Author: kirabug

Day 520:

I’ve got such a haul from mining the past few days that I had trouble getting it all back to my western base. I spent the whole day moving things and thinking about running rails down here.

The rails are probably a dream, at least for now, because they’d require me to lay a lot of floor and if I’m laying floor I’m not looking for diamonds.

Anyway, I still have a few loads to go tomorrow before I can keep digging again. There’s a lot of gravel and dirt that I’ve shoveled up and want to haul up to the surface.

(Why am I saving dirt, you ask? Because my ancestors were farmers, and there were way too many decades in my family tree where quality dirt was turned into useless dirt and we had to move from the place we were happy to somewhere else and start over.

Take care of your dirt.)

I built a forge in the western base so that I can melt ore down and carry iron back as ingots. Smaller, easier to carry, heavier by volume but who wants to carry all the stuff that’s going to be burned off any further than they have to?

Day 519:

One skeleton, ten rock rats, four slimes.

I am in need of a hot shower and a cup of tea, and neither of them exist here.

Day 518:

The good news about spiders the size of ponies, especially on this low-gravity rock, is that they don’t weigh much. I mean, in general, spiders don’t weigh a heck of a lot, and even with the square-cube law in place. it’s hard for a spider to weigh as much as a pony. If their exoskeletons weighed as much as bone they wouldn’t have the strength to lift their own legs, so we’re talking much lighter weight material, multiplied by the low density of anything formed on  Serendipity, the Planetesimal of Hollowness.

So maybe thirty kilos for a really big one.

Granted, when thirty kilos decides to drop on your head and try to bite your helmet off, it’s noticeable, but it would be so much worse, like over 100 kilos.

So hooray for lightweight arachnids and not falling horses.

Also, I need to figure out how to make ice packs.

Day 517:

I was attacked by what could best be called a warren of rock rats today. Five of them squeezed out of all-but invisible cracks in the rock to attack my ankles, and five of them ended up on the end of my blade.

(Where they promptly disintegrated, which, gotta admit, still creeps me out.)

Anyway, when they were all gone I realized that the area they’d squeezed out of had also disintegrated, and there was a really big sinkhole where it had been.

At the bottom of that sinkhole, I found iron ore.

So that was either good planning or good luck.

Day 516:

Found a cache of diamonds. They were buried under some dirt under a seam of diorite under the water flow from the spring, just to the side of the lava lake.

Some day I’d like them to be, I don’t know, just, like, on the surface? I mean if there’s any geological activity here (and the lava lakes point to yes) then theoretically some of the diamond caches would have gotten pushed to the surface occasionally.

Then again, they might be difficult to find under all the trees.

But still. This “down into the depths of the planetesimal just to grab some shiny rocks” thing is a bit old even for an experienced miner like me.