This map was no different from a normal world, except for a small palace containing a small energy crystal at its center.
The players would win as long as they could destroy this crystal.
As for the development team, their mission was to utilize the seven-day preparation period to build a fortress and protect the crystal until the end of the eighth day to achieve victory.
Alto began quickly assigning tasks to everyone.
"Helena, lead a team to handle building the villager trading hall."
"Beatrix, take five people to find a wetland and build a slime farm."
"Sosiel, take five people and..."
"Daeran..."
"Arue..."
"Everyone, complete my tasks as quickly as possible!"
"Understood, boss."
Everyone responded in unison without a moment's hesitation, then immediately rushed toward their respective target areas.
As for Alto himself, he stretched his body and felt a surge of anticipation. It seemed the time had come to show the players what true skill looked like.
Looking at the palace before him, a playful smile curled at the corners of his mouth.
Seven days were more than enough for him to build an ultimate fortress that would leave ten thousand players completely helpless.
And the first step was to take down the Ender Dragon as quickly as possible and plunder the resources of The End.
He looked across the terrain and brought up the game's built-in debug screen. The information display instantly appeared in the corner.
He began operating rapidly and quickly locked onto the nearest village location by adjusting the render distance combined with the coordinate information.
At zero minutes and forty-seven seconds, Alto arrived at the village and started rapidly looting everything.
Iron ingots, diamonds, weapons, food, and various other supplies quickly found their way into his inventory.
His fingers flew across the menus as he swiftly crafted the various equipment he needed. His movements were so fast they became a blur. What would take an ordinary player half an hour, he finished in only a minute and a half.
At one minute and fifty-six seconds, Alto found the ocean and used the bubble columns to lock onto the location of an underwater lava pool.
What followed was a dazzling display of technical skill. Utilizing the principle of obsidian generation from the collision of lava and water, a portal frame was quickly and successfully constructed.
The moment it was ignited and activated, he brought up the debug interface again to observe the entity count in the corner.
As the Nether finished loading, the entity value surged to over thirty-five, and he immediately locked onto the direction of a bastion remnant.
The hours of Nether exploration and preparation required by ordinary players were compressed by him into under three minutes.
He ran and jumped all the way through the hellish landscape.
At three minutes and forty-nine seconds, Alto arrived at the bastion remnant and took a shortcut by digging straight to the location of the gold blocks.
Then, relying on his movement skills, he quickly lured the piglins into a two-block trap he had dug in advance.
He didn't waste time killing endermen for pearls. Instead, he casually tossed the gold blocks on the ground to attract the piglins, quickly completed the trades, and obtained a batch of ender pearls. At this point, just over four and a half minutes had passed.
Turning around, he used ender pearls to teleport through the Nether and precisely found out the location of the Nether fortress by relying on his mastery of terrain generation logic.
He quickly gathered the necessary blaze rods and crafted the resulting blaze powder with the ender pearls into Eyes of Ender.
At five minutes and fifty seconds, Alto returned to the Overworld and threw an Eye of Ender in two perpendicular directions. He brought up the coordinate interface and generated a linear equation through the trajectory angles. The intersection of the two lines was the precise location of the stronghold.
He had thus abandoned the inefficient method of chasing the eyes that ordinary players used and quickly locked onto the stronghold's coordinates.
Then he returned to the corresponding coordinates in the Nether to build a secondary portal, utilizing the eight-to-one coordinate ratio between the Overworld and the Nether to save travel time.
After teleporting through, he dropped directly into the core area of the stronghold.
At seven minutes and fifty seconds, Alto found the End portal frame and embedded the Eyes of Ender into the empty slots. While the portal was activating, he conveniently grabbed the loot from the stronghold's chests.
The moment he stepped into The End, he didn't pause for a second and threw an ender pearl to fly directly toward an obsidian pillar.
At the moment of contact, he placed a block beneath his feet to catch his falling body. Then he began calculating the Ender Dragon's flight path. Finding the right position, he intercepted the dragon's normal flying path.
He placed a wooden boat and simultaneously drew his bow. The moment the Ender Dragon collided with the boat, he used the dragon's hitbox collision to accelerate the arrow to devastating speeds.
As few people knew, in Minecraft, arrows could increase their damage through velocity.
Using this principle, one could achieve a one-shot kill on the Ender Dragon.
As the arrow flew out, Alto's body was also knocked backward, but he caught himself with a boat clutch the moment he landed.
At eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds, with a shrill wail from the Ender Dragon, its massive body crashed heavily onto the pale stone below. Experience orbs swarmed around Alto as he leveled up rapidly, and the dragon egg materialized.
He collected the dragon egg and the loot, then stepped into the return portal. The entire process had taken exactly nine minutes.
The End poem appeared on his screen, indicating that Alto had cleared the game.
Although this time seemed a bit slow compared to the speedrun masters from his previous world, who could do it in under three minutes, this was a random seed after all, without any preparation.
When he returned to the starting palace, the development team members were progressing smoothly as planned. Team One sent news of finding a wetland, and Team Three had also mined their first batch of ores.
The moment Alto stepped through the return portal, all members of the development team simultaneously received a clear system announcement.
[Announcement: Player Alto has defeated the Ender Dragon, unlocking The End dimension achievement!]
The development team members who were originally focused on their duties instantly froze in place. The concentration on their faces was replaced by complete bewilderment.
It was as if question marks were floating above each of their heads.
It's cleared already?
"No way! I heard it too! Did he use cheats? We've only been working for 9 minutes?!"
"I just found the swamp, and you're telling me the Ender Dragon is already dead?"
"I thought the redstone devices the boss taught us were impressive enough, but I didn't expect his combat skill to be this insane, too."
Helena, who was building the frame for the villager trading hall, dropped the plank in her hand with a clatter. She blinked in disbelief.
"Just now, did I hear a system announcement? The Ender Dragon has been defeated already?"
"You're way too fast, Alto..."
The work efficiency of over thirty people was naturally quite impressive, and after clearing the game, Alto also began various operations without pause.
He returned to The End to collect elytra from the floating ships. With the flight boost from the elytra, the team members' efficiency increased dramatically.
Soon, various automated factories were completed across their base.
An automatic bamboo farm provided the large quantities of scaffolding needed for construction.
An automatic stone generator produced massive amounts of stone, and a tree farm churned out vast quantities of wood.
Utilizing the mechanism of iron golems spawning from villager panic states, they built a sixteen-core iron farm to rapidly produce iron ingots.
A villager curing station and trading hall quickly generated a massive supply of resources and various maximum-level enchantment books. Additionally, automated villager farms provided various agricultural products in abundance.
They also built a raid farm that produced large numbers of totems of undying, emeralds, and various materials, as well as a basic swamp slime farm, which provided the slime blocks necessary for building world eater machines.
The first day passed.
[Hahaha, am I seeing this right? This is the result of the development team's first day? They're just slacking off, aren't they?]
[Thirty-two people were busy all day, yet the palace hasn't changed at all. Were they playing poker inside and forgot to build any defenses?]
[I knew they weren't up to it! They probably don't even know how to build proper defenses. They're just designers after all, they don't actually know how to play the game competitively.]
[It's in the bag! I can punch a hole in this pathetic palace with one hit. On the eighth day, I'll lead us straight inside and smash that crystal in three minutes flat!]
[Could this be intentional? Are they trying to lure us into underestimating them?]
[Don't overthink it! There are only thirty-two of them. Even if there are traps, ten thousand of us can overwhelm them through sheer numbers alone!]
[This is hilarious. Maybe the development team is panicking inside and can't even mine obsidian, so they're just playing dead and giving up!]