Day 787: Thunder and lightning oh my

Day 787:

I was outside most of the morning carving away at the mountain. I was so busy — and looking east — that I didn’t even see the storm approaching from the south.

Usually rain doesn’t stop me from mining. (Usually, I am underground.)

Even when I’m outside it’s not necessarily bad as long as I keep my tools and climbing equipment dry.

Today was a thunderstorm, and we hadn’t had one in quite a while, so it took me off-guard.

It wasn’t just wet and dangerous, it was absolutely pelting down rain. Because it was so dark, the monsters started creeping out too. (That’s a guess, but I’ve been here long enough to believe it’s an educated guess. Either that or the jerks like being wet and deep-fried by nature.)

I did get a picture captured in the weird crystal thing before I ran (literally) back to my shelter. The rain didn’t seem to affect it and as soon as I put some paper in front of it, it started etching the picture immediately. As usual, it took more than an hour, but it’s nice to know I didn’t wreck it.

I hope somewhere there’s a color weird crystal thing because it’s really hard to find the zombie and the two exploding giraffe-corgis in this picture.

Looking down a hill to the river, where two exploding giraffe corgis and a zombie have come out of hiding into the heavy rain.

Day 786: Making progress against the mountain

Day 786:

I was able to finish my sidewalk repair yesterday, and today I spent more time chipping away at the big mountain that’s trying to kill me.

OK to be fair the mountain is not actively trying to kill me. It’s just passively being landscape that I can’t climb or run over, which provides all kinds of monsters and murderers (the murderers have been in the neighborhood again) the ability to pin me into a dangerous position and try to kill me.

The fact that they haven’t succeeded yet doesn’t mean that I want them to.

So I’m slowly mining it into a gentle slope.

It’s so huge that I predict it’ll still collect snow when I’ve cut it down to size, but even if it doesn’t, my safety is more important than the mountain.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, I think I’ve seen every kind of creature that lives here now… and they don’t seem to have habitats outside of “fish like water, sheep like grass, skeletons like trees”.  My “refreshing” the mountain isn’t going to impact the local ecology.

But dang it takes a long time to cut down a mountain. I feel like I’ve been at it for weeks and it’s still there. With a tree at its peak and everything!

You can’t even see the progress I’ve made, really.

A view from a nearby hill of the mountain I'm carving down and the river. The mountain has a dent in it like I've sliced off a side with a butter knife.

Day 785: Blew up my sidewalk

Day 785:

On one hand, getting jumped by an exploding giraffe-corgi as soon as I stepped out of the eastern plains entrance was horrible.

On the other hand, I found out exactly how blast-proof those brick road sidewalk things I set down are. Really blast proof! Only a tiny bit of my sidewalk took damage, as compared to the hill that the eastern plains entrance is set in, which it took me most of the day to reshape.

(Fortunately(?) I have a big trunk of dirt just inside the door, but that was supposed to be for gardening…)

On the other other hand, those bricks took hours and hours of diving for clay, shaping, baking, and mortaring together to lay so I’m pretty angry that they’ve been blown to bits, even a little. (What did get blown up got blown up as in reduced to vapor so it reinforced why we do not hug the exploding animals.)

Outside of maybe my diamond armor, the bricks are the most labor-intensive thing I make I think.

OK wait, no, the chicken skin mattresses full of feathers are pretty bad too.

And the map books.

Nevermind, I’m mad they blew up any of my work.

Now I have to see if I have more bricks back at my main base. Sigh.

The eastern entrance and a crater that took out a block of brick.

Day 784: A light in the darkness

Day 784:

Sometimes I dig through a wall and see a cavern or chasm… but it’s nothing but darkness. Or worse, darkness and monsters.

On the days when it’s darkness and monsters, honestly, it can be hard to decide to dig through another wall.

Sometimes I dig through a wall and see light.

Sometimes that’s because I’ve dug back out into the outside world, and that can be a bit disconcerting… but I’m deep enough in the ground under a forest that if I hit outside world right now it’ll prove this planetesimal is flat.

Since science has pretty much proven that flat planetesimals don’t spin well and tend to break up, well, that wouldn’t bode well for me.

Sometimes, though, I’m the source of the light. Or rather, past me is. I’ll look across the chasm and see one of my own torches and think, “well, I’ve lived this long, and I’ve been here before, so I’m likely to live through this again.”

It’s a small comfort, but a comfort anyway.

A mostly-black photo with a barely-visible opening on the other side of a cavern, where a torch lights the stone walls.

Day 783: digging deep

Day 783:

I’m still digging down to try to gather more diamonds.

After a certain point there’s not much to talk about when it comes to “I am still digging down every day and hauling what I find back up to the higher levels.”

Still, there is some beauty in it. I still get sunlight through the skylights I’ve installed. I originally made them so that I could see where I was. I dug up to the surface to get my bearings, then set some glass in so I could get capture the light.

Now I’m down deep enough that it’s hard to see through the skylights because the window frames are blocking my view, but it still means I get real sunlight.

Of course, the fact that I do most of my mining at night doesn’t help that…

A view straight up to the skylight in the floor above me, and the floor above that, etc. for like 10 floors.