Have you ever heard of the Count of Monte Cristo? If not, it’s a great movie. You should definitely watch it. (The book is worth a read too if you’ve got the time to spare) If you have, you’ll understand why I mentioned it shortly.

Every now and then when I’m browsing this sub, I see a post that makes me think of units. You know the type. “Finally bought a freighter,” “Finally upgraded my x y or z for way too many units and nanites,” “Finally made an activated indium farm.” And every single time I think “Oh yeah, money is a thing in this game.”

It’s late 2018. NEXT has been out for a bit, portals are a buggy mess, and whispering eggs are one of the best ways to make money. I’m out and about on my home planet, just exploring, having a grand old time, when I happen across a portal. Now, I’d never actually used a portal before, so I figured I might as well try it out. I charge it up, hop on in, and everything goes to hell.

First, the game freezes. Oh well, that’s not uncommon. It unfreezes after a minute and I find myself on a seemingly empty planet with nothing but rocks and weird crystal things as far as the eye can see. Alright, this one’s a bust, might as well head back. I turn around and head back towards the portal. I try to enter it and… absolutely nothing happens. The portal’s bugged. Excellent. Well, guess I’ll just fly my ship up to the trade station and use the teleport to get back home.

(Now, I don’t believe that this would have actually worked normally, but the portal breaking made the game decide that this system was my proper system, as opposed to a portal system, which was a thing back when you couldn’t leave systems you had portaled to. I didn’t find out that you normally couldn’t leave portal systems until much later, since this was my first experience with a portal, and everything broke.)

It didn’t take me long to notice a major flaw in this plan though. My ship wasn’t with me, wasn’t on the planet even, and refused to be summoned. Alright. Excellent. I’m trapped on a dead planet with little money, no ship, very few supplies, and the only thing around me are whispering eggs. I tried grabbing some of those, but the biological horrors dissuaded me after I’d picked up two.

I genuinely didn’t know what to do. So I decided to start walking. I figured maybe I could find one of those summony sticks that were around planetary buildings that you could use to summon ship. Maybe that’d work. Eventually, after a long bit of walking (and several more near death experiences with whispering eggs) I happened upon a trading station. Why was there a trading station on a dead planet? Who knows. But there was, and I was happy. The reason I was happy was because I figured that if I could collect and sell enough whispering eggs, I could theoretically buy a new ship and just leave. My old ship was garbage anyway.

So, for reasons unknown, I set up a portable refiner just outside of the trade station. I was probably trying to refine some carbon to get more efficient fuel but honestly I can’t remember. It was clearly important though because I set down a second portable refiner just to increase the efficiency. And then, just to top it off, I accidentally put the larval cores I had gathered into the refining slot of the first one instead of the carbon. And that’s when things got interesting, because when I pulled the larval cores back out of the refiner, two new ones immediately popped back in. Weird, but free money is free money, so I grabbed those too. And two more popped up. And two more, and two more, and two more. Eventually, once I filled up my inventory with larval cores and had to exit the refiner, I realized what had happened. Putting those first two larval cores into the refiner had caused them to duplicate into the second refiner, and every time I was removing them, the second refiner was duplicating them back. Utilizing this, I was able to make enough money to buy a new ship and fly home within minutes. But it didn’t stop there.

After getting back to my home base, I spent awhile duplicating hundreds of larval cores and making millions of units. But it wasn’t enough. The mathematics major in me wanted more. I needed to maximize efficiency. So I spent several hours going from manufacturing facility to manufacturing facility hunting down every single recipe required to make the most valuable item in the game: a stasis device, worth over 15 million units apiece. I crafted one, and within 45 minutes I had hundreds. I filled up every slot in my storages, exocraft, and freighter with billions and billions of units worth of stasis devices. I hit the unit limit within the hour, and I knew that I was set for life. Now, three years and several hundred hours worth of gameplay later, I’m still sitting comfortably and 4.2 billion units, with 10 billion more in stasis devices sitting around. A crippling glitch accidentally led me to an infinite source for money, allowing me to enjoy everything the game has to offer without spending hundreds of hours grinding for credits. It was beautiful. I went back to that planet (which was, funnily enough, rescrambled into a paradise planet with a later update), renamed it Monte Cristo, and set up a little villa. I still go back there every once in a while.

So if you ever happen across a little paradise planet named Monte Cristo, stop by for a visit. And if you ever run into Dr. Zenter, Guardian of Knowledge, pop over and say hello. Maybe I’ll even toss you a stasis device or ten. Atlas knows I’ve got a few to spare.

Oh, and for the love of all that is holy in this randomly generated universe, don’t use a portal without saving first. You never know what might go wrong.