Andy sat on the bed for a while, just to catch his breath. Turns out, it wasn’t all that comfortable. But after everything he’d been through, this was still heaven.

Looking around the bedroom, there really wasn’t much in here. Just the bed, a nightstand, the LCD displays, a metallic box with a red light showing, and the locker.

Andy decided to start by investigating the locker. Inside he found another two energy bars and a tablet of some kind.

He pocketed the energy bars and examined the tablet. Flicking the on/off switch, he was actually quite surprised that it had power and turned on.

A splash screen briefly showed the ‘Landers’ game logo and then went into a menu. The title in the top left of the tablet displayed: ‘Landers - PDA’. A cursory glance through the menus showed that the device held a full game help file, or at least he should say a wiki of sorts. More to that though, the PDA apparently contained a multitude of ridiculously useful functions.

It could track the direction to beacons you set up, diagnose power issues and a huge variety of other functions. There was even an option for-

Atmospherics!

The thing that had been the bane of his existence so far!

Andy turned the atmospherics function on and stared dumbly at the display. The title read: ‘Room atmospherics:’

It not only showed the room pressure and temperature but also the makeup of the atmosphere in it! It listed moles and percentages of each gas!

Nevermind how this was scientifically possible. Game logic!

Point is, the bedroom registered the following gases:

Nitrogen: 71%

Oxygen: 24%

Hydrogen: 3%

Toxins: 2%

Carbon dioxide: 1%

The one to three ratio of oxygen to nitrogen was most likely the gasses that were originally in this room, since they are the typical gasses used for human breathable air. Even a low percentage of Carbon dioxide would be pretty toxic to humans, so that likely came from outside, along with the rather vaguely labelled ‘Toxins’ and the Hydrogen. It was possible some Nitrogen also came from outside, but given the look of this planet, Andy doubted it.

So the three, two, one, makeup of H2, CO2 and toxins were likely the makeup of the atmosphere outside. Obviously not that exact ratio as these numbers are clearly rounded, but at least he now had some idea of what was out there. He could later confirm it in person.

The higher Hydrogen rating explains why releasing oxygen was always so damn explosive.

The temperature also read forty degrees celsius…

Wait- what?

The temperature in the bedroom was going up? Andy thought the sealed room wouldn’t increase-

Oh. Of course. It was his damn waste tank heating things up again.

Looks like that one or two more uses of this bedroom he had planned for eating and drinking, was about to get a whole lot less than that.

Fuck. Again.

Examining the atmospherics a bit more, it turned out that you could even hold the PDA close to a tank or pipe and it would even tell you what was inside it, just like the room reading. That was nuts!

Andy didn’t have much else to do at this point, so he started flicking through the wiki. Trying to get a handle on all the different builds and tools and stuff listed. There was a lot!

Everything from mining to agriculture, to building rocket ships and automation. It just went on and on. He kind of wished he had this game back home.

The PDA however, while having a listing of a ridiculous array of weapons and other armaments, seemed to have no info on alien lifeforms. Bummer.

Eventually he came across a ‘device’ listing that he recognised. It was called a ‘power controller’. It was the white box he had seen on the wall of the bedroom. Andy pointed his crowbar at it and soon the box flipped open. Inside was a battery and some symbols and lights.

From the looks of it, whatever charged the battery in the power controller had stopped working and now the battery was being used to power this room. The use of the power controller, according to the wiki, was a couple of things. First it separated power networks with its electrical input and output sockets. Second, it allowed for the charging of a single battery, but also the use of that battery to power stuff in turn if needed.

Andy did not need anything turned on in this room at the moment, so he turned the power controller off with the built in switch, in order to save this particular battery for later.

The room went dark and Andy could do nothing more until the sun set. So he continued browsing the PDA for now.

Even though the temperature had increased to forty five degrees celsius, Andy only lost three percent of his health eating and drinking. He needed to fill up as much as he could before leaving the room, he wasn’t sure if he was going to get another chance to do so.

He then slipped into the ‘cube’ and used the crowbar to manually close the bedroom door behind him. Unfortunately there was still that twenty four percent of oxygen with him now in ‘the cube’, but there was nothing he could do about it. He simply had to hope it would not cause a problem.

Andy said a silent prayer and used the crowbar to remove a sheet from one of the walls.

