kirabug's idea files

Day 294:

Now I’m almost sure this isn’t the same canyon I was digging in earlier, but it might be one of the earlier canyons?

OK, so here’s a thing that keeps happening:

I dig through a wall into a wide cavern with no signs of ore in any direction.

Way above my head is a torch embedded in the wall and I think, for a split second, “Oh my cod! I found someone! There was someone else here!”

And then I recognize the mark that I started carving into torch handles a while ago (for just this reason) indicating that no, this is my torch, and I’ve been digging here before, which is why there’s no ore…

…but there’s also no walls or floors, and I’m usually pretty particular about them.

So am I digging into areas I was legitimately in?

Am I digging into areas where someone’s placed old torches I’d left in other areas, just to confuse me?

Am I digging through time?

Or am I just breathing some heinous fumes from being too close to the lava?

Day 293:

Got tired of making tools so I’m digging up toward the surface, following a vein of ore… and it almost literally dumped me out into a canyon.

Problem is I can’t tell from this height whether it’s the canyon I was just working in, or a different canyon.

It’s got plenty of falling zombies either way.

Day 292:

I’m still experimenting with the iron ore, by the way. There’s a far distance between iron tools and steel tools, but all I know about steel is that it’s a different composite of iron ore and carbon than straight up iron is. And that means that I have to experiment to get it right.

In a lot of very real ways, this is why I end up making so many tools. One batch of iron will come out strong and solid and the next will be brittle and the pickaxe will snap, and the one after that will be soft and not much use for digging. On average I get about a day or two out of a pickaxe if I spend the whole day digging, and that sounds horrible but considering that before I found the iron ore I was literally making pickaxes out of stone and those were really fragile, I’ll take this.

And I think the diamond-ish ones will be better, but there’s not much diamond and if given the choice between making a harder pickaxe and protecting my brain pan, creating a helmet usually wins.

Day 291:

Still working on tools, because I let my supplies run low.

Part of that is just inertia. I’m mining something like a mile from my workshop, and even though I have a stop-off point with other supplies and a minor repair area roughly halfway between here and there, anything that involves serious work needs to be hauled back to the workshop.

And one does get tired of hauling things, when one doesn’t have self-driving maglev sleds.

Anyway, yes, lots of making tools which I then pile into a box so that I have them, and slowly cart to the halfway point so that they’re closer to me when I need them. And I’m getting to the point where I’ve found enough iron I’m seriously considering making my own railroad tracks.

Wish I’d read enough history to know how.

Day 290:

Decided to take a day off to work on tools, specifically a pickaxe made of diamond.

Or whatever this blue stuff is. I’m sticking with the term diamond because it is by far the hardest substance here, but it’s clearly not actual diamond because diamond is a crystal that fractures, and this stuff is malleable enough to turn into tools.

Anyway, the challenge is that if you don’t have a hammer made of diamond, it takes a lot of strikes from an iron hammer to shape diamond.

So it takes a whole day to make a hammer, and then once I have that hammer it takes about half the day to make a pickaxe, even though the head of the pickaxe is significantly more complex.

And heating this stuff doesn’t do squat, so it’s all cold hammering. Which, I mean, I’m working up enough of a sweat, but it’d be nice to be able to make things a little easier.