kirabug's idea files

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.

Day 523:

I got up this morning and went outside with the intention of bringing in my wheat crops. Instead I discovered a sheep, just hanging out as if it was the most natural thing in the world, right in my backyard.

A SHEEP.

THE THING I’VE BEEN HEADING WEST TO GET.

IN MY YARD.

So now I have sheep and I am breeding sheep and this is well and good and excellent!

And also I have too many cows.

So I spent the day (after capturing my new sheep!) culling some of my cow herd. I mean, the sheep need room  to graze too, and when you can’t swing a sword without hitting a cow (even without meaning to) that’s too many cows.

It means I have a lot of hide tanning in my future, and I think one of my lower caverns is about to become a refrigerator while I try to get some of the meat dried or processed into something i can use.

BUT SHEEP.

Now I have to figure out how to shear them.

Day 522:

Yesterday I got lost. It happens occasionally. I get so caught up in what I was digging that I stopped paying attention to where I was… and then I couldn’t figure out how to get out.

The nice part about mining is that if you dig up for long enough, you’ll eventually find out.

In my case, I first found a very large crevasse (I’m sure you’re shocked) and then I turned left and dug until I found grass.

It put me at the foot of one of the mountains I plan to climb.

It was also damned cold.

And there was a sheep, but it wasn’t willing to follow me.

I made it home okay — it was only about an hour’s walk from where I live. So the mountain’s a reasonable distance away and the carts help me get back and forth faster, which is really nice.

And also, well, my chest plate totally disintegrated when I took it off. Not even shards of the diamond I’d used were left.

But on the other hand, I have over 100 diamonds now, which was my goal for working my way back across to the place that has the sheep.

So it’s time for me to switch strategies again no matter how good the mining was in the other direction and try to get some wool out of these hills.

But first, I think I’ll take a few days to feed the cows and the pigs and bring in my food supplies and make sure everything here is running well.

Because once I head the other way, I’m not sure how long it will take me to get back.