Immediately external atmosphere rushed in to fill the 48kpa difference in the cube, pushing Andy against the closed bedroom door in the process. But at least there was no fire and death involved. The twenty percent oxygen ratio must have been low enough to not cause a problem when mixing with the atmosphere’s hydrogen.

Speaking of, the first thing he did was examine the atmosphere with the PDA:

“Hydrogen: 50%”

“Toxins: 30%”

“Carbon dioxide: 20%”

Interesting. And very, very deadly! He was suddenly glad he had never tried to open his helmet in the middle of that. That cocktail at a hundred and fifty degrees celsius or higher would most certainly have killed him instantly.

Andy held the crowbar up to the sheetless wall frame, but nothing happened. It would seem that deconstructing wall frames required a different tool. He tried the hand drill, but also no luck. Fortunately he could squeeze through the wall frame regardless, as is. Which was a good thing, otherwise high might very well have been stuck there! Imagine going through all that and then simply dying because you trapped yourself in a fucking wall!

Andy took the time to explore the POI properly this time around. He needed to see what he could all scrounge up, what he all had to work with.

First up was a half destroyed room. A manufacturing area of some kind. There were a few large industrial machines here. The first was an atmospherics manufacturer. According to the wiki, it was responsible for construction of pipes, filters and other atmospherics related equipment and devices.

Next up was a machine called a shredder. It apparently could shred stuff back into raw ores. The things you would normally have to go out and mine if you wanted to get any kind of manufacturing going.

There was also an electric furnace, which could melt those ores into ingots used for production. It apparently used a lot of power though.

There was a coal generator here as well, but without any coal or any way to mine coal, it may as well be useless.

Next to that, was also a ‘fuel generator’. It was a portable device that took a fuel canister and used it to generate power.

The last structure, appeared to also be a type of manufacturer, but it was so badly mangled, that Andy had no idea what it was for.

There was also another locker. Andy opened it up and found another energy bar inside, along with a wrench and a wire cutters.

Consulting the wiki on these two new tools, showed that the wire cutters was needed to lay or collect electrical cables and the wrench was used to lay or collect pipes and stuff related to pipes.

The locker also contained three metal ingots.

“Iron ingot 2kg”

“Copper ingot 37kg”

“Gold ingot 15kg”

These would probably come in handy manufacturing one or two things that he needed. Although the lack of iron might be a severe limiting factor in anything he wanted to make.

For now he pocketed the energy bar and clipped the new tools onto his toolbelt.

Scattered on the outside of the base, he found a fair amount of wreckage that resembled solar panels. This was likely the base's main source of power prior to whatever happened here.

There was also a second building that branched off the original airlock. The passage leading up to it of course was pretty destroyed, but the building itself appeared to be intact.

Three pipes came out of this building before ending in broken ends where the carnage started, but they did all have sealed valves prior to that, so there existed the possibility of some kind of gas still being in some of them.

The building appeared to be some kind of greenhouse, going by the mostly glass roof and the dirt tiles used for the floor. There just wasn’t anything planted in it though.

A single door granted access to the greenhouse, but Andy did not want to open it, as there might be some useful atmosphere in there for all he knew. He wondered what kind of atmosphere it had though.

He then spotted that one of the pipes leading into the greenhouse, was ruptured on the inside. That meant whatever gasses existed inside the greenhouse, likely was equalized with the pipe.

Andy whipped out his PDA and pointed it at each of the three pipes. The first had pure CO2 in it. The second was empty. The third, which was the ruptured pipe that now shared atmosphere with the green house, had the following:

“Oxygen 56%”

“Nitrogen 14%”

“Hydrogen 29%”

“Carbon dioxide 1%”

With the pressure sitting at 220kpa, that actually meant quite a bit of potential oxygen in there. The temperature however, was sitting at sixty one degrees celsius, making it largely unusable in its current state, even if he constructed a filter to filter out the O2.

Andy looked through the stuff the Atmospherics constructor could manufacture, on the PDA, to try and come up with some ideas. The only devices that he could make that could cool the atmosphere down were all costing resources he did not have access to right now, like steel for example.

His first priority right now was actually oxygen for once instead of water, since his O2 tank was almost empty. He would run out before the night was over by his guess. For once it was something other than hydration that was going to kill him.

And he had multiple potential sources of oxygen around now, but just no way to cool it. He needed a solution to this problem.