Woolworths Production Complex
Photo credit: yodabird19
The Woolworths Production Complex is a large factory and farm complex situated at the northeast corner of the Chimgara world border. The complex is owned and operated by Cortesia Del Mar, and is located approximately 1 kilometer east of the city of Setra Maria.
History
The idea for the Woolworths complex dates back at least to January 2024, and likely earlier than this. At this time, Cortesia Del Mar (then almost entirely based out of Setra Maria) had a need for more and more advanced production facilities to keep pace with its national development. Such facilities as wood farms and planter/harvester farms (for use at Prometheus Station) were originally planned to be housed within render distance of Setra Maria, to take advantage of natural load time from players in the city. However, this quickly proved an untenable prospect, for three chief reasons:
- The farms would have to be quite large to meet Cortesia's needs, and Setra Maria sits at a very low y-level (approximately y=30), making burying the farms underground impossible.
- The builders of Setra Maria were concerned with the aesthetic impact any farm installation - concealed or otherwise - may have on the city, providing a strong impetus to place the farms far from city limits.
- The advent of new types of farms in the subsequent months (most notably supercapital industry) worsened the prospects of fitting the whole of Cortesia's industrial needs in and around Setra Maria.
The notion that the farms should be easy to load for as long as possible remained a key goal, resulting in the the idea to position all of Setra Maria's industrial infrastructure in a concentrated area, far from the city and free of aesthetic restrictions. The name "Woolworths", which is an Australian grocery chain in real life, was chosen by Brick_WallGaming as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a farm complex called "Whole Foods" (an American grocery chain) owned by one of Cortesia's allies on a previous server in 2023. The "Woolworths" claim was established on January 5, 2024.
Over the course of the subsequent months, yodabird19 and _s1ice designed the Woolworths complex from scratch on the creative server; the design was completed by June. The hole for the complex on survival was dug by yodabird19 using decomposers on June 22, 2024, and on June 25 work began to print the complex. Cortesia Del Mar solicited material, financial, and manpower aid from their allies in the Ilios Alliance to produce the factory, promising that "the services of this factory will be freely available to all five nations in the alliance"; individuals such as VoidsentRose, _omni, and eyrzeke contributed substantially to its completion. The printing of the complex also involved manually placing many of the components of the complex (such as ore blocks) which would have been expensive to print using a ship factory, as the nominal ship factory print-cost of the complex exceeded 3,000,000 credits.
The printing of the Woolworths complex overlapped substantially with the Ilios Alliance-Vask Authority War of June-July 2024, though this did not substantially affect the complex's installment. Some discussion was had among members of Vask Authority in private channels of the prospect of attempting to block or frustrate the development of the Woolworths complex, but this was never acted upon. Furthermore, the Ilios Alliance's fleet doctrine during the war excluded the use of supercapital ships, which reduced the pressure on Cortesia to bring the complex's supercapital factory online quickly.
The Woolworths complex was brought online over the course of August 2024, with certain sections of the factory (such as the wool farm) lagging behind others (such as the supercapital core factory) in completion. Concerns from the Horizon's End staff team regarding server lag caused by loading the complex eventually caused Cortesian leadership to strike a deal with staff on October 9, 2024 to limit the times at which the complex would be loaded. On October 24, 2024, yodabird19 released a 4-minute YouTube video showcasing the interior of the Woolworths complex, which became the second-most-viewed video on his channel (as of December 2024).