Juggernaut: Rise of the Zerg

Chapter 64

After the food was sufficient, Zero was not in a hurry to expand the number of ant colonies—because winter was coming soon!
At this time, there is nothing to do to increase the number of ant colonies, and it is not cost-effective to bear the food consumption of more ant colonies in winter.

Zero has planned all the things to be done, and will wait until next spring to implement them.Including the expansion of the size of the ant colony, to what extent it will be expanded, and what tasks to be completed after the expansion of the ant colony, etc., He has prepared a plan in his heart, just waiting for the winter to pass.

In the hibernation, time passed quickly, the ice and snow receded, and spring came again.

The sea doesn't freeze over in winter except for a thin layer of ice near the coast.As the temperature rises, even this thin layer of ice melts quickly.

Because the weather was still a bit cold, the builders who climbed out of the cave were not in a hurry to plant crops, but went to the north cliff under Zero's command.

There are a lot of pebbles on the beach there. During this leisure time, they will be responsible for collecting enough stones to provide raw materials for the establishment of aquaculture farms after zero.

In addition, last year, Zero put down his experimental sample there, and he also wanted to use the builder to see how the sample changed after a winter.

From the mountainside to the coast, the journey is long.The builders generally headed north all the way over mountains and ridges. Although their speed was not slow due to their larger size, this distance still took them a lot of time.

By the time they arrived, it was almost noon.

Zero once again felt a little annoyed by the sharp reduction of his sphere of influence. In the past, this kind of thing would naturally directly mobilize the ant colony closest to the cliff, and it would not take so much time at all.

At the same time, He gradually became dissatisfied with the crawling speed of the builders.However, there is no way around this. Now that the entire island is waiting to be built, even if it is zero digging, it will definitely not be able to gather the resources for the evolution of the queen ant.

If anything is faster, it's air units.But they have no way to pick up pebbles directly, so they can only be builders.

Therefore, after this departure, they will not return to the cave in a short time. They will dig a temporary camp by the sea, and the transporter will provide them with food supplies.

Otherwise, they come back and forth one by one, and it will be dark.

After the builders came to the beach, the first thing Zero saw was the experimental samples placed on the beach last year.

Contrary to his expectations, this cobblestone sample that was bonded with clay and air-dried did not directly disperse into a pile of indistinguishable stones as Zero had expected, it still retained an overall shape, but the cobblestones were connected. A lot of the clay has fallen off, and now only a little bit remains in the cracks of the stones.

Even so, Zero is quite satisfied with the result.

In his original expectation, this kind of clay should not be able to withstand years of washing by sea water, and there is a high probability that it will become a pile of gravel again with the passage of time.

But they don't, which means that this idea is actually quite feasible, but it still needs to be used in conjunction with stupid methods.

On the coast, builders are still busy moving pebbles of suitable size to the direction of the grassland, and in the ant nest, many sweet potatoes have been moved to the queen by the left-behind ant colony as food.

It's time to expand the ant colony.

In one day, the queens frantically produced tens of thousands of eggs.

A small part of them will hatch into more queen ants, and most of them are builders who will undertake construction tasks.

Based on the total amount of food stored in caves and granaries, this number of ant colonies is far from reaching the upper limit of support, so the queens did not stop there.

It wasn't until nearly [-] eggs were laid that Zero finally stopped the production of the queens, and the number of ant colonies reached this number, which was basically the same.

After regaining enough food, Zero learned the previous painful lesson and decided to build a strategic granary inside the mountains.In this strategic granary, there will be enough food to meet the annual consumption of about [-] ant colonies all year round, and the food in this granary can only be replaced by new food when there are no special circumstances, and it will not be easily replaced. consume.

And the number of [-] is roughly calculated by zero. The current ant colony's food reserves can support the maximum amount of the entire ant colony until the autumn harvest. If there is any more, the food in the strategic granary will be consumed.

However, in the initial stage of construction, this number of ant colonies is roughly enough.The fish farm in the zero concept is destined to be an extremely large project even for the ant colony that has evolved many times.

First of all, if you want to have enough harvests, then the scale of this farm will not be too small. For ants, this will not be too small, in fact, it is huge, because this scale must be at least seven in diameter. Eight meters, as for the depth, there will be at least two or three meters.

Zero still didn't think about how to catch fish in the end, or in other words, none of the methods he could think of was very feasible given the ant clan's current capabilities.

The only available method is a completely stupid method, that is, to achieve the final purpose of capture by releasing water and revealing the truth.

This is of course very difficult and quite unreliable, but this is the only thing he can think of at the moment.

Although the method is a bit stupid, there is always a slight possibility of implementation.This does not prevent him from starting to prepare for the construction of this facility. He believes that there must be a way for the car to reach the mountain. At the same time, he also has reasons to do so.

Because it is foreseeable that in a short period of time, there are only so many lands that can provide crops for ant colonies, and it is difficult to increase.

This also means that if the yield per unit area of ​​sweet potatoes does not suddenly increase, the food that the ant colony can harvest each year is actually about the same.

This year, we can harvest enough food to feed [-] ants for a year, and next year it will be the same amount, without much fluctuation.

That is to say, if no new source of food can be opened up, then the number of ant colonies is doomed to never exceed the number of [-], and this is absolutely unacceptable to Zero who has just experienced the painful lesson of the disaster!
Under such a natural disaster, even an ant clan with tens of millions of them was almost completely wiped out, let alone [-] ant clans, which could not have any resistance to this level of disaster.

Although Zero also knows that even if the ant colony returns to its previous size, it will definitely not be able to resist this natural disaster, but besides increasing the number of ant colonies, he currently has no good way.

After all, only when the number is large, it is more likely to leave more survivors. This is the simplest truth.

Therefore, the existing land on the island is doomed to be unable to meet the zero demand, and he must develop new sources of food.

And rely on the mountains to eat the mountains, rely on the sea to eat the sea.On this island, is there anything more likely to make zero reach than farmed fish?
If the plan turns out to be viable, the Ants might be able to use this as a way to get back to their peak size.

Of course, it's too early to tell, and the builders haven't even collected the pebbles yet.

The road ahead is long.

(End of this chapter)