A week in real life

Steeldust is a game with two main classes, depending on your class the gameplay would be completely different.

The first class was Reid's class, sinners

And the other one was saints.

The sinners would rely on their machinery to fight while saints would have superhuman strength. While sinners would use their XP points in order to learn knowledge, saints would simply increase their stats. Killing the opposite class was very rewarding, as killing a sinner would give the saint class player way more XP points compared to a player of the same class and vice versa. This, however did not stop the PVP between the same classes especially for sinners as they would get their items when they killed someone.

For sinners, getting help from the NPCs at start and learning character knowledge was what the average player would do to make machines, while some would use manual craftsmanship and engineering to make machines and tools. Those were mainly real-life mechanichs or just some guy that had decided to try it out.

As for saints, they would hunt low level monsters or train in order to get skills. XP would enchance their stats trough getting stat points every time they leveled up. Stat points could be used to increase physical stats like endurance, strength, agility or magical stats like intelligence and mana.

Sinners also had endurance, strength, agility and intelligence but the physical stats were way weaker and there was no magic stats. Intelligence would be used for machines instead of magic.

The leveling system was also simple. The required XP to level up was set by developers and did not follow a certain order and new classes would be available after some levels such as traitor, which required a saint to be at least lvl 100. Class changes were completely optional and most of them required to complete some kind of mission.

Like many other full-dive VR games, Steeldust had real-life physics. The difference from reality was there was a system to help the players along with being able to respawn and pain reduction. The first time real life physics were used in a game was back in 2099, and it started to spread from then on. In 2142, it became pretty common, since if developers wanted to change the gameplay, they could simply change material hardness or add energy that completely run on code instead of making something actually generate energy. There were many more possible ways to have unrealistic gameplay while having real-life physics.

For Reid, he was not a social person, his family had died when he was 18 in some accident and they were pretty rich, so he just lived his life as a shut-in gamer that got obsessed with machines and a single game. Reid's family didn't care much for him anyways, they would give some allowance, eat dinner and breakfast together. Other than eating dinner and breakfast, they would rarely see each other as Reid had stayed in his room and they wouldn't be home most of the time.

Even before his parents deaths, he didn't have much human interaction. Reid was always quiet and wasn't really into human relationships from the start.

While the consciousness was lost in Steeldust, the player would get logged out and wouldn't be able to join back until the character woke up. If the consciousness was lost for a week, the player could simply respawn.

There was this problem where even if the player characters arm was completely obliterated, it could function as normal unless coded not to do so. Simply using real anotomy was actually easier when you had real-life physics compared to coding every wound, cut, bleeding, broken bones and animating muscle movement in order to make it look realistic. Such things made it a better option for realism, except the brain. The brain completely ran on code.

Reid was his nickname for Steeldust, He didn't really use his real name since he stopped going outside and Reid would often forget his real name.

Reid spent the week searching blueprints and learning them. Of course, they were not civilian blueprints available on the internet, they were incomplete military weapons and projects.

Thats why the other players couldn't cach up. He would then use these to make them using his assembly factory. He preferred manually making stuff rather then using the game system. That way, it was way more custimizable and also allowed him to go beyond anything that has been done before so Reid was not using the games sytem and assembly factories, he made his own.

He had been requested to make blueprints for the army through the game, but he did not care.

He was rather skilled so he never got cought, he couldn't be traced from the game either since he already took countermeasures.

He perfected and changed them, as ethnicity wasn't a problem in the game he did not have to think about religion or any kind of righteousness. It was only a game, after all.

IRL(in real life), cloning, stopping ageing and inhumane killing ways were still prohibited since religions were against it and such.

Besides religions, another big reason for all of the incomplete military blueprints were that they were too costly, instead of supersoldiers with expensive gear, it was way more efficient to get more people.

That was not an issue for Reid as he played solo. He couldn't get any people, not with his social skills. Besides, he preferred not to.

The first day of the penalty Reid ate some food from his fridge and did some research, choosing a incomplete military prototype blueprint of a pistol sized railgun with exploding ammunition that would cause another explosion every time it pierced something else until it lost all energy among the other blueprints he found and went to his bed to sleep after. The prototype would not pierce trough if the thing it hit at first wasn't completely blown to bits. He also had searched for the bug in his VR gear but found nothing, so he bought a new one from the internet.

The second day of the penalty Reid ordered food, ate the food which was hamburger and french fries and tried to understand the incomplete blueprints which he succeeded at, went to his bed to sleep after.

The third day of the penalty Reid simulated the prototype in a physics simulator and tested it over and over with small or big changes every time to find ways of improvement, made some scrambled eggs, ate it and went to his bed to sleep after.

The fourth day of the penalty Reid made a blueprint of the improved version of the prototype which would be stronger, faster and better overall, heated up some chicken nuggets, ate the chicken nuggets and went to his bed to sleep after.

The fifth day of the penalty the new VR gear he ordered came. Reid set it up then went back to working on the prototype, making a better working version of the improved prototype that would malfunction less, made and ate some toast and went to his bed to sleep after.

The sixth day of the penalty Reid made the improved better prototype and it was now smaller and lighter but looked a little blocky, ate some junk food and went to his bed to sleep after.

The last day of the penalty Reid ate some toast he made and changed the looks of the improved lightweight better prototype and decided to name it "Nailgun" and tested it around making last touches while waiting for the countdown of the penalty to reach 0.

He had spended the week. This was his second death this year. He put on his VR gear and waited for his penalty to end as there were seconds left.

4...3...2...1

Logging in...

Error

Reid felt immense pain and instantly lost consciousness.