kirabug's idea files

Day 826:

I spent the day ranching like a rancher. I cleaned up the field a bit, butchered a couple of pigs (the population in there’s getting a little high) and sheared some of the sheep to make carpet for the cold cave floors.

I also harvested some pumpkins and started roasting them to make pie. Roasting pumpkin is hard because the heat source has to be putting out a consistent heat if you don’t want the meat burned, but wood and even coal aren’t particularly prone to consistency. So in reality I spent most of the time fussing over my fire and the rest of the time ranching and shearing.

Oh! I forgot to mention that yesterday on the way home I caught the other skeleton horse! So now I have two skeleton horses, four angry pig men, and lots of sheep, cows, and pigs.

And yes it probably is rude of me to call them pig men, but their skin is the same color as my pigs, they grunt like pigs, and they have little pig ears. Plus, after the weird thunderstorm four of my pigs had disappeared but four pig men complete with swords and armor were in my pond.

I’m not saying one caused the other but I live in a place with real zombies and undead skeletons so I’m no longer the queen of skepticism either.

Day 825:

I’m back at home base because I ran out of tools to the east and I’m not finding diamonds fast enough at night to keep the tools in good condition. (I have a small store of them back home.) It was also a good chance to make sure that all my animals were safe and healthy, and that my crops are still growing.

And to pack up some chicken jerky to take with me because the potatoes I took last time are getting kind of old and I don’t just mean boring.

Here’s a picture of the top part of my ranch bit.

You might notice that there are strange pig-like men with half their face missing in the bottom of my pond. One night we had a horrible thunderstorm and the next morning I found them living in my pond. They don’t seem to need air? They just stand down there? They do seem to know what they’re doing with the swords, though, so I’m just at a live-and-let-live stage  with them.

Day 824:

So I think I mentioned that there were at least two more skeleton horses roaming the woods at the base of the mountain.

I managed to catch one of them today. I thought of using it as a mount, it seems like a nice enough horse, but there are so many murderers around right now that I don’t want to lose this one again as fast as I lost the last one. (That loss still stings a bit.)

Instead, I’ve put the horse in my ranch area paddock meadow field thing. It has the creepiest neigh.

Once I figure out what (if anything) I can do about these murderers, I’ll start using my horse more. The horse is definitely easier (especially overground) to use for travel than the mine carts underground are.  For one thing, it’s hard to steer a mine cart around a zombie if there’s no track available.

It was a beautiful sunset tonight, so I took a picture of it.

Day 823:

Back up at the northern end of the mountains today. It’s not as cold here because there’s no snow, but there are apparently still mountain springs.

That’s right, I found another half-underground pond.

I will never have dry socks again I swear.

Day 822:

Spent the day down in the southern end mining to bring the mountain down. Most of the time it’s all stone, which I turn into rubble and haul away to use as fill. (I’ve discovered that it makes great fill when I hit bedrock because I can’t dig up bedrock and this way I’m not trying to walk around on a wildly uneven surface.)

(Hauling rock underground instead of out of the ground is a bit odd, I’ll say that much.)

Anyway, most of the time it’s stone but every once in a while I hit a coal seam and get to take something out of the ground that’s actually useful. I’ve been veery careful to try to keep my coal-burning activities limited to places with great ventilation (even if they’re underground) because I know ultimately the smoke from this stuff will kill me. Ultimately, not having a source of fire right now will kill me faster.