Wasteland Border Inspector - Chapter 526
Chapter 526: Chapter 190: Bountiful Material Harvest and Elder Qu’s Advice
Before picking out supplies, with Old Sun tipping him off in advance, Cheng Ye already had a rough idea in mind.
The only question now was how much basic funding would be issued for this assessment.
After arranging for Wang Kang to follow the refugees to attend the class, he took the tablet straight back to the off-road vehicle, reclined the seat halfway, and let out a long breath.
Comfortable!
He tapped open the tablet; inside was a shopping mall interface with a clean, simple design.
Looked like the material buyback system with a new skin over it, with “Satellite City Infrastructure Mall” marked in the upper left corner.
In the upper right, the words “Cheng Ye” were displayed, followed by the points earned after his recruited population passed review:
[Current available Infrastructure Points: 92]
“Tsk, not even a full 100, that’s really little!”
Cheng Ye clicked his tongue again and again.
He had selected 75 households with children; calculated at 2.5 points per person, that made a total of 750 points.
Because situations like Bao Dashan’s had cropped up when picking able-bodied adults, in the end only 62 slots were issued, counting as 62 points.
He had selected 69 childless households; calculated at 1.5 points per person, that made a total of 103.5 points.
Total: 915.5 points.
“So rounding off, I actually got a tiny bit of advantage here and they’re treating it as 920 points?”
Cheng Ye did the math in his head.
Although he hadn’t taken the risk of choosing families with both children and elders, so he hadn’t gotten that much of a points edge, going by what Gu Xinjing said—1 point equals 100 Contribution Points of purchasing power—92 points meant 9,200 Contribution Points.
That figure really wasn’t small at all!
After all, it was just an assessment; there’s no way they’d give every team thirty to fifty thousand points to splurge as they pleased.
Moreover, when using Contribution Points to buy building materials, facilities, and similar supplies, the prices were actually very cost-effective.
Those resources couldn’t be taken away, and since this was on-site construction, Happiness City would even throw in a subsidy.
Just like that twenty thousand points for the pedestrian street back then—if he hadn’t insisted on building a landmark structure, and on having the piping and materials meet a “hundred-year project” standard, twenty thousand points would absolutely have been enough.
Only when buying vehicles and other portable resources did the points start to evaporate, easily going into the tens of thousands.
Four major categories had been opened in the mall corresponding to the assessment:
[Infrastructure], [Facilities], [Supplies], [Population]
“Population?”
Cheng Ye clicked in curiously. Could it be that he was allowed to bring the community militia in?
After the page jumped, the items displayed made him raise his brows:
[Elite refugee phalanx, random able-bodied adults: 5 points / 10 people]
[Elite refugee phalanx, random households: 3 points / per household]
[Ordinary refugee phalanx, random able-bodied adults: 3 points / 10 people]
[…]
“As expected, you can only randomly pick people from among the refugees, no bringing in Buffer Zone residents.”
He scrolled the screen and examined it closely.
The population category was divided into three tiers: elite, ordinary, random.
The description said that elites came with one livelihood-producing skill, ordinary ones had Basic Wilderness Survival capabilities, and random was pure luck.
The data source was the refugees’ recent statistics from the Residents Office, with an additional note: “If the ‘goods’ don’t match the description, you may request a refund with proof.”
“If I’d previously picked too many seven-person households, I could have used these extra points to plug the labor gap with this…”
The thought flashed by, then Cheng Ye shook his head. “But random means I can’t handpick them myself—too many variables.”
The people he had gathered himself could at least pull together as one rope before any crisis hit.
But families or able-bodied adults brought in randomly hadn’t heard him explain his plans for Dapo Town; if someone got restless or slacked off on assignments, he’d have no way to handle it.
As for refunds, just gathering evidence would be a pain; the assessment was only three days long, who had that kind of time to burn?
Exiting the population page, he tapped into the [Supplies] category.
This was the most straightforward way to study the purchasing power of Infrastructure Points—just compare it with Buffer Zone prices to see what was what.
Unexpectedly, the tablet didn’t stutter like the material buyback terminal; line after line of items with pictures and descriptions loaded quickly.
The available supplies were quite numerous; Cheng Ye glanced at the page count below.
At 20 items per page, there were 627 pages in total, meaning there were 12,540 types of supplies available for purchase.
In the top right corner was a search box, with a note underneath: “Items can be pulled up via fuzzy descriptions.”
“So this is the low-spec version of Firewood Communication, huh?”
Cheng Ye shook his head inwardly.
Happiness City had been the first Shelter City back in the day to use Source Rail technology to make chips, but after all these years, they hadn’t kept their hardware edge, and the software lagged even worse.
This tablet mall wasn’t even as convenient for searching as that tiny Firewood Communication device.
Food is the people’s heaven, so he searched for “Nutrient Paste” first.
[Ordinary Nutrient Paste: 1 point / 500 packets]
“Mm, that price is actually pretty good.”
Cheng Ye started calculating. “If 1 Contribution Point equals 7 Happiness Coin, and Nutrient Paste costs 2 coins a packet, then when buying Nutrient Paste, 1 Infrastructure Point is equivalent to 142 Contribution Points, about 1,000 Happiness Coin.”
With this most intuitive basic data point as reference, he searched for the daily necessities the residents needed; lines of entries popped up quickly.
[Towel (30cm×60cm): 1 point / 250 pieces]
[Wash basin (diameter 30cm): 1 point / 120 pieces]
[Water bucket (17 liters): 1 point / 80 pieces]
[Toothbrush set (5 toothbrushes + 2 tubes of toothpaste): 1 point / 180 sets]
[Synthetic mattress (190cm*90cm): 1 point / 35 pieces]
[Bedding set (pillow + four-piece set + quilt): 1 point / 35 sets]
[Long-sleeved autumn outfit (top + pants + shoes; any size): 1 point / 8 sets]
[Radio (rechargeable): 1 point / 8 units]
[Anti-illness filtered kettle (six-layer filtration): 1 point / 6 units]
[Demolition tool set (crowbar + claw hammer + wire cutters + steel chisel + tile knife + cut-resistant gloves): 1 point / 20 sets]
[Repair tool set (screwdriver + wrench + pliers + tape measure + sandpaper set): 1 point / 20 sets]
[Construction tool set (shovel + claw hammer + hand saw + hemp rope…): 1 point / 20 sets]
[Patrol flashlight (12-hour battery life): 1 point / 15 units]
[Hand-crank charger: 1 point / 4 units]