288: Really hard rock

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.

287: Weird Zombies

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: confirmation

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.

Day 285: found another staircase

Day 285:

Captain Omega, one of my first captains, used to tell us that any time we saw something interesting in a mine, we should channel some steps or something to it so we could access it again when we were ready. There wasn’t always time at the beginning of a job to fiddle around with interesting things, especially if we were in poaching oar or minerals from a site. But if the time came, she said, it always helped to make it easy to find where you’ve been and what you’d come back to find.

On the western edge of this chamber I’m clearing, I can see a set of steps that I dug jutting out of the ceiling.

Which means I’ve been interested in this chamber twice, although I’m guessing that they weren’t obviously connected at the time.

I’m still cleaning up in that direction, though, so I’ll find out soon enough.

Day 284: sharp pointy sticks

Day 284:

I spent the day making arrows with the feathers I’d plucked off the duckens that went in the smoker yesterday.

The duckens are still slow smoking, so they keep longer.

I have a bazillion tiny cuts all over my finger pads from the delicate work, which is pretty impressive when you consider how much calloused skin is at the end of each of my fingertips from the mining work.

Arrows were all I got done today. Now I’m going to bed and hoping my fingers feel better in the morning.