Author: kirabug

Day 521:

The last thing anyone wants to see when walking under a lake of lava that is conveniently walled in with glass is an exploding giraffe corgi.

I would love to tell you that I was cool under pressure and fully able to handle the situation, but the truth is my hands were shaking like crazy and after I shot it (preventing the explosion) I threw up a couple of times.

In this case, I’m kind of glad I didn’t have my mining suit. They’re difficult to get vomit out of and The Company gets mad when you throw them out because you can’t get chunks of last night’s dinner out of the vents.

But I’m here to tell the tale, so we’re going to count it as a win.

Day 520:

I’ve got such a haul from mining the past few days that I had trouble getting it all back to my western base. I spent the whole day moving things and thinking about running rails down here.

The rails are probably a dream, at least for now, because they’d require me to lay a lot of floor and if I’m laying floor I’m not looking for diamonds.

Anyway, I still have a few loads to go tomorrow before I can keep digging again. There’s a lot of gravel and dirt that I’ve shoveled up and want to haul up to the surface.

(Why am I saving dirt, you ask? Because my ancestors were farmers, and there were way too many decades in my family tree where quality dirt was turned into useless dirt and we had to move from the place we were happy to somewhere else and start over.

Take care of your dirt.)

I built a forge in the western base so that I can melt ore down and carry iron back as ingots. Smaller, easier to carry, heavier by volume but who wants to carry all the stuff that’s going to be burned off any further than they have to?

Day 519:

One skeleton, ten rock rats, four slimes.

I am in need of a hot shower and a cup of tea, and neither of them exist here.

Day 518:

The good news about spiders the size of ponies, especially on this low-gravity rock, is that they don’t weigh much. I mean, in general, spiders don’t weigh a heck of a lot, and even with the square-cube law in place. it’s hard for a spider to weigh as much as a pony. If their exoskeletons weighed as much as bone they wouldn’t have the strength to lift their own legs, so we’re talking much lighter weight material, multiplied by the low density of anything formed on  Serendipity, the Planetesimal of Hollowness.

So maybe thirty kilos for a really big one.

Granted, when thirty kilos decides to drop on your head and try to bite your helmet off, it’s noticeable, but it would be so much worse, like over 100 kilos.

So hooray for lightweight arachnids and not falling horses.

Also, I need to figure out how to make ice packs.

Day 517:

I was attacked by what could best be called a warren of rock rats today. Five of them squeezed out of all-but invisible cracks in the rock to attack my ankles, and five of them ended up on the end of my blade.

(Where they promptly disintegrated, which, gotta admit, still creeps me out.)

Anyway, when they were all gone I realized that the area they’d squeezed out of had also disintegrated, and there was a really big sinkhole where it had been.

At the bottom of that sinkhole, I found iron ore.

So that was either good planning or good luck.