Day 2 - Exploring My New World
Today I decided that my home, while not "home sweet home" yet, was safe enough and built up enough, that I could leave and explore my world a little. I needed to see if there was some sort of primitive society that I could barter for goods with and what types of resources the land held.
I started by climbing over the mountain that I lived under. My portable wrist map showed a small gathering of something just the other side of the top of my mountain, so I carefully investigated.
There appear to be crimson-robed cultists worshipping a totem of sorts. I tried to approach them and they immediately attacked with no warning. I tried to defend myself with my sword, but it couldn't penetrate their armor and I was forced to flee before they injured me. I'll have to find a ranged weapon and come back - I don't want them finding my base and killing me in my sleep. At least I know there are other people on this planet. Hopefully some of them will be nice, or at least neutral.
As I finally cleared the foothills of my mountain, I came across something we would describe as prehistoric back on my home world: Flowers the size of trees! There seemed to be only 2 varieties (red and yellow ones), but they were amazing to look at.
I broke the flowers off of one, but it only left an oily pigment in my hand. They also didn't smell edible, so I think I'll just admire them until I can find a use for them later. There are also tons of oak shrubs and those magical, glittering flowers in this area. I'm going to have to figure out what they're about at some point.
I did find some wildlife as I wandered, too. There were this world's versions of cows, pigs, and chickens, of course, but I found ducks as well! In all of my travels, I've never found ducks outside of home. They are just above endangered status there, but if you were lucky and rich enough, you would be able to enjoy one for a meal one time per year. Here, I found an entire flock so I opted to kill one and take it home for a gourmet meal tonight.
At the very end of my wandering, I did find a village. They seemed to be very docile and not to have much of a verbal language. They are also completely obsessed with emeralds. This village had two large greenhouses, and I found a few crops that I stole to grow back at home. I'll have to see how to get the emeralds to setup trading with these people. Maybe they can even help me defeat the cultists?
Back on the home front, I've setup a series of machines that are able to double the number of ingots I can get from ores without the need for me to bring in lava.
The machines with the chests on top of pretty neat. The first one can enrich my coal with more carbon or my redstone dust and make them worth more somehow, just through the use of energy. Once I've enriched them, I can place them in the two machines on the left and then enrich iron bars into better materials. Behind the machines, I have heat generators that I can feed any flammable item (wood, coal, etc) and they produce RF. I quickly saw that I would need a better means of producing RF, though, as they ate over 600 pieces of coal and still weren't able to finish processing my ores. As much as I'm enjoying the mining here, I can't constantly be hunting for coal so I decided I needed something new. I quickly built a solar panel, then wired it to the top of my mountain. I also built a small battery to store the RF since the solar could only run at night. I forgot to photograph the panel, but you can see the setup here:
Special Bonus!
Now that I'm beginning to travel down the road to technology in this world, I stumbled across something that could change life as I know it. I found a glimmering pond a few hundred yards from my side door, so I decided it would be a good place for some reading and a picnic. For (odd) reasons all my own, I like to put books in picture frames while I read them. So today, as I was eating and reading my framed book, something amazing happened!
The liquid pond literally starting spewing magic into my book. Once the book was filled to capacity, a pink explosion occurred and my Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fan Fiction Anthology was changed into a magic compendium. What kinds of things can I do with this new book? What kinds of power can I wield? What the hell happened in the story where Dawn, Buffy, and Faith all had a sleepover and were starting the topless pillow fight? It was illustrated dammit!!