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Day 150: Guh.

One Among the Dead

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 150:

One hundred and fifty days on this rock and I’ve actually got quite a bit to show for it. I’ve got crates and crates of valuable stone and ore waiting to be carted off-planet. I’ve got literally hundreds of white duckens that follow me wherever they see me. I’ve got a herd of cows that love me.

I’ve got scars all over my body, bruises in places I didn’t know bruise, and a severe dislike of anything that comes in the color “camouflage”.

And with no way to get off this rock, it doesn’t matter how much stone I have because I can’t spend it if I can’t get out of here.

I’ve had better vacations, is what I’m saying.

Line sketch of the author's log book with this entry written on the lefthand page.

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Day 149: Dissatisfishing

One Among the Dead

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 149:

Spent the day fishing and digging up sand. I got caught in an undercurrent a couple of times during the latter, so I lost a little time and a lot of energy to swimming harder than I wanted to swim. But I did catch enough that the space around my fire looks like a fishmonger’s as I dry the meat.

(It’s also stifling hot in there, stinks of fish, and smoky as hell, so it’s a good reason to go elsewhere.)

Watercolor of a grey rectangular furnace with red and grey fish hanging from the ceiling to just above the furnace to dry. The furnace's window is glowing red from the heat.
Drying fish over the heat of a furnace. I’m probably filling myself with carcinogens but as soon as someone finds me here they’ll be able to detox me with their med kids.

This batch of glass seems to be melting more consistently, though, so the sand mining seems to be effective even if the fishing is stinky.

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Day 148: Waste

One Among the Dead

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 148:

I’ve been having a lot of quality problems with my glass lately. I’m not sure if it’s the temperature or the cooling time or the trace minerals or what, but probably half the glass I make breaks almost immediately.

Considering how much work goes into fetching sand and melting it down, it’s got me kind of bummed.

But I’m low on food and don’t feel like killing a ton of duckens for a while, so I’m going to be in the water fishing anyway… we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll try a new source of sand.

Line drawing of a pane of glass filled with cracks
This has gotten old
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Day 147: pearls?

One Among the Dead

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 147:

I fought one of the land horror squid today. It beat me with a block of stone because apparently “hit people with things” is within its comprehension but “build tools to hit things” is not.

Fortunately, I am not just a tool user but a tool builder, and I hit it with a sword. My sword proved to be the more effective weapon and I won out.

It dropped a blue-green object at my feet that resembled a pearl, if pearls could be the size of basketballs. Opalescent, maybe? That’s a word, right? It was opalescent, doesn’t show me my reflection, seems deep. Might be valuable to one of those museum types who think such things are valuable based on a formula of color x size x difficulty to fetch.

But damn, man, these things take a lot of room to store. I hope it’s worth a decent amount.

Watercolor of a large blue-green pearl with a carrot for scale. The carrot is roughly the diameter of the pearl.
That is a big whatever it is.
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Day 146: battle has become boring

One Among the Dead

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 146:

Here’s a typical routine:

  • Eat breakfast
  • Walk out to the current mine site
  • Dig out the area where I want to put up walls to keep the monsters from invading while I mine
  • Every 45 minutes or so, kill somewhere between 1 and 5 monsters as they swarm over the edges of my floor.
  • Stop for a snack about midday
  • Continue digging
  • When it looks like it’s getting dark outside (based on the skylights I dig every few hundred meters), head back home
  • Eat dinner
  • Feed the animals
  • Sharpen and clean my weapons
  • Go to bed

I still get an adrenaline rush every time some skeleton or zombie comes into view, but not nearly like the first week. I guess people can adjust to anything.

Watercolor of a dark brown baked potato
A small baked potato is the perfect snack for midday, by the way. It’s got great starch, it’s compact, comes in its own wrapper, and stays hot as hell all day. Which makes it a nice hand warmer too!