kirabug's idea files

Day 509:

Not a lot to talk about today until the end of the day. Up to that point, it was dig ore, carry ore, drop ore off, repeat.

Then near the end of the day as I was carrying ore back to my local storage dump, a very tiny baby gelatinous death cube jumped off a cliffside to attack me, missed totally, and splattered itself all over the ground. Instant death, no stabbing needed from me.

I honestly wasn’t sure whether to feel bad for the cute little critter or relieved to know it wouldn’t grow up to be a giant gelatinous death cube. Probably a bit of both. I mean, nobody likes to see baby anythings die.

Well, maybe baby fire ants.

So anyway, covered with slime and confused about the ambiguous cruelty of the universe, I decided to call it a day and haul back to my home base for a bath.

Day 508:

I keep my dried fish in the same pocket of my backpack (knapsack? is that what they used to be called?) as I keep my torches.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve pulled a fish out of my pocket to light for a torch.

Side note: I don’t recommend setting dried fish on fire and using it as a torch. Doesn’t work out. Especially for oily fish.

Day 507:

Yeah, I said I was going to bake something nice for myself today, but I got up to a cold cave and a rainy day. I just wasn’t up to talking myself into more work. (Cooking, when you’re not very good at it, is definitely work. And since nothing here has any precision — no knobs on the stove, and for that matter, no stove — I’m not very good at it.)

(I wasn’t good at it when I had precision instruments either.)

So I headed back to the mine, where I found a lot of lava and some more diamonds. That made me a bit happier. I’m that much closer to warm clothes!

Day 506:

I’ve gotten a lot of material out of these walls and that means wearing through a lot of tools – axes, shovels, torches — that require wood. (It’s a good idea to use wood handles when you don’t have vibration-activated inertial-dampening fiberglass. Wood’s the next best thing for dampening the vibrations from the rock. Plus, not nearly as conductive as, say, iron, which gets kind of warm if you hit a hot rock, and gets kind of sparky if you hit the red rock.)

So I’m heading back to home base for more wood as soon as I haul this haul topside. And maybe some pancakes. My current harvest of wheat should be just about ready, so some flour, eggs, and milk later I might actually have something nice as a treat.

Or more dried fish, I mean that’s always an option.

No, I think I’m going for the pancakes.

Day 505:

Turns out there’s also a waterfall pouring out of the wall next to the lava lake.

That seems to happen a lot here, which is really weird. I would think that water would

• evaporate
• turn into a giant gas ball and explode

both of which should keep it far away from the lava lake.

But apparently I am wrong.

Either way, it’s  bad idea to get caught up in a wave of water that leads to a lava lake, so I’m keeping my distance.