Adam and Eve

He had all the sand and clay he ever needed in Aftercraft. Technoblade meticulously collected everything he could need from the swamp, including oak wood, oak saplings, vine, lily pads, slime balls and rare flowers. The swamp might be gloomy, but it was full of amazing resources that this mountain range did not have.

Now that Carl was well fed in the safety of his walls, Technoblade wondered what he should do.

He had the means to start a village after receiving a permit to start a new civilisation. He had two villager souls to create his very own Adam and Eve. However, he had a problem.

Technoblade did not know where he should create the new village. He did not want to live in the same house as the first couple in Aftercraft tasked to repopulate the world. Not only would it feel awkward and inappropriate, but Technoblade's virgin ears would also be defiled in the most tragic manner.

"I could build it within the walls on the other end, but there could be a very rapid population boom that I will not be able to cope with," Technoblade studied the map in his mountain mansion. Yes, he made a new room just for the town planning business because he was procrastinating.

Birthing villagers in Aftercraft was easy. The system admin designed them to be similar to plants. All Technoblade had to do was toss them in water, and they would magically spawn as adults. However, upon materialising, Technoblade understood that they would immediately become societal burdens.

He did not like the human race a lot for various reasons. The lack of education and maturity had to be one of the reasons, but most importantly, many people were too unwilling to progress in life. Complacency and self-entitlement were the main issues, and Technoblade wondered how he could stamp that out in his village.

"As mayor of a new town, do I have any say over how they behave?"

Consulting his system, Technoblade went through the quest trees again. The system admin updated the detailed guidebook, and Technoblade spent the last few days pouring through the tome. He needed answers, not suggestions.

How did the villager mechanic work anyway? Would it be similar to Minecraft, where they had schedules and jobs, or would they be similar to players?

The introduction guide to villagers made Technoblade blush so hard that he had to take a break and harvest his wheat before continuing. It sounded like a teenage female love story unfolding before his eyes with how the system admin adopted a storytelling method of describing the union of man and woman. However, the answer was clear.

Villagers in Aftercraft were similar to Minecraft. They had jobs and could start families. Technoblade did his best to ignore the incest concept, but it was still disturbing to think about future generations.

"Villagers can be differentiated by their clothing colours when they become adults. Females will wear red, and males will wear green. Villagers who are incapable of increasing the population will wear brown and can be assigned jobs based on their character status. Villager training is possible, and the job variety depends on the mayor's level?"

Alright, this looked more like a kingdom management game than a sandbox survival. Why was Aftercraft so complex?

In short, these villagers were similar to NPCs and could not talk. They only acted according to Aftercraft's AI or Technoblade's commands. It was disappointing. However, Technoblade did not remain disheartened for long. After studying the Town Management tab, he understood how to make the village a prosperous city.

It would take time, but once he managed to train a single villager to take over his mayor position as an apprentice, he could leave town management in their hands.

Jobs in Aftercraft functioned differently from Minecraft. Unlike Minecraft, where every villager had to be assigned a single workstation to open a trade shop, the villagers in Aftercraft did no such things. Unlike piglins, there was no way to access a villager's shop. They did not trade items for emeralds. However, they could collect resources on Technoblade's behalf and deposit those items directly into Technoblade's inventory or a chest.

The guidebook listed all the available job types. They had all sorts of jobs, from woodcutter to bricklayer. Technoblade loved how advanced the villager AI was because there were advanced jobs like architects born from outstanding bricklayers who were in charge of territory expansion and building new housing. The mayor's apprentice was the final form of a villager working his or her way up from a scribe. That was someone Technoblade needed. He loved how realistic this was.

The progression paths of villagers in Aftercraft were interesting, and Technoblade spent a long time making plans for them. He hated dealing with a baby boom without the means to cope with them. Villagers in Aftercraft were more tedious to look after than the villagers from Minecraft. They had very human needs like food, water, shelter and clothing. Education was part of the requirements to increase a villager's status so they could evolve from one job to a higher level job.

To educate villagers, Technoblade had to assign a teacher to a building called a school. Thankfully, the detailed guidebook let Technoblade know how schools were recognised by the system admin. Any building of ten by twenty blocks with at least twenty bookshelves was automatically recognised as a school after he logged it into his town planning journal. Teachers started out as scribes, and to create his first scribe, he had to craft a journal using a book, feather and ink sac.

Technoblade groaned. He would rather not deal with numbers, but every villager had to be properly accounted for. Villagers in Aftercraft had many needs, and if he failed to fulfil those requirements as their mayor, they would turn into pillagers who would plunder and murder other villagers. Of course, there was a way to guard against random pillagers in his population. Technoblade could create some guards from his villagers by assigning them the hunter job. Hunters can turn into tamers, guards or archers, but only guards can kill pillagers.

"Why is this so complicated?" Technobldae asked.

In any case, after several days of agonising over details, Technoblade decided that he needed to implement the birth control campaign first. If China could implement the one-child policy, so could he. He would rather be labelled as the cockblocking mayor than the mayor who starved his people.

"Two villagers," he nodded. "I can start with that."

After making the checklist, Technoblade decided to start building his first villager house. He could always expand the walls to the meadows when the population increased, but for now, he would build it at the far corner of his walled land. The house needed at least a five by five blocks ground space, a door, a crafting table, a furnace, a water source block and at least one bed. Every villager required a bed, and every house could only contain up to four villagers regardless of the number of beds.

Villagers cannot procreate without additional bed space in a house and food. Children villagers will always stay with their parents and leave the house after they become adults. Unfortunately for Technoblade, villagers were immortal in this game and will not die a natural cause of death. He had to select his villagers wisely, and those that did not make the cut had to walk the plank into his moat.

Building the villager house was a fun distraction, and Technoblade made the house a little too grandly with a small garden. He even decorated the interior, even if it was unnecessary. The house had carpets, flower pots and grand self-portraits of himself. Technoblade did not want them to forget their mayor's face from the long absence after he left the village to hunt for wither skulls. Having posters everywhere he could hang them should kindle a sense of community spirit.

After placing the fence gate to the front of the villager's house and lighting the gravel path in their garden with lanterns, Technoblade watched the berry bushes grow for a while near the small pond and wondered if it was alright to name the small pond in their front yard the spring of life.

"Here goes nothing!" he held the orbs in both hands and carefully lowered them into the water.

With a magical burst of light, a villager in red robes and a villager in green robes materialised before Technoblade.

Ping!

[Congratulations! You have completed the quest [Homo Sapien]. You have been awarded the title of Mayor and have full access to the Villager Management Panel in the Town Planning Journal tab.]

Finally! Technoblade quickly looked at the individual villager profiles for his first two villagers. The first thing he did was name them. He wanted to be creative, but it was probably not a good idea to name them after things like TikTok or DeezNutz.

"You shall be Adam, and you shall be Eve," he decided after watching them stare at each other's eyes for the last ten minutes.

That's right. He wasn't very creative with names. It didn't really matter. At least they would stay true to their given roles in life.

"Alright, get acquainted. Making babies will have to wait a bit, but you can christen the house first. It's yours now."

Technoblade gave the new couple their privacy with a wave and shut the fence gate behind him. Playing cupid was not his job, but as the Mayor of Orphania, he wasn't complaining.