A quick death and a not so quick respawn later and I was back in Newb Town, slightly more knowledgeable about slimes. The one that killed me was apparently called a Junking Slime, go patriarchy, and it lived underground, only coming out at night. Maybe it was attracted to the artificial lights? Or maybe it just didn’t like sunlight.

I also had the drop chart for the green slimes now. Concentrate was apparently supposed to be rarer? So either someone screwed up or I was doing something that increased it’s drop rate. My guess was that it had something to do with them shrinking when I hit them. After all, that probably doesn’t happen with a sword, right? It would make sense that some attacks, including electricity, just did that.

Oh, and the slums actually were called Newb Town. They didn’t have a proper lore name, so that’s what all the players called it.

Anyway, I was quite done with gods damned slimes already, so I decided to grab a bench and get to work on seeing what I could make with the pile of scrap I’d scavenged.

First thing was first: I absolutely needed more than 3 shots on this stupid gun!

I pulled open my crafting menu and got to work. Among the spoils of my labour were several toy batteries, which looked like they were about the right size for my gun, if only I could figure out how to attach them. Let’s see…

First I needed to dissemble it, so said the menu. I carefully pulled and jabbed at its seams until I could figure out how to actually do that. It turns out that I could pull the body part of the gun into two pieces, but I needed to undo some screws first. Once apart I could clearly see the battery, which looked to all appearances like a couple taped together watch batteries! I also exposed the other components of the gun, namely the barrel, which controlled the output, and the crank, which...was a crank.

I removed the watch batteries and replaced them with a pair of [Toy Batteries] I had scavenged, which was about all that I could reasonably fit into the chassis. Incidentally, one toy battery was about the size of a AA, though it was evidently rechargeable. It was mostly unmarked, with a little plus and minus on the ends instead of bumps to let you know how to plug it in.

There was obviously nothing I could do with the crank, but I found myself eying the barrel. I doubted I could make it more accurate, since the lightning just went wherever it wanted once it fired, but maybe I could make it a little stronger? I removed the barrel.

The...filament? The shooty bit on the very end seemed to be fine, but the coil was not. Inside it was a mess of wires all haphazardly stuff into it. Some of them were even fraying!

I pulled the whole mess out, reclaiming what I could and tossing the damaged wires, then reached for replacements from my pile. Fortunately I had no shortage on bits of copper wire. I remember reading once that it was better to wrap wires in a coil to reduce interference? I wasn’t sure whether that applied to electricity though, or just archaic mediums of information transfer. Damn history channel. Damn textbooks. It’s really not fair that I couldn’t recall which had been the source of that info.

Well whatever. It probably wouldn’t hurt, right? I decided to create a sort of double spiral, wrapping the wires in a spiral before wrapping them again into the housing of the coil.

Once that was done I just needed to put everything into the right spot and tighten a few screws!

And, of course, to test it!

I started off with the crank and immediately found a promising problem. It took way longer to charge up now! Hopefully that meant that it had higher capacity! But an increase in reload speed was not so great. It was something I would need to think about later.

As for the shot itself, Newb town was fortunate enough to have a shooting range. I approached and unloaded, 8 shots in all! Eight! That was over double the old limit! Unfortunately I had no way to judge the strength of the thing. The target range actually had a function for that, but I didn’t know where it was before my tampering. At the very least it didn’t seem any weaker. And looking around I was getting comparable numbers to the other newbie gear. Maybe even on the high end of that range, though that could just be in exchange for having such an unreliable weapon…

Anyway! Time for crafting part two: The drone!

My options were actually pretty limited on this one. I needed schematics to build drones and I only had 2 by default, with a few more buried in deeper. One of my options was called the rover and it looked like a glorified RC Car. The other was called the spider drone. I decided to go with the later because, frankly, it looked cuter. And less like a lame toy.

Mostly the latter.

I had a few more options for mods then I had had for blueprints. I had several low-level options available from my crafting trees which I could buy and the interface claimed I could use add-abilities from skill trees as mods as well.

One mod that stood out to me right away was [Compact]. It would let me make the drone collapse into a form that fit into my inventory when I wasn’t using it. I was pretty sure I’d be able to throw it like that as well? Although the game didn’t explicitly say as such. It was worth a try at any rate.

My second mod slot was trickier and I looked over all of my trees to try to find something. Maybe a stealth passive? Ehh. I didn’t really think [Silent] would do much for a drone that didn’t even have any weapons on it. [Mimic] would be cool, but it was too high a level for me to buy yet. Anything I was interested in the Familiar tree was similarly out of reach, though I did make sure to buy [Basic Commands] so that I could control the drone once it was done. I was considering just picking something random from a crafting tree when I noticed a low level add in the Telsa list.

> [Lightning Rod]: Struck Enemy will attract Lightning.

That got the gears in my head turning. Maybe this was a solution to my number one problem after all. Only one way to find out, right?

 - - - 

By the time I was finished the sun was coming back up. A look at my menu revealed that I still had an hour or two of subjective time before the first warning went off, but I felt pretty done for the day. I decided to sign off a little early.

Did I enjoy my time?

Yeah. I think I probably did. Damn it. I’m going to need to talk to Danny and Laura about getting a proper setup.

Well, that could wait for tomorrow.

> Signing Out