word mining central
Sometimes you need a project that’s just for, y’know, goofing around. This is the ongoing saga of my Minecraft character. For lack of a better title, we’re going with “One Among the Dead”.
Day 657:
I finally decided to just camp in a relatively secure spot in the mine I’m digging last night and got some sleep. I turned around this morning and there was the route out of the cave. Sleeplessness does strange things to the brain, I would swear those markers weren’t there yesterday.
Anyway, home safe and making myself a new pair of boots because the old pair fell apart when a skeleton shot me in the foot. My foot’s fine, the boots not so much.
Day 656:
I’ve dug such a deep and meandering pit I have no idea how to get out of here.
Fortunately I have a good bag of supplies with me and a solid pickaxe.
Unfortunately, I have no idea if I’ll come up under water or under something breathable.
But that’s the risk, right? If I had mapped this mess I wouldn’t have this problem.
On the other hand, I’d have a map so big I’d needed horses to follow me carrying it.
Day 655: Still digging under the mountains that I sculpted a few months ago. Had no idea all this ore was here. Kind of handy, actually, won’t be running out of anything anytime soon. And if I handle it right I could release it into the market slowly enough to get rich without tanking everything else.
I’ll probably need lawyers and things. I wonder if they take pay in granite.
Day 654:
One of the things you need to do when you’re mining without a suit or exoskeleton is bring your own water. I’ve carved containers out of gourds, wood, and stone so far… the stone was by far the hardest (pun not intended) but also the least effective, because, well, cork is scarce around here and carving a twist-on lid is not easy in stone.
So I keep water on me, because dehydrating isn’t fun, and it’s easy to do even in humid and cold conditions like the inside of a cave.
The other thing you need to do is urinate, because you’re drinking all that water. The space suits and exoskeletons used to take care of all the various bodily functions’ clean up for us, even down to vomiting, because, well, nobody likes to asphyxiate in space. But here it’s just me and my armor and the hope that there isn’t a murderous exploding giraffe-corgi on the other side of the wall.
Lately I’ve been trying to aim for dirt, because it absorbs the smell better than stone and doesn’t leave a stain. Gravel drains everything straight through, as does sand, and “mounds of charcoal lying around waiting for you to pee on them” don’t seem to be a thing.
Today, I was draining a vein down a crevasse into what I thought was dirt… it was a zombie’s head.
I recommend using zombies to absorb urine. It doesn’t help their smell, it doesn’t remove your smell, and it seriously angers the zombie.
Day 653:
The zombies are dressing better. More and more of the ones that come to attack me are not only wearing armor, but gold armor at that.
I’m not sure if I should be flattered or annoyed.
The armor doesn’t stop much. Gold is way too soft to make into anything functional, and whoever made the armor doesn’t appear to have learned much about alloys because as far as I can tell from melting it down it’s pure gold.
It does disappoint me that we don’t get many lightning strikes in the rainstorms here. (Okay, we get cloud-to-cloud but not many ground strikes.) Because a whole bunch of zombies marching over a mountain wearing highly conductive gold armor? That’s a barbecue ready to happen.