Category: One Among the Dead

Day 573:

I did a lot of mining out fo the side of the hill I’m trying to sculpt. Cut down two trees of a reasonable size, so I don’t need to worry about wood supplies for a while. Did some fishing too, which was a nice change.

The sun sets over the river and turns the whole valley shades of red and orange and purple. When you’re not fishing because you’re starving, it’s very relaxing, and the color change reflecting up off the water is a great way to know it’s time to go home.

Making myself a fish sandwich for dinner and then heading to bed.

Day 572:

I’m sleeping a lot better topside, which isn’t really a big surprise. Humans were designed to have bright days and dark nights and when you spend all your time in a  cave you don’t really get either. But I’ve been up strip-mining and landscaping in the sun enough that I feel, well, good.

The sunset tonight made the sun look like a giant ball of fire in the sky. I wish I knew which star it was, so I could say goodnight to it properly. I’m sure their names aren’t “Sun” and “Moon” on the astronomical charts. But they’ll do, I guess, for now.

Day 571:

I know this is going to sound odd, but I think I’m experiencing some kind of visual disorder.

So I was digging out the side of a hill, like you do, when I came across a deposit of granite. But instead of looking smooth and shiny like it usually does, this granite looks like spam. It’s kind of, I don’t know, flatter than it used to be?

I thought it was just an odd specimen, but when I got back to my caverns I discovered all the granite looked different. And the andesite and diorite also look a bit odd. Not totally different, just, not the same way they did yesterday.

Most other things look the same, but my wheat looks yellower somehow, and my iron ingots look smoother. I know it doesn’t make any sense.

I’m hoping it’s just a visual hallucination because the alternative is that I’ve somehow forgotten what granite looks like but not that it exists and that’s getting into neurological problems I don’t want to tackle on my own.

At least I got a good seam of ore out of it.

Day 570:

I’m most of the way up what I thought was a big hill only to discover that compared to its neighbor it’s a little hill. Also, the lake I found turned out to be much higher in elevation than I originally thought.

It’s easy to eyeball elevation when you’re comparing a big hill to a flat plain, or a mountain to a big hill. It’s a bit harder to say “is this lake 3 meters above that other lake?”

Also, these lakes don’t seem to have feeder streams or things that empty them out, which is… well… weird. So weird I feel compelled to fix it. But I haven’t figured out how yet. It seems odd to dig a trench for a lake that until now seems to have gotten along just fine without me. On the other hand, water that doesn’t move eventually turns into primordial sludge, which given enough time and evolutionary pressure, turns into predatory lending corporations, so it’s best to get the water moving now.

Day 569:

Not a lot new to report.

The place I’m mining right now is unusually low on duckens, which is the only thing notable about it.

That’s not a lot to write home about.

I did notice that the moon here moves in phases the same way that the one on Old Earth did.

(The four moons on New Earth all have their own behaviors and I’m not nearly smart enough to describe them, but “tidally locked” wasn’t a part of the descriptions.)

I haven’t had time to track the length of the moon’s phases, for reasons that mostly align with “don’t like to be above ground” and “things try to kill me in the dark” but I might give it a shot at some point.