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.