The Dark Lord of Crafting

I picked a pleasant-looking spot beside Wiskywend and dug out a basement before dropping my workbench. Unlike the trickling stream, being beside a real river provided me with a new potential food source. So it was with a sense of excitement that I planted a log at the edge of the river and tied off a fish basket with rope, weighing it down with a few loose rocks before tossing it into the water. It needed bait, but all of my crafted tools so far had been supernaturally effective, so hopefully that would carry over to this trap as well.

There were a few hickory trees nearby, and hickories had been my only source of nuts so far. I hit them first, and rather than saving the nuts for a meal, replanted them. Given the effect my presence had on grass and mushrooms, I was hoping it would lead to a tree farm in short order. Not that there was any shortage of trees, but the majority hadn’t rewarded me with anything edible, so being able to farm the hickory would be a major win if it worked. I spread the seeds out to be sure they would have room to grow, and as there were a couple of pines in the way, I chopped them down as well.

My System dinged.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Hello, busy beaver. Your Miner skill has increased to ten. New resource unlocked. Rock on.

That was enough to get me to drop what I was doing and rush back to my shelter. Digging out the basement had uncovered a trove of small stones, but so far, I had been unable to incorporate any rocks into my crafting.

It was mostly pebbles, which I had piled into a corner, but I had a few larger examples as well. Swatting them with my hand did nothing other than irritate the skin on the side of my palm, so I jumped to trying a wooden pick. The effect was almost immediate. Tiny cracks began appearing in the rock as I tapped away, slowly spreading until it looked like it could shatter at any moment.

Then it popped.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Granite Shard]

Use it for crafting stylish Granite Blocks, then build back better. The world is your construction site. What's next, O Master of Minerals?

The rock was worth one coin, but the pebbles didn’t get me anything. When I tried to harvest them with the pick, they quickly cracked through, and subsequently exploded into dust. It was the same as with the grass. If there wasn’t enough material to harvest a coin, what there was would just be ruined.

Altogether, there were nearly twenty samples large enough to count as [Granite Shard]s, so I collected them all and took them over to the workbench. There were several fragmented materials in Maincraft that could combine into blocks; copper, gold, and prismarine shards, among others. I filled all nine slots in the crafting grid with my new coins, pulled the lever, and it rewarded me with a [Granite Block].

It was one cubic foot of stone, but the table didn’t show any sign of strain at having to hold its weight. Its sides were smooth to the touch, and its edges were crisp. Mining it took longer than the shards had, but the resulting coin looked about the same. Grey, hard, and stamped with a square.

My pick was looking worse for wear. It was chipped and splintering, and its nose was dull. Clearly, wooden tools were not designed for breaking rocks. As the only tool that could be crafted with a single block was a shovel, I placed two sticks in the bottom center of the grid, topped them with the granite, and pulled the lever.

It did not give me a shovel.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Stone Hoe]

Tougher than your average hoe. Stone tools will last longer and be less likely to break when used improperly.

Damage Rating: 2

Speed: Average

There was some logic to this. The head of a shovel contained more material than the head of hoe, and it was interesting to see that the System had made adjustments to the recipes. In my formula log, there was now an addition to the hoe entry to include the new combination, though the wooden version remained unchanged.

It looked exactly like the original, except for the granite blade, and it was ten pounds heavier. A hoe was not what I would have asked for to be my first stone tool, but as I was planning on starting a farm, it was no cause for complaint either. The tools worked best when they were being used for their intended purpose, but anything could be a weapon. The edge certainly looked sharp enough to cave in a shambler skull if it came to that. Though the damage rating suggested otherwise, I couldn't imagine how something so heavy and sharp could not be an improvement on a wooden ax.

Planks stacked in any direction, even totally horizontally, with no need for support, held together by the crafting force. There was surely a limit to that somewhere, but I hadn’t found it yet. It was super cool and super in defiance of all rational physics, and considering everything else that had happened, a minor note. I covered the basement with what ended up looking like a wooden trailer, including a short hall to go over the stairs leading down.

With plenty of time and trees to work with, I was ready to mess with fences. I arranged the basement in such a way that when my coffin was in place, there wouldn’t be enough room for a shambler to spawn anywhere outside of the cells I cut into the earth along the walls. To this end, I employed a maze of fences and gates. It seemed like the mobs needed a five-foot cube of unencumbered space to come into existence, but this would serve as an experiment to see if a taller but thinner area would also do, or a triangular one.

The fence arrangement would theoretically keep me safe to harvest my way out of my sleep box and stab the monsters that appeared in my cages overnight, even if the fire went out. Should I use zombie meat as bait for the fish trap? Probably not. Just farming them for leather was weird enough. What would Esmelda or the mayor think about my cells?

My intentions toward the town and its inhabitants were entirely legitimate. I wanted supplies to expand my crafting capabilities, and also, I was just lonely. It wasn’t like I was going to trap the little folk in cages and poke them full of holes. Human leather would be too thin. My primary worry was that they would send someone to monitor me who could fall prey to the mobs, but after my bro night with Gastard, the townsfolk had to be aware of how dangerous it was to be around me, even when the sun was up.

The shambler that had attacked me that morning was still on my mind.

Mobs that weren’t exposed to sunlight didn’t despawn when the sun came up. It was a helpful mechanic from the perspective of the horror farming sim that had become my life. I could corral monsters for their material, but the threat it posed outweighed that convenience. There were probably dark places near my original base camp teeming with space zombies that had come into existence because of me, either underground or amidst dense foliage. I was still miles from Erihseht, I assumed, and the distance would hopefully keep the villagers from being at immediate risk. How reality-bending, or reality-weakening, could my mere presence be?

Once upon a time, I spent a year in solitary confinement. It’s a weird thing to explain because it’s not easily relatable. Anyone can relate to an emotion like grief. Death, heartbreak, and illness are among a laundry list of hardships that are universal to the human experience. Living in a bathroom surrounded by other people who are also living in bathrooms is not a normal step in the walk of life.

During the COVID lockdowns, people talked about that like it was the same as being in prison, but it wasn’t. The closest thing I can think of is NEET culture, specifically the hikikomori in Japan, a phenomenon where people live in their rooms, usually at their parent’s expense. They may have agoraphobia, PTSD, or some other unaddressed issue. The similarity comes to mind because I could have left solitary after a few weeks, but when they came to release me back into the general population, I refused.

Those refusals were the only institutional charges on my record out of nearly thirteen years of imprisonment. The specific name of the charge was something like "refusing a direct order," because they would tell me to leave and I wouldn’t. The administration put me back there because I’d been in a fight, and it was such an immense relief to finally be alone that I had wondered why I hadn’t ever thought of getting myself into restricted housing before then. There was other stuff going on with me, untreated mental illness, and an unhealthy environment, and I got more and more paranoid the longer I was back there. Eventually, something just flipped, and I wanted to get out, but it took me a long time to make that decision.

This is a long way of saying that I’m not averse to being alone for a while, but that doesn’t mean I like it. People can try to convince themselves that they are better off alone, I certainly did, but they aren’t. If I was going to have a new life in a new world, there needed to be a way for me to live around other human beings without putting them in constant danger by merely existing.

Once the shelter was ready and a fire was burning, I sat down on top of my coffin, surrounded by tools. I’d put telescoped windows around the ground level of the shelter, with ladders to climb up to them. I was staying up to see if the special zombie returned after being burned by the sun.

To pass the time, I whittled. I was no stranger to arts and crafts, mostly painting and drawing. Guys in prison would pay me in commissary to do portraits of their families to send home. But I’d never tried something like this.

The crafting process hardened tools sufficiently that the dagger may as well have had a metal blade. Wood shavings flaked off around me as I quickly got into a flow. Despite my inexperience, my hands seemed to know exactly what they were doing. I smelled the wood, fresh and faintly sweet, and felt the grain under my fingers. It was almost like a road map.

After half an hour, I had something approximating a snake. It wasn’t a shape I had planned out, but it had come together like I was following instructions as I worked. Soon I was nicking a scale pattern along its sides and detailing the eyes. It felt as natural as if I had been doing it for years.

Ding.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Achievement: Artisan (1)

New skill unlocked: [Artisan]

Being a crafter is more than combining coins. Giving your creations a distinctive flair requires both effort and artistry. Keep practicing, and one day, you might make something to be proud of.

Was this even a real System, or was it just making things up as I went along? Where was the mentor figure who could guide me on the path of being a Survivor, only to die in a heartbreaking moment of crisis in the second act?

Regardless, the snake was neat, and whittling would give me a hobby while I was alone. As soon as I heard the first moan from outside, I started checking the windows. The zombies were all normal so far, but a new voice had been added to their ethereal chorus.

It started with a wail, somewhere between the screech of a bird and a human scream. Then something thumped on the roof. It scrambled across the planks for a moment, then either went still or jumped off. I had no interest in making another hole to see what it was.

As I continued to cycle around the windows, more wails, thumps, and swooshes followed, and I thought of phantoms.

In Maincraft, if a player goes a few days without sleeping, a flying mob will begin spawning to harass them. My sleep schedule had been irregular, but I hadn’t been going completely without it. Maybe the change in location, or the duration I’d been in Plana, was opening the door for new spawns. It was also possible that whatever was attacking my shelter was a native creature, but that was less likely. A natural animal would have no incentive to attack a house that was already surrounded by zombies.

One of the new monsters did a flyby past a window. I didn’t get a good look at it, but it gave me the impression of a manta ray. Definitely a phantom.

This was a bigger issue than the zombies. A flying mob could cover a lot more ground in a night, or roost in an area sunlight wouldn’t touch. The little folk needed to be warned, and I might have to move back to my original base to give them a larger buffer zone. That sucked. I had been looking forward to having fish outside my door.

I was preparing to lock myself into the coffin for the night when I heard someone laugh. It was a scratchy, high-pitched sound that made the hair on my arms stand on end. I rushed back to the window, and there he was.

The zombie was standing up straight, and he had the broken stick in his hand with a pointed end. He was circling the shelter, and though he was still the same fleshy humanoid that I knew and loved, he could no longer be described as a shambler. Dude looked like he had been doing some physical therapy.

The zombies didn’t just come back every night; they evolved. It looked like the catalyst for that was stealing my skin. Sunlight had banished, but not destroyed him. I couldn’t just think of this thing as the special zombie anymore. He needed a name. Given the circumstances, it wasn’t too hard to think of one. I hadn’t seen Silence of the Lambs since I was a teenager, but it had certainly left an impression.

“Goodnight, Bill,” I said. Either I needed to figure out a way to kill him in a manner he couldn’t recover from, or trap him, but not tonight. Not with a new mob swooping around outside, and only one stone tool to my name. But soon.

"Captain’s Log: Quest Update. Kill Bill."