There Zack was, sitting at the small table in his apartment. He got out a box of cereal, there was very little cereal left inside the box. He just sighed and poured the remaining amount into a bowl. He then opened his fridge and realized that there was such little milk left.
"Welp, I guess I will have to go to the grocery later."
Zack had been putting off going to the grocery for so long but now he was fully out of breakfast. Because of this, he grabbed the key to his apartment, locked up after he left and started taking the hour-long walk down to the grocery. There were a large number of billboards up that he saw for VR games during his walk. VR games had taken over this day and age. A large amount of the population played at least some VR game.
It took a little while but Zack had arrived at the grocery store. While shopping Zack overheard two people talking.
"Hey, man, please, I really need some of your army to help me out in this war." A younger looking man with blonde hair begged to a more built man who seemed to be around the same age.
"Dude, I already said that I need them in order to defend my territory." The built man replied with a straight face. It seemed that there wasn't any way that the blonde haired man would get troops.
"Please?" the blonde haired man asked hoping for a different answer.
It was at this time that Zack interrupted their conversation with a question.
"Hey, uh, what game are you guys talking about?"
"Duh, the VR game Kingdoms. It is on the rise in popularity." The question was answered by the blonde haired man.
"Oh, uh, well thanks a lot for telling me," he then quickly walked away and finished his grocery trip.
Once Zack got back to his apartment building he got onto his computer and looked up the price for one of the VR pods. It cost around 1,000 dollars to buy one and this number made him feel a little nauseous but he bought it anyways.
In the upcoming days he didn't know whether or not he would come to regret his decision to buy the VR pod, but he had hoped that he had made the right decision.
It was a few days later that the VR pod was installed into the apartment, he was quite excited at this point since he had been researching the game kingdoms for the last 2 or 3 days and now he got into the pod right after the people who installed it left. He inhaled and exhaled taking a deep breath before this new journey would begin.
"Start Game, Kingdoms!" Zack then exclaimed like he saw to do on a basic tutorial of how to play the game kingdoms.
he then felt as if his consciousness was slipping away at that moment like he was going to fall asleep. He slowly let his eyes close and then when he opened them he was in a void just drifting through space.
A screen was in front of him. This screen was the Kingdom Creation Screen, a screen that allowed the player to create the basis of their kingdom before they started the game.
The first choice was to pick the base race. In the game Kingdoms, there were many races and each had its special traits. Scrolling through a few of them he read through the following,
Humans: Adaptive/Gain +5% habitability in every terrain.
Orcs: Strong/Worker pops(population) produce 2.5% more resources, gains 15% Health.
Gnomes: Intelligent/+10% research speed.
Dwarves: Natural Crafters/Crafter pops produce +10% higher quality items.
The list would have gone on and on with many different races to choose from, but one race stood out to him as interesting and was one of the races with multiple buffs although that also had debuffs. That race was the following:
Kobold: Natural Engineers/+25% research speed for engineering research.
Scrappers/Use 25% fewer resources while crafting.
Weak/Worker pops produce 5% fewer resources, loses 20% health.
He sat in this void while thinking if he wanted to use the kobolds or not. Eventually, after about 5 minutes he decided to used the kobolds and probably do an engineering research build.
Next was his kingdom's civics, Zack got to choose 2 from a large list.
The ones that Zack ended up choosing were called Technocracy and Master Crafters.
Technocracy gave +5% research speed and Master Crafters made crafted item quality +10% higher.
The last thing that Zack needed to do was input his username and kingdom name. For username, he chose the name 'Arte', it was a name he used for his leader in many games and he chose to use it in this one as well.
For kingdom name, he went with a simple name with that name just being 'Kobold Kingdom.' it wasn't too creative but he was fine with this name.
After confirming that these were what Zack wanted to pick he entered the Virtual world of the game Kingdoms.
Zack was standing in a field, looking at his hands it seemed he was a kobold because it was what he chose as his starting race. There were 20 other kobolds and carts filled with basic supplies in the field with him.
"Map Screen," he said testing out the voice commands.
When Zack said "Map Screen" a screen appeared with square tiles showing the one he was on being the plains terrain tile and the 4 adjacent tiles with mountains being to the north, more plains to the east and south, and a forest to the west. The map screen also showed the tiers of each tile, with the tile he started in being 1 star and the ones surrounding him being 2 stars.
"Okay," said Zack, thinking to himself about how to start this game. The first thing he would have to do would be to set up a food supply for the group of kobolds.
In Kingdoms, people gained 2 extra pops of their main race every day after their first day. This meant that each day their upkeep of food would be going up. Because of this, Zack had wanted to start with farms on his first day to keep food for at least a decent bit.
And so he assigned 6 of the kobolds to start creating 6 crop fields in which they would be starting to grow Corn, Rice, and Potatoes. He chose these 3 to have at least a bit of variety because if you fed your kingdom only one food then their happiness might go down. Each of these crops took around 90, 120, and 70 hours to grow respectively.
He now had 14 Kobolds to use. The plains biome that he started in only allowed for farming. He then decided that the mountains would be the best place to explore first because there are metals that are used in crafting, as well as having some alchemical ingredients, but best of all there is the rare chance that he could find an artifact. An artifact was an item with a major power that gave either bonus to your whole kingdom or just a select person.
And so Zack looked at the weapons in the starting supplies and there was a total of 5 swords which lead him to the decision of assigning 4 of the kobolds as soldiers. Of course, the 5th sword was for himself to use.
The next thing he did was assign 3 kobolds to start setting up tents between the crop fields and the mountains, 2 to the researcher profession, and then he assigned the final 5 kobolds to miners and gave them the 5 basic pickaxes that came with the starting supplies.
he had the 2 researchers start researching the basic metal refining technology which would take a reduced time because it was an engineering type research.
And now that Zack got the basics set up he would have to explore. So he gathered the 5 soldiers and 5 miners and set off towards the mountains.