With time slowly ticking down till the invasion. It was time to ramp things up and to start focusing on better gear and weapons. It would turn out to be a far more complicated matter to arm my village than I was expecting. On top of that, I was looking to expand my military as well.

With my village now at least refining some ore. It was time to not only assign a miner. I wanted to be in there as well for a decent chunk of time. I knew at some point the next chamber would be broken into, and I'd need to clear out some nasty things.

It was just disgusting in the mines, the deeper I got. I ended up walking up there one day to see the person who was supposed to be mining running for their life. Without me, they had reached the next level. They, of course, lacked any kind of combat experience, so they did the best thing, which was running for their life.

There were also some further building upgrades or building themselves that I wanted built and producing goods before the invasion. There was just one massive issue. Instead of the buildings getting finished in order. The villagers wanted to spread out the wood beams and other crafted resources to every building site.

This ended up being a massive issue. As things I wanted done long before, they are now not looking like they will finish in it. I even went back during nightly hours to strip bark off logs myself. Then hauling over the building materials to what I wanted built first. It was of little use, as during the day, new resources would just go towards buildings that were not as far along.

One building I wanted up in time was the armor smith. While I was able to get it ahead. This building alone has three building steps to it. The village just did not share the same level of passion for this one.

Even after I got it built in time. I ran into another issue. A lot of the clothing that allowed my village to survive the winter had long since broken. All crafting resources to that end were going towards getting everyone the clothing to survive another winter.

It seems getting myself some better combat gear is going to have to wait. I also did not have any idea how well or not the new armor would be for the unknown upcoming situation. This was yet another one of those things where I decided to put the village first instead of just one thing for myself. As it was not going to be cheap to produce the gear I wanted.

There also came a point where I started to expand the fence to my new section of buildings. They were having enough issues with rodents getting into things at night. I also ended up putting up a guardhouse on that side of the town in the northwest corner. It kept having some issues.

This ended up being a blessing. As I'd discovered, northwest of my village was this strange portal. The very portal from which the invasion was going to come. While this would end up placing the invasion in the direct line of my highest valued crafting buildings. At least it was not the residential part of the village.

With how much ore that was getting pulled out of the mine to keep up with tools and metal weapon production. I noticed all my storage for stone has long passed the max. The mine was starting to get littered with rocks.

Since I did not want them to go to waste, it was time to start putting in some roads. Roads allow you to travel on them for a reduced cost of stamina being used while running. I could run all the way from my village up to the mine on a single bar of stamina and still have some left over.

I also expanded the roads out in a few different directions. This would allow those who were going out and gathering a quicker path back to the village. I was hoping it would help speed up the gathering efforts for the resources we needed to finish some new buildings.

I’ll admit I should have built some pathways at the very least sooner. Even if they were dirt. It would have helped, perhaps, if I had done so twenty days sooner, given me the advantage I now lacked in time remaining. At least moving forward, I now have some pathways to my village and some of the more important buildings that had room have a road as well.

These roads ended up saving me a lot of time when I started to go off looking for further blood shards to farm. At some point, perhaps I'll end up making a couple of massive roads going to some faraway areas. For the time being, however, I used up almost all my rock stockpile. I’d have to wait till more came out of the mines, and I found myself not facing an invasion within a couple of days.

It did not help that five days before the invasion, there was yet another blood moon. I should have been out gathering further blood shards to increase my numbers and to train new guards. Instead, I found myself spending another night back at the village helping to defend it.

This at least allowed me to test out my metal sword. Along with seeing some of the more combat-oriented villagers put it to the test as well. While I miss the range of my old weapon. The damage increase was more than worth it in my eyes. Granted, there were some better weapons I wanted, but at this point, we lacked the upgrades to be able to craft them.

At this point, there were going to be more issues I could not solve in time than I'd have liked. For instance, we would be lacking in having enough housing for new villagers. I was, however, hoping to get them spawning in a couple of nights right before the attack. That way, I knew they at least would stick around long enough, and I'd hope to give me enough numbers for whatever I was going to be facing.

Final Thoughts

There came a point in time when I could tell I was going to miss getting a lot of my goals done on time. I looked back at the list of stuff I wanted done and decided to just focus on getting more villagers. It was the one thing I knew I could control. I also wanted them to have at least a couple of days of training before being sent off to what might be their deaths.

It seems this time around, I tried to do too many things while not getting enough done. There was still a small window to try and get some things done. I could already kind of feel things were not going to go well.

Even at one point, I realized all my own armor had broken. While the crafters are told to keep at least two of everything in stock. They were far behind in keeping up with the demand of so many villagers. Yet getting another villager to help them out would end up needing their own set of tools, armor, and yet another mouth to feed. We were already barely scraping by, let alone needing any extra manpower at this point, getting ready for combat.

Information

Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about ASKA.

Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.

Disclosure: This content was written during early access.