Category: One Among the Dead

Day 290:

Decided to take a day off to work on tools, specifically a pickaxe made of diamond.

Or whatever this blue stuff is. I’m sticking with the term diamond because it is by far the hardest substance here, but it’s clearly not actual diamond because diamond is a crystal that fractures, and this stuff is malleable enough to turn into tools.

Anyway, the challenge is that if you don’t have a hammer made of diamond, it takes a lot of strikes from an iron hammer to shape diamond.

So it takes a whole day to make a hammer, and then once I have that hammer it takes about half the day to make a pickaxe, even though the head of the pickaxe is significantly more complex.

And heating this stuff doesn’t do squat, so it’s all cold hammering. Which, I mean, I’m working up enough of a sweat, but it’d be nice to be able to make things a little easier.

Day 289:

So I’m still at the bottom of the ravine (I bet you’re shocked) mining out ore, but I discovered that about a half level up from where I’ve been digging, the ravine has (by last count) three lava falls, two waterfalls, and two unrelated pools of lava.

We are burning a lot of bats down here is what I’m saying.

So today I spent the day walling in lava so it would stop setting the bats on fire.  Call it my good deed of the week, or call it my desire to not fall into lava, not walk into lava, and not listen to bats screaming anymore. Your choice.

Day 288:

I think I found some obsidian, but it’s the hardest damned obsidian I’ve ever seen. It’s black-ish, glassy, and only appears near lava flows. But I broke two iron picks trying to mine it out of the ground so I could get a better look at it, so it is some seriously tough stuff.

I’m considering making a pick out of diamond just to see if that’ll into it. My last diamond pick lasted a lot longer than the iron ones… the problem being of course that diamond (or whatever this malleable blue rock is) is difficult to find, so constantly using it for tools isn’t very reasonable. Iron is cheap (easy to acquire) and easy to work. Diamond is a pain in the ass, even if it does last ten times as long when it’s finished.

I guess it’ll come down to how stubborn I get about removing this rock.

I miss having a ship’s geologist at my beck and call. Not that she ever was at my beck and call, she answered only to the captain. But she was friendly and liked mystery rocks and, if I did want her attention all I generally needed to do was ask.

People are good like that, you know? Sure, we complain about each other when we’re around, but generally, even if we don’t like each other much, we’ll be nice about things. I miss that too.

The long-nosed zombies are not as nice.

Day 287:

Occasionally, and today was one of those days, the zombies look weird.

Well, not al of them.

But some of them have really big noses, the kind of noses that should interfere with eating. (I’m not getting close enough to find out if they do.) And they wear different clothes, like brown tattered stuff or white tattered stuff.

I don’t know why.

But the change is kind of nice. If having variety in the murderous beasts trying to destroy you on a daily basis is your definition of nice, anyway.

Day 286:

I was right – the second set of what appeared to be steps coming out of the ceiling are definitely mine.

The interesting part is at this part of the chamber, that ceiling isn’t the level I just left… it’s the level above. So at some point I’d dug down here from two floors above, taken all the ore I could find, and gone back up, but left myself enough of a marker to know to come back.

I was right to do that, too. I’ve found a few more diamonds, but also a lode of iron ore and a big vein of andesite. So now I’ve shifted from straight cleanup work to straight mining work, to get the valuable stuff out before I go back to clean-up mode.

All is pretty positive here if you ignore that I’m digging the wrong direction to get to the top of the snowy mountain. And my fingers still hurt from those tiny feather cuts. But those are details compared to the market price of andesite.