Item Id List: Anno 1800
He folded the list carefully and slid it into the false bottom of his desk drawer. He looked at his own city through the dirty window. Smokestacks belched. The Iron Tower glittered. His influence rating was 1,800. His balance was 12 million.
He heard footsteps above. The creak of leather shoes on the floorboards of his print shop. The police. They weren’t looking for seditious pamphlets. They were looking for editors .
The list went dark.
Friedrich remembered the first time he had “summoned” this item. He had been a humble clerk, drowning in debt after a fire destroyed his soap factory. In a moment of desperation, he had used a cracked version of the memory tool. He typed the number. He pressed confirm. And the next morning, a grizzled, one-eyed captain named Bartholomew “The Flogger” Hale was standing on his pier, demanding a commission. The man was a monster, but Friedrich’s clippers began sinking pirate frigates that very week. Anno 1800 Item Id List
At the top, scrawled in a neat, obsessive hand, was a note: “For use with the external memory editor. Progress is not earned. It is executed.”
He reached the bottom of the page. The last entry was smudged, as if the ink had bled from a dimension that didn't quite exist.
Not a manifest of steel shipments from Sheffield, nor a roster of rum barrels from the New World. It was a list of names. The Item ID List. He folded the list carefully and slid it
The footsteps above stopped. A heavy knock.
Friedrich had never typed this one. He had only thought about it. On the night his rival, Lord Westing, had bought up all the pepper stock and bankrupted his supply chain, Friedrich’s cursor had hovered over the input box. One number. Six nines. And Lord Westing’s beautiful, lucrative crown colony would simply… vanish. No war. No cannons. Just a blank spot on the ocean where a million tons of coffee used to be.
“Mr. Albrecht,” a muffled voice said. “By order of the Admiralty Committee for Economic Authenticity, you are to surrender all GUID mapping documents.” The Iron Tower glittered
He didn’t need spectacles. He needed a patch.
He looked at the first entry.
But there was no joy in it. The items had built his empire, but the list had stolen his story. Every battle felt scripted. Every trade route felt hollow. He was not an industrialist. He was a librarian of cheat codes.
Friedrich looked at the drawer. He looked at the candle. He thought of – “Spectacles of the Clear Mind” (Epic, Item). Effect: Increases chance of finding other items by 15%.