Author: kirabug

Day 683:

Slept over (under?) at the river site again last night. Back still unhappy.

While mining out this part of the vein of ore under the river I managed to mine into the area I’d been in a few days ago… so everything is connected.

I know by now I should probably be used to knocking down a wall only to find one of my own torches hanging nearby…. but it still takes a minute or two to reorient every time it happens. Context is king, as someone said a long time ago, and the context of entering yet another dark damp cave, but this time from the left, is enough to make it look new all over again. This is why we mark x’s on the walls or tie string in specific locations or something to always indicate where we’ve gone before… because one can die in a cave if one never finds the way out again.

But I did find the way out, along with a few more things like a giant underground waterfall and a few dozen zombies and skeletons at the bottom of the waterfall, and a sudden desire to seal up the whole entrance to the cave.

Strangely enough, it was raining when I came out. I say strangely because the river height both in the cave and in the river’s banks seemed unchanged despite the fact that it was absolutely chucking down rain.

Yet another “I wish I had an official scientist of any type” here I guess.

Anyway, I still have some sand and gravel to clean out of the river bank, but I’m done ore mining, at least for now, at least in that cave. I’ve sealed it up with some extra gravel and I’m back to just being soaked and cold all the time tomorrow.

Day 682:

I did sleep overnight in the cave last night and this morning I had the most stiff back ever. It turns out that my body prefers a bed made of chicken skin and feathers over a bed made of gravel, especially a gravel bed under a river in some of the dampest space I’ve ever been in. I’d be shocked if I don’t have some kind of lung fungal infection after that mess.

On the other hand, I found  a huge seam of ore and managed to spend the whole day cleaning it out and putting it into trunks to haul to the surface. The trunks are heavy, but storing stuff and then taking it up during daylight is still way safer that working at night.

And because I was essentially carving my own cave, no monsters! Which was nice! I might do it again tonight just to see how far I can get with this cave.

Day 681:

Spent all day in the water again today, extracting sand and gravel so that I can make glass and arrows.

(I don’t make the arrows out of the gravel, but I have found a lot of good chippable rock in the gravel, most of which makes pretty decent arrow heads. The gravel I keep on hand for things like “pouring on annoying zombies”.)

The last time I spent a lot of time in the water, I ended up accidentally staying overnight in a cave.

I didn’t stay overnight in a cave this time, but I did find one, so I’m going to pack enough supplies tomorrow that if I end up sleeping under the river again I at least have an extra cape to throw on to keep warm.

And some extra chicken so I’m not as hungry. Priorities.

Day 680:

The rain is gone and I’m clearing the hills that block my view of my nice wood road, so that it’s harder for things to jump up and try to kill me.

(I’m also seriously contemplating replacing the back northern doors with doors that have windows because I opened them to find skeletons standing in front of me, on fire, this morning. NOT COOL.)

It’s a lot of dirt hauling and a lot of coincidental veins of ore, but that’s all still a good thing to have. Plus, less chance of death, which I’m a fan of.

Day 679

The two topics in the title of today’s diary entry aren’t really related. At least, not that I can tell.

The first is an interesting phenomenon I noticed a while ago but I’m not sure if I mentioned… the duckens are psychic. Or at least they’re extremely observant on a plane of reality I can’t grasp.

If I’m in my library with a pocket full of seeds and no duckens in the room, and I move into the map room, none of the duckens in the map room approach me until they see me pull the seeds out of my pocket.

But if I pull the seeds out of my pocket in the library, in the inner sanctum where they definitely can’t see or hear me, and then I walk into the map room, they’re all crammed against the door like they knew I had the seeds the whole time.

Freaky.

Part of why I observed this today is because I was out working on mining, as you do, when a thunderstorm struck. If I’d have been deep in a mine I would have been fine, but I was harvesting sand from the bottom of a river. And the last place you want to be in a thunderstorm is wearing steel armor at the bottom of a river while swinging a metal shovel around. So I’m home drinking some hot water and apple peel “tea” and taking it easy for the rest of the day.