CH 150

Chapter 150 – This is troublesome…

We’re already near the end of the year.

Frontiers started at summer, but I feel like half a year went by in the blink of an eye.

There were a lot of things that happened, but I was basically just crafting the whole time.

The current event will be longer than usual, as it will last past the New Year and only end in the next month.

We, from Works and Beyond the Faraway Time are making a party every day at my workshop to create event items.

Since many people have taken turns by now, my friend list has increased considerably.

As expected, it’s too hard to say no in that kind of situation, but… I guess it’s fine. If a problem arises, I just have to cancel the friendship.

Besides, it’s not like people get permission to enter my workshop just from being friends anyways, so I don’t think any problem will come out of it.

The only people who can enter my workshop without my permission are the members of Works, Mika and Hime.

And on that note, there are actually quite a few ways to customize who can and can’t enter a facility you own. You can let only people from your Clan, or people on your Friends List, or people on the same Party as you, or you can just refer to specific individuals, which is the restriction I use.

In most other games, this kind of thing is either “Just me”, “Me and my friends” and “Anyone”, but Frontiers lets us customize it better.

I’m very happy that the system lets do things in the way that is more comfortable to me.

******

The joint event item production was going very well.

Especially to me, who am participating every time, I have been accumulating event points at a tremendous rate.

There are many attractive items that the points can be exchanged for, such as the right to use Teleportation Gates for free, or Minicots.

I’m, of course, planning on conquering all Minicots, and I think I should be able to do it by the beginning of the next month.

There are also fireworks-type items that can be used for festivals.

Up until now I hadn’t seen anything like it in Frontiers, but there is a large lineup of options available.

From small sparklers to large fireworks that explode in the skies, there are plenty of choices to choose from.

Of course, as large fireworks are flashy and cover a huge part of the sky, they require many points to be used.

And as they’re consumables that consume a large amount of points from a single shot, it would surely be hard to launch many of them.

Or at least, it would be hard for a single person, but not so much if several people cooperated.

At the New Year’s festival hosted by the Fake Kansai Dialect Association, a fireworks display is planned to happen by the evening, so I’m looking forward to it.

On that note, I also tried shooting one firework high in the sky myself. A large layered flower bloomed in the night sky, and it was very beautiful to see it, even if there is something lonely about having only one shot up there in the sky.

Still, it feels nice to be able to use an item that can produce such a huge effect on my own.

… Will the server be okay though? Lots of those will be launched during the New Year, so I’m worrying if it might overload the server with excessive particle effects.

Well, Frontiers is really strong and can have over 10000 players simultaneously online without any lag, so I guess it will be fine.

In any case, one of the items we can get through the event allows us to freely use the Teleportation Gates, instead of needing Magic Stones to travel through them.

With the update, the Teleportation Gates can now be used to enter Field Areas too, and that’s very important when used together with the Party Auto Matching System.

Due to that, the price of Magic Stones rose a bit at first, but it’s now steadily dropping.

That’s because you can now obtain bigger stacks of Magic Stones when hunting on areas with a higher degree of difficulty.

Before, they only dropped in single units, but it’s now possible to get five or even ten Magic Stones at once.

Field Areas with a low difficulty level still behave the same as before, but now that the update increased the difficulty of areas as you dive deeper into them, it’s easier to obtain bigger number of Magic Stones now.

And as deeper floors have stronger enemies, they’ll naturally drop higher rank materials too.

The materials themselves don’t seem to have changed, but the ranks available have certainly risen. It’s now considerably easier to obtain materials of rank 5* or even 6*, as opposed to almost always getting 3* like we used to.

Facilities, Tools and Skill Levels are all important, but material ranks are also extremely important for crafting too.

And differently from Rare Materials, which have strict processing conditions, higher rank normal materials have no such thing.

Sure, it is a bit more difficult to work with high rank materials, but you usually can handle it just fine if you can handle the lower rank materials.

And so, as high rank materials are more easily available now, I have decided to put a limit on how many lower rank materials my store is willing to purchase.

Until now I hadn’t cared that much about the rank of what I was purchasing, but from now on, I’m gonna be working mainly with high-rank materials.

Naturally, the price of high-rank materials is higher, though they don’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll get a high-rank final product.

You first need to work with low-rank materials, and after you can stably make products with them, you should move up to higher rank stuff.

Well, higher rank materials still help on increasing the rank of your final product, so they naturally have a pretty high demand.

That said, the people on my priority sales are all top-tier player Pioneers who can hunt in the deeper parts of field areas and who have plenty of time to hunt, so they’ll surely sell me plenty of high-rank materials. It’s unlikely that I’ll run out of high-rank stuff any time soon.

Not to mention that there are other people who come sell me those materials.

After all, I can’t make products without materials, and I still have a monopoly on the Steel items with two Options in them, so lots of people sell things to me in order to let me keep on producing.

And that’s why, I also end up often getting Rare Materials, but…

This is troublesome…

I just died.

I’m a craft-focused Pioneer, so I have almost never died, but the number of times I have experienced it has just increased by one.

And the reason is this:

——

Absolute Zero Light Ore

Rare Material/8*

——

It’s a rare material that Gospel obtained in a field area within the Ljungsmelis Republic.

Since the update, rare materials received a category of their own, so they’re easier to identify.

In any case, it was obtained after defeating a boss in a fairly deep dungeon floor, but since it was just an ore, I figured the processing method would be to simply turn it into an ingot.

However… This ridiculous thing damaged me during the processing.

By the time I realized it, it was too late. The damage was unexpectedly large, and while I browsed my Inventory to try looking for a recovery potion, I ended up dying.

I don’t usually need potions, and I definitely don’t have the habit of suddenly taking them out of my Inventory.

Combat-focused Pioneers like Mika have dedicated pouches that allow them to take potions out whenever they need, as well as shortcuts to access them faster.

I don’t really have any pouches with me since I never needed one, so I also had no shortcuts for potions.

I was surprised that there was a material that could do this kind of thing.

Luckily enough though, as the workshop is mine, even if I died in the middle of processing, the item will still be there once I come back.

However, the probability of failure increases if you take too long to process, and the final rank of the item may also decrease.

Since I now knew that I will be damaged while processing it, I prepared some potions, so I was able to finish processing it without trouble.

However, the final result was 2*… That was disappointing. I bought this item at a fairly high price, since it was an unknown rare material with no information on it at all.

That said, I bought more than one piece, and I was able to get a 3* result for my next one.

——

Absolute Clear Light Ingot

Material/3*

——

I got an ingot with a really cool name.

But what do I make with this? I don’t have any recipe to work with.

Of course, none of the Recipe Fragments use the Absolute Clear Light Ingot either.

And since I don’t have many of those ores available, I can’t do much trial and error either.

But not trying to do anything with it would be a real shame…

Let’s see… Can’t I make something for Mika, who won’t be able to log-in during New Years? I’ve made new dolls for Hime recently, but Mika got no new weapons at all.

Sure, she did upgrade her armor as I made good items with two Options, but weapons were harder to upgrade, as her current weapons were truly top-tier.

Still, she has been using them for a while now, and she has been asking me to make something new for her, so… Let’s try making something!