Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

He also found a hidden underground house by chance and discovered a golden treasure chest inside.

Excitedly, he opened the chest and found not only ordinary consumables like bombs, arrows, and ropes, but also an orange-quality Depth Gauge!

[Blessed Depth Gauge]

Equippable

Crafting Material

Displays Depth

+4 Defense

——

Seeing this item, Yi forgot about the strange game world view and felt extremely excited.

He didn’t understand the “Displays Depth” part.

But he understood [+4 Defense]!

Wearing a full wooden armor set, including helmet, clothes, and shoes, and counting the set bonuses, he only had 3 defense points!

Now, he gained a whopping 4 defense points from just one item!

Happily, he put the item in the [Accessory Slot] and looked at the last item in the golden chest:

It was a green-quality Chain Knife that excited him even more than the [Depth Gauge] – its damage value was even more than twice that of the Copper Shortsword!

Yi quickly discarded the rubbish Copper Shortsword and replaced it with this “high-class” weapon, happily swinging it around.

But he apparently overlooked one problem:

In a narrow cave environment, using a just-acquired and unfamiliar weapon wasn’t easy to execute…

As a result, he didn’t get far from the hidden house before being surrounded by several cave bats. After swinging the Chain Knife for a while, he couldn’t hit a single one!

In the end, he was killed by the relentless biting of the bats…

As excited as he was from getting the precious items and new weapon before, he was equally in pain now as he lost everything upon death!

Yi looked at the familiar map selection screen in front of him, didn’t immediately enter the game, and instead fell silent for a full half-minute.

Afterward, he expressed his thoughts to the audience:

“Maybe I should stop being stubborn…”

“How about I play Normal mode first, get familiar with the game, and then challenge Expert mode?”

“There’s no progress like this, I don’t even know what the main storyline is, and it’s boring for you to watch, right?”

Although he had reasons and a good argument.

Unfortunately, the audience didn’t want to hear it.

They responded in unison:

“No!”

“This is so thrilling!”

“We love watching you die.”

“We can watch others stream for game progress.”

…

Yi was choked by these unscrupulous fans, then skillfully ignored their opinions. Pretending to read the comments, he calmly said, “Alright, since everyone feels the same way, I’ll just do as you wish!”

Then, disregarding the question marks that swiftly slid past his eyes, he quickly exited the game, created a character with normal difficulty, and started over.

*

It was pretty much the same for Camille Victoria.

When she first encountered the night above ground, the incomplete zombies, the floating eyes in the sky, and the long-legged goldfish on the ground gave her a strong psychological shock.

She immediately threw away her copper sword, vowing only to be an archer from then on!

But the crude weapon was obviously not enough to fend off the endless wave of monsters during the night, and they were soon overwhelmed by the outnumbering monsters.

Seeing the horrifyingly mutilated monsters getting closer and closer, Camille Victoria wished she could just stab herself and be done with it.

Unfortunately, in the end, she was still scratched by a zombie’s claw, making her scalp tingle and nearly causing her to feel sick from the revulsion.

—This was still a fortunate outcome given that Lincoln had shown mercy; at least, the zombies wouldn’t chew on the players’ faces.

Despite that, after re-entering the game, Camille Victoria couldn’t help but vigorously rub her clothes with her hands.

Strictly speaking, this was an entirely new character, with completely new clothes that had never been scratched by zombies before, but it was hard to overcome this mental hurdle.

At this point, a teammate suggested, “Since the characters and maps in this game are separate, can we try a different playstyle? I can switch to a character in normal mode to support you guys, wouldn’t that make the difficulty drop significantly?”

It was a nice thought.

Unfortunately, after trying, they discovered that characters in normal difficulty and expert difficulty couldn’t enter the same map.

They realized this mechanism a bit too late.

Only 10 minutes after Terraria was launched, Chasing Wind quickly grasped this point.

Within the company, there were employees hired specifically to assist Chasing Wind in playing the game, and he had already provided them with Mirage Consoles. Today, they also started in a group of four.

As soon as Chasing Wind thought of this, he immediately ran a test.

Of course, it didn’t work.

In the end, both Camille Victoria and her fans’ four-person team and Chasing Wind and his employees’ four-person team went back to the difficulty selection screen. They created characters with normal difficulty and returned to the old map to start over.

Normal difficulty, difficult difficulty, and expert difficulty characters could each be created separately, independent of each other and unable to interact.

*

Even streamers, who desperately needed live streaming effects, switched to normal mode, let alone ordinary players.

The rewards for the [Survival Challenge] were indeed attractive. In addition to the overall rewards for the week-long event, there were 20 “longest survival of the day” rewards each day, tempting everyone to try expert mode.

However, compared to the tens of millions of potential player scale, 20 award-winning spots were far too slim of a chance.

More and more players realized that instead of pursuing this slim hope, it’s better to enjoy the game’s fun in the present.

As a result, the number of players in expert mode was significantly reduced.

However, the game’s progression began to advance rapidly!

Having let go of their fear of death, players quickly became more unrestrained:

“What optimal mining method? It’s all nonsense! Just dig down! Dig hard! Dig to the end of the world!”

“Exploration? Find treasure chests? Finding treasure chests is nothing in terms of exploration! Follow me, rush to the edge of the world!”

“A rope can reach the sky? What kind of high-tech is this? Is it the legendary Fairy Rope?! Never mind, as long as it can reach the sky, let’s go and have a look!”

“Land of Corruption? Soul-eating monsters? How disgusting! But what’s inside this cave? Let’s go and take a look.”

“You guys go ahead, I’m not joining you. This lake is nice, I’ll build a safe house and fish.”

…

Without any restraints, players became wild horses and began dashing across the world, filled with dangers and treasures, completely disregarding life and death.

With this headlong rush to progress, they achieved more in an hour than they had in the previous three hours!

By evening, after office workers and students finished dinner and entered the game, the main force had successfully discovered clues and began to fight the first BOSS—[Eye of Cthulhu]!

And this BOSS battle further cemented the players’ understanding of:

Why this game was only for adults!

Looking at that giant eyeball, three times the size of a person, dragging long veins and nerves, splashing blood while splitting off sub-units and charging straight at you, even the most coarse-minded, strong-hearted players felt their scalps tingling and their hearts racing.

Not to mention when it reached the second stage, the giant eyeball spinning wildly in the air, indiscriminately splashing dense bits of flesh and smaller eyeballs…

As it finally stopped spinning and reappeared, the huge pupil in the middle was gone, replaced by a gaping mouth, charging at you to take a bite!

When the players experienced this scene for the first time, they felt a strong assault on their sanity!

Camille Victoria, when she first saw it, was so frightened that she turned around and ran away, screaming as she did so, only one step away from calling out for her mom.

What was even more outrageous was that this thing had a third stage!

The three-stage BOSS didn’t transform, but its speed drastically increased, its movements became more erratic, and its desire to attack intensified, making the battle’s difficulty soar.

Because it could phase through any terrain and they had no experience or plan to evade the attack, seemingly defenseless, BOSS often attacked unexpectedly from underground.

Why talk about combat difficulty in the middle of discussing horror and heavy content?

Because after the players were killed and had just revived at the respawn point in a house, they saw a huge, horrifying mouth rapidly phasing through a wall!

Players were caught completely off-guard, facing the terrifying BOSS as it directly charged at their faces and swallowed them whole!

Only those who experienced it could understand how thrilling that was!

What’s worse was that because they couldn’t beat the high-difficulty BOSS, they had to try again and again…

Each time repeating this terrifying experience that would drive one insane