kirabug's idea files

Day 529:

I spent some time fishing today. It was partly because I wanted to have more stock in food than just carrots (although with all the beef I have in stock right now you’d think I wasn’t worried) and partly because I needed a day to think.

So think I did.

And the thing I thought about the most is how, now, even my hobbies are utilitarian. Like, there’s no sitting around and watching sitcoms on the vid screen until 2 in the morning anymore. I’m either building something (work), mining something (also work) or fishing or gardening (technically work but so much easier than the first two that it feels like a treat).

There’s no story here unless I write it. No podcast unless it’s me talking to myself. No vidscreen at all. No video games because there’s no screen. The closest I come to a first person shooter is actually shooting things, and to be vomitously honest, I hate every minute of it. I’d much rather shoot electrons than actual things, even if the things are consistently trying to kill me.

And I don’t have time to write fiction, though to be honest I do a lot of telling myself stories. They’ll likely be lost to the ages. It’s not like I have time to write them down. I’m way more interested in making sure there’s food and shelter and the occasional mattress.

I guess, if anything, the mattresses are the place where I really stretch out my creativity. I get fancy with the stitches sometimes or make sure that there’s a ducken outline in the ducken skins I’m stitching together. The birds deserve to be remembered; they deserve to be something fancy.

I might work on dye. There are plenty of flowers around here. It might be nice to have some red thread and some yellow thread in addition to the ducken-gut-colored thread I’m using now.

Day 528:

It turns out that way back when, whenever it was that I last worked my way east at the upper levels, I left a bunch of chambers half-dug and half-developed and thus off my map.

(I refuse to map something that doesn’t have solid borders yet because that way lies madness and many map updates and it’s not like I’ve got a computer here, this is all being done in charcoal and the occasional squid ink.)

So I’m both further ahead than I thought and further behind because the places that I need to connect together so that I can run my new rail system are not connected, but the places below them are connected, so there’s hope.

That was a long way to say I’ve already made more progress than I thought and also I’m tired and my back hurts from hauling rock all day.

Day 527:

I’ve made some new armor out of the diamonds, as one does. I wasn’t comfortable with how quickly my last chest plate fell to pieces so I’ve made a bunch of those… and I’ve also made some better leg protection, some boots (or rather, diamond things that slide over the boots because purely diamond boots wouldn’t bend and that’s not how human feet work, and an extra helmet.

And I had enough left over to make a couple of shovels.

I actually have a lot more diamond, enough to make some pickaxes and maybe even an axe, but the thing is that I’m running low on storage. So I’m trying to use up some of the older armor that’s mostly damaged in my crate.

I mean, if all I’m going to be doing is fighting the occasional skeleton that raids my garden, I don’t really need the good stuff for that… and if the good stuff breaks near home, that’s not exactly a bad thing either.

It’s weird, the pull between not wanting to throw anything out and wanting things to wear out so badly that I can’t fix them.

Day 526:

Every attempt that I’ve made to make carrot cake or carrot soup has failed miserably and I am so very sick of carrots.

I’m also terrified that I’ll get seriously injured and not be able to hunt for a while, and carrots last a really long time in the right conditions, so I keep growing them just in case.

Even the cows are sick of them. The only animals that will eat them are the pigs, who don’t appear too fussy but prefer the carrots over, say, wheat. Probably because they’re pigs and not cows.

I would take literally any other vegetable right now, even boiled brussels sprouts.

Day 525:

Having spent half the day cleaning my cows down to reasonable numbers, I attacked a problem on the southern end of the caverns.

Duckens really like natural sunlight.

Which, I mean, makes sense. All animals pretty much do, except for the things that catch fire the the sun comes up like the zombies and the skeletons — but I’m still not sure they’re animals in the strictest sense.

(Still miss having a xenobiologist around.)

Anyway. Duckens tend to show up everywhere in my caverns, but most of all where the natural light filters in, and this has been okay except that the southern doors are all natural light all the time… so there were about 200 duckens cramming themselves into a 20 meter by 20 meter cavern and that’s just ridiculous.

So I took one of the old swords in the “box of old crap I’ve pulled out of the river” and cleared out duckens until I could get to the door again.

Now I have a lot of feathers and a lot of ducken meat to dry (along with the beef jerky I need to make) and enough ducken skins to make another mattress. Which I might need, if I’m going to make an even-more-western outpost to go up the mountain.

It’s weird to have done all this work to go west only to have the reason to go west show up in my backyard. On the other hand, it puts me back on track and makes me feel a little less guilty about spending all that time mining.

Tomorrow I’m going to work on my gardening and then I’ll build a plan for going east efficiently.