Day 683:
Slept over (under?) at the river site again last night. Back still unhappy.
While mining out this part of the vein of ore under the river I managed to mine into the area I’d been in a few days ago… so everything is connected.
I know by now I should probably be used to knocking down a wall only to find one of my own torches hanging nearby…. but it still takes a minute or two to reorient every time it happens. Context is king, as someone said a long time ago, and the context of entering yet another dark damp cave, but this time from the left, is enough to make it look new all over again. This is why we mark x’s on the walls or tie string in specific locations or something to always indicate where we’ve gone before… because one can die in a cave if one never finds the way out again.
But I did find the way out, along with a few more things like a giant underground waterfall and a few dozen zombies and skeletons at the bottom of the waterfall, and a sudden desire to seal up the whole entrance to the cave.
Strangely enough, it was raining when I came out. I say strangely because the river height both in the cave and in the river’s banks seemed unchanged despite the fact that it was absolutely chucking down rain.
Yet another “I wish I had an official scientist of any type” here I guess.
Anyway, I still have some sand and gravel to clean out of the river bank, but I’m done ore mining, at least for now, at least in that cave. I’ve sealed it up with some extra gravel and I’m back to just being soaked and cold all the time tomorrow.