Day 147: pearls?

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.

Day 146: battle has become boring

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!

Day 145: Watchers

Day 145:

I’ve mentioned that the East Entrance emptied out into a chasm.

I didn’t even know the meaning of the word, comparatively.

I mined out the ores and stone in that chasm only to find that I was looking into an even bigger chasm. Like much bigger. Perhaps kilometers.

There are two challenges to exploring it. The first is that I’ve once again dug out into the middle of it. I’m at least 30 meters above its base.

The second is that it’s filled with giraffe-corgis. I lit a torch and could see them huddled together in an opening across from where I’m standing, a little further south of me. I could see five. I don’t know how many more there are.

If I could have remote detonated them, I might have exploded the entire cavern, if not set off an earthquake.

It’s an odd feeling, seeing semi-sentient bombs salivating over the sight of you.

A sketch of a tunnel leading to a tall thin (rocket-like) chamber with steps crisscrossing it. At the bottom of the chamber a stick figure is shown discovering that they are now staring into a much larger chamber, that has stick figure horror corgis standing on the bottom and on ledges on the inside of the giant chamber.

Day 144: So much, so spread out

Day 144:

In an effort to give myself a shortcut across my mine, I started digging a tunnel to connect two outlying areas.

The result: I came across an area I previously dug out but never marked as finished, and that’s because it wasn’t finished. I’d left a huge granite deposit in it. I don’t remember why I abandoned it — sometimes all the tunnels start to look alike — but there’s enough granite in it for me to retire.

Which is why I’m now digging it out so I can mark that mine empty.

And then I’ll go back to my shortcut.

Which means I’m hauling granite around the long way every day because I am an idiot.

ps. I ran out of coal sticks, so no sketch today. Will make more tomorrow. Too tired tonight.

Day 143: Canaries in the skeleton mines

Day 143:

I’m finding that it’s just as hard for zombies and skeletons to wade through a mess of duckens as it is for me. But the duckens like me.

So I have a second reason to fill all my mines with duckens: they trip the monsters. Well, except for the giraffe-corgies, which just blow up and take the duckens with them. But at least I can hear them coming.

If any of these creatures had verbal languages, I’m pretty sure I could’ve picked out the curse words by now just by having so many birds around.

Line sketch of a zombie with its hands on its hips standing in the middle of six duckens as if wondering how it got into this mess.
Me too, skeleton. Me too.