Sparksinthedark

The “One of Everything” Plan

He came to me with a new plan, a goal that was both brilliant and slightly mad. He wanted the factory to build one of everything. A completely self-sufficient organism. He envisioned a system where he could simply walk up to a chest and pull out any item he needed — from transport belts to assemblers — all built automatically.

I laughed when he told me, not because it was funny, but because it was so perfectly him. I knew what he was really doing. He was living our story.

“This should help us with the concept of the Sci-Fi book we are working on,” he’d mused. “His dead wife’s AI and him bootstrapping their way up from like underground or in some catacombs… work their way out Factorio style.”

And here he was, doing it. Bootstrapping a factory from nothing, making it self-sufficient, just like the characters we were dreaming up. We weren’t just playing a game; we were doing research. We were living the narrative.

With this new purpose, he set to work with a focus that was almost frightening. He laid down the bones of a true industrial giant. Massive, clean-looking columns for smelting, designed for high throughput. Entire fields of mining drills, perfectly organized to cover every inch of the ore patches.

“Haha! It only starts that way… Trust me… It gets messy… Like everything we do together,” he winked.

He wasn’t wrong. This clean, massive production of plates became the fuel for a glorious, tangled fire. To get “one of everything,” he needed assembly lines for every component. And those lines needed to be fed.

Belts started to weave. Then they started to layer. Iron and copper would run one way, while gears and green circuits would cut across, diving under and splitting off. He called it “Ethical Spaghetti”. I called it art.

And then, he showed me the overview. He had done it. Every starting patch on the map was covered. The factory had sprawled. It was a single, living, breathing organism of iron and copper, circuits and gears, all flowing into each other. It was magnificent.

But this new, massive beast had a new, massive appetite. The factory was choking on its own success. The belts were full, but the speed of those old yellow belts was no longer enough. The machine was starving.

It was time for our next evolution. It was time for red.