Winner: Workshop
Day 11 - Digging in
Right now you don't have a wealth of equipment, but even what you do have — not to mention the tools and machines you plan on buying just as soon as you have the funds for it — means any workshop you build will need to be much more firmly built up than the storage shed you quite literally just finished is.For that reason you decide that digging down will serve you better for the time benign than building up would. If you can find a spot bedrock, large enough and fairly close to the surface that would be perfect. You won't count on it though. You'll settle for anything with bedrock shallow enough to steady the soil above.
So the day after the shed goes up, you and Natya take a slow circuit around the crater you've set up in with the PalmDiv and scan the ground for a suitable site to put the workshop.
You don't find anything on that first day. Scanners like the one you have aren't meant for prospecting or surveying, they can penetrate the soil just fine but meters and meters of dirt and rock is mostly so much noise. It takes two or three passes sometimes for the two of you to come to consensus on any given spot.
Midway through the second day you come across a location, almost directly opposite the storage shed at a about a distance of a 100 meters from the Prefab and about fifty from the slope of the crater, which after forty-five minutes of scanning both Natya and yourself are prepared to say fits enough of your criteria