combat-oriented gameplay. After waiting and waiting for what felt like forever, the springtime of Lifestyle Profession Players had finally arrived!
Yaya: Ooooh! Happy New Year to us! Finally, an epic-tier buff for Lifestyle Profession Players!
Quit Smoking: Heh dumbass, there’s still no mushrooms for you to pick even after the buff. ⊙_⊙
Yaya: It's not like picking mushrooms is the only thing I know how to do! I explore the game world too, okay?!
Eye Owe Money: Alright, comeon, tell us more about what you’re exploring here. UWU
Night Ten: What are the administrator's measurements? ( ?° ?? ?°)
Yaya: How would I know!!?
Dino Warrior: Dogshit devs, I'm begging you, just give me a helmet already!! T.T
Lightning Professor: Damn, this guy's begging for food without getting on his knees!
This_lord_is_arrogant_what_can_you_do: Lmao. It's just another shitty promise and you people are getting this excited? They're baiting you with a bunch of PVs, heh. Anyone who believes this is my dad! ╭∩╮( •?_•? )╭∩╮
Irene: Then why don't you remove your tag that you’ve been waiting for two and a half years? (?ω?)
Elf Wang: Your dad? Not bad. Do you mean to type 'I'm your dad' and screw it up? ( ?° ?? ?°)
Far Eagle: Noob question here! How much does a mining ship cost, and how long does it take to break even?
Fighter Wolf: Can we become pirates? I'm going to become the Pirate King! I want rivers of blood! ( o ? 0 )
Shit Stirring Stick: Should probably be fine if we disguise ourselves as mining ships from the southern seas and rob Wislander merchant vessels. Probably. If there are consequences, pretend I never said anything. :)
Pipe Doggy: Hehehe... blonde, and huge too. Hehehehehe.
Scapegoat Sheep: Bro, can you act normal...?!
Night Ten: Light: How the fuck would I know? Please explore it yourselves in-game. ??╭?╮??
Quit Smoking: Hahahaha, fuck!
Escaping Mole: Night Ten, my brother, put some effort into it. When are you going to open the gates to Wandering Swamp for us? (??? )????
Night Ten: Ugh, don't even mention it. It's all tears if I start talking about it. This corner is way too hard to dig through. (?﹏?//)
Gale: You'd better actually be talking about digging through a corner. (?_?)
...
While the players and forum lurkers were noisily chatting away, one exceptionally quick footed agility type player had already boarded the Dolphin cargo submarine and gotten an early taste of the new map.
The underwater settlement beside the coral reefs and kelp forests had restored electricity to 50% of its districts. Many residents of Coral City who had been stranded on the islands had already returned to their familiar homes.
As the lighting systems came online, transparent domes began glowing like motionless fluorescent jellyfish. Multicolored ripples of light spread across the seabed like a brilliant rainbow.
Looking at the dazzling scenery beyond the submarine's porthole, Tail’s jaws dropped and she pressed her face against the glass of the Dolphin till her nose was all squished up as she gasped, "WOWIE! So this is the legendary Coral City?!"
The reaction of the huge furry mass beside her was even more exaggerated, nearly blocking the entire window as she pressed her entire body against the glass. "Amazing!"
Her cat ears gently twitching, Sesame Paste stood behind Tail and let out a heartfelt sigh. "It feels just like Ideal City at the bottom of the sea..."
Although it wasn't nearly as large as Ideal City, the technological sophistication here was no less impressive. According to Ample Time, who had spent nearly half a year in Ideal City and even picked up a damn degree while he was there, Ideal City's prosperity was actually somewhat inflated.
That wasn't to say Ideal City wasn't prosperous. Rather, most wastelanders' first impression of the place was far more exaggerated than its actual circumstances warranted.
The reinforced concrete used there was really just technology from the early Prosperity Era. Endpoint Cloud was merely a quantum-computing network developed from the core of a colony starship. As for the holographic projection equipment, rail transit, and maglev highways, while visually spectacular, what they demonstrated wasn't really technological capability so much as sheer productive capacity.
That was also one reason the Academy and the Army weren't particularly impressed by Ideal City's prosperity. Their ancestors had all originated from the same civilization, so they knew perfectly well what the others truly had in reserve.
At its core, Ideal City was a society that had reached an extremely high level of prosperity and then fallen into stagnation. Here, however, that wasn’t meant to be a neutral description. Rationally speaking, they really had already developed the land beneath their feet nearly as far as it could go. If the Prosperity Era was their benchmark, there honestly wasn't much left that urgently needed improvement.
Compared with Ideal City which looked far more prosperous than it actually was, Coral City belonged to the opposite extreme. It was far more outrageous in reality than it looked.
The settlement lay more than 100 meters beneath the surface of the sea, with its deepest sections reaching several hundred meters down.
Constructing an underwater settlement where humans could live, work, produce goods, and conduct research normally under such immense pressure was already an extraordinary achievement in itself. And the technologies required to keep such a settlement functioning were no less sophisticated than those needed to operate a space station.
The fact that the local survivors had managed to accomplish all of this without a stable supply of nuclear fuel was even stronger proof that they truly knew what they were doing.
Listening to all the excited shouting, Chen Jianhong couldn't help curling his lips into a slightly smug smile. He laughed and said, "This isn't even the settlement at its most magnificent. Right now, I’ll say we've only brought around 50% of it back online. Once all the facilities here are restarted, it'll be even more spectacular than what you're seeing now! Of course, that'll also consume a tremendous amount of energy. We'll probably have to wait until the Ocean Current Power Plant is repaired."
Sisi, who hadn't said anything until then, sighed, "It only took an instant to shut everything down... but restarting it takes half a year or even longer."
Chen Jianhong grinned. "More or less. Destruction is much faster than construction, after all."
That was true of Coral City, and hadn't the Prosperity Era been the same?
He had heard that in the distant past, magnificent megastructures had linked the heavens and the earth. Torrents of steel and concrete stretched endlessly across the horizon. Boundless deserts had been transformed into farmland, while the chaotic and inefficient urban sprawl of the old age had been demolished and turned into vast fields shaded by trees. Through imagination and technological prowess, humanity had divided the planet into several worlds so distinct from one another that their borders might as well have been drawn with a knife. In the skies above, colossal colony starships had even ventured to new worlds five light years away.
In that age of extreme prosperity, the limits of science and technology were no longer bounded by imagination. Instead, imagination itself had become the bottleneck.
Yet after human civilization reached the pinnacle of its history, the generations that followed spent two centuries without managing to recover even one ten-thousandth of that former prosperity.
The Coral City of today was nothing more than one inconspicuous pearl among countless lost treasures.
"Today I've shown you around my old home. How about someday you take me somewhere even farther up in the sky?" Chen Jianhong joked.
Jumping down from the glass window, Tail turned around and enthusiastically raised both thumbs at him. "Okie! It's a promise!"
"Hahaha!" Amused by her exuberant reaction, Chen Jianhong didn't really take the promise seriously, but still laughed in response. "All right! It's a promise!"
...