With the black quartz I'm able to make generators that run nicely on charcoal. Sure I could just feed them with logs, but it's easy enough to make the charcoal, and designing this machine was good practice. I've got them paired up, two each, with wireless RF, now I can get power into anything, anywhere. Not much power, but better then dealing with cables.
Next thing I'm experimenting with is the reconstructor. I've already been exposing materials to the resonating device, this gives me another way to modify materials. So far very few respond to this, but I think there's a few more that I can change, I just don't have access to them yet.
With power, grinders, and furnaces I can now update my structure. What filled the edge of two platforms and reached far into the sky, now sits as a nice, compact, almost tame section of wall. With the transposers to move things quickly, and the flat nodes for places where they can move slowly, I've started to build quite a stockpile of materials. Each of these pulled out from the system as needed, processed, and then delivered right into a drawer. I'm quite pleased.
Next up. Water. Sure, I could just take some ice from the portal. Change it back and let it melt. It don't seem right though. Test said to start with the barrels, didn't say I should take apart the portal. So while I could do this, I won't.
Instead I've built a squeezer and put the logs into it and left it to fill a tank. Sure I really only need to squeeze down 8 or so to get my 2 buckets of water to start off, but it's easy enough to just forget about this and let it run a while, making sure there's a large stockpile, just because disaster sometimes happens.
With unlimited water I've got a better source for gridpower, not just the windmills, but now a nice block of watermills. This is enough of them to trigger a bit of a lossy generation but as I've got the space I might as well do a block of them like this. When the wind is strong redcoal gets a nice solid bonus.
Water water everywhere. No squid though. Still if I had string I could fish. Just have to try to get that string then, won't I? Should be simple enough, right? I've got water. Water is an aspect of change.
First the water and sticks. It's not quite a sapling, not even quite a dead bush, but close enough for sympathetic magics. Infuse again, and a tiny spark of life can find itself here in this world. A sapling. The first living thing other then myself in this world. Combine a few of them, strip the leaves, and gather the leaves together. Gather more and more leaves together and there's enough for a compost.
Compost, gravel, run water through it and there's a tiny bit of that life transferred into the water. As it is that's nothing that I can use as it is, but it can be further transformed. That seems to be the nature of the work I've been given here. Find a resource, transform the resource, discover how it becomes a new resource.
Distilling the water with the tiny bit of life essence in it, the result is a disappointing amount of muddy water. The good news is that the compost lasts a while the water of life will slowly add up by processing more of the gravel. Not everything in it is what I want, but there is some there.
In the end I've got to take more gravel and add the dirt to it. Truth is I do this any time I'm making course dirt and processing that to get more usable earth. First time I've seen it in this form though.
I've not used this before, but grout works here, though without the clay in it. I cook it down, make the bricks, and then form the lava powered smeltery. In this case I toss the dirt right back into it, melt it down and pour it over more gravel. Making more dirt, that I melt down, until I've gotten enough to please me.
Dirt. Sapling. Time.
Tree. Wood. Leaves. Saplings.
Growing things, a bit strange in a void like this where there was not even a tree to start, but this is the way of things here.
All those leaves and saplings, turn them into compost, and then spread the life from them back into the soil. That produces the first of my blocks of grass. Though I could wait for it to spread, I can also make a few more and let them spread all at once. So just a matter of letting it start while I progress.
The grass is nice, it's one of the things required for the goal, but it wasn't why I was making saplings. These saplings can be transformed into vines that grow and spread as an endless resource.
Those vines can be processed further and I from the strands of them string harvested. With that string a fishing rod. With the spell of sustenance cast here I don't need to eat, so the fish are just another resource, but a useful one.
Cooked fish, left to dry on the rack, will eventually cure into a makeshift leather. Enough to wrap the hilt of a small blade. From the sea I expect I could pull more rods, some rather useless scrap armor, perhaps some enchanted books? I don't see much reason to automate fishing, though perhaps I could. I'll think about it.
More of my fish that I caught, with the blade, turns them into biomash. Now this has a few uses if I wanted to produce some exotic crops, but I don't have everything I need for them, and even if I did, I don't see the reason to have them. I'll return here.
I'd made the composting frame earlier, as soon as I could, and the biomash composts into neatly measurable packets of material. Crops don't respond as well to it as bonemeal, but as I don't yet have any crops growing, I'm okay with this.
To get the bonemeal, just had to combine compost with peat. Taken to the field of grass I've been growing for a while, and now I've got all the grass. All the flowers, and so many kinds of crop. It's a small nice pretty thing in this nowhere land.
