Category: One Among the Dead

Day 528:

It turns out that way back when, whenever it was that I last worked my way east at the upper levels, I left a bunch of chambers half-dug and half-developed and thus off my map.

(I refuse to map something that doesn’t have solid borders yet because that way lies madness and many map updates and it’s not like I’ve got a computer here, this is all being done in charcoal and the occasional squid ink.)

So I’m both further ahead than I thought and further behind because the places that I need to connect together so that I can run my new rail system are not connected, but the places below them are connected, so there’s hope.

That was a long way to say I’ve already made more progress than I thought and also I’m tired and my back hurts from hauling rock all day.

Day 527:

I’ve made some new armor out of the diamonds, as one does. I wasn’t comfortable with how quickly my last chest plate fell to pieces so I’ve made a bunch of those… and I’ve also made some better leg protection, some boots (or rather, diamond things that slide over the boots because purely diamond boots wouldn’t bend and that’s not how human feet work, and an extra helmet.

And I had enough left over to make a couple of shovels.

I actually have a lot more diamond, enough to make some pickaxes and maybe even an axe, but the thing is that I’m running low on storage. So I’m trying to use up some of the older armor that’s mostly damaged in my crate.

I mean, if all I’m going to be doing is fighting the occasional skeleton that raids my garden, I don’t really need the good stuff for that… and if the good stuff breaks near home, that’s not exactly a bad thing either.

It’s weird, the pull between not wanting to throw anything out and wanting things to wear out so badly that I can’t fix them.

Day 526:

Every attempt that I’ve made to make carrot cake or carrot soup has failed miserably and I am so very sick of carrots.

I’m also terrified that I’ll get seriously injured and not be able to hunt for a while, and carrots last a really long time in the right conditions, so I keep growing them just in case.

Even the cows are sick of them. The only animals that will eat them are the pigs, who don’t appear too fussy but prefer the carrots over, say, wheat. Probably because they’re pigs and not cows.

I would take literally any other vegetable right now, even boiled brussels sprouts.

Day 525:

Having spent half the day cleaning my cows down to reasonable numbers, I attacked a problem on the southern end of the caverns.

Duckens really like natural sunlight.

Which, I mean, makes sense. All animals pretty much do, except for the things that catch fire the the sun comes up like the zombies and the skeletons — but I’m still not sure they’re animals in the strictest sense.

(Still miss having a xenobiologist around.)

Anyway. Duckens tend to show up everywhere in my caverns, but most of all where the natural light filters in, and this has been okay except that the southern doors are all natural light all the time… so there were about 200 duckens cramming themselves into a 20 meter by 20 meter cavern and that’s just ridiculous.

So I took one of the old swords in the “box of old crap I’ve pulled out of the river” and cleared out duckens until I could get to the door again.

Now I have a lot of feathers and a lot of ducken meat to dry (along with the beef jerky I need to make) and enough ducken skins to make another mattress. Which I might need, if I’m going to make an even-more-western outpost to go up the mountain.

It’s weird to have done all this work to go west only to have the reason to go west show up in my backyard. On the other hand, it puts me back on track and makes me feel a little less guilty about spending all that time mining.

Tomorrow I’m going to work on my gardening and then I’ll build a plan for going east efficiently.

Day 524:

I hadn’t really realized how many cows I had until I started culling the herd. I wish I was on old Earth right now. Those people knew how to eat a carnivorous diet, something more than beans and the occasional chicken. (The moon base wasn’t as lucky, as grass was incredibly difficult to come by.)

I would probably be a cow baron or whatever one called a person with too many cows. I wonder if that was like a royalty position – cow baron. Perhaps that’s how they got all the land for the cows in the first place.

I got mine by feeding the cows. It doesn’t seem like it should be this simple. I’ve had to make more arrows just for the purpose of culling the cows.

It does explain all the leather boots though, cows being this easy to raise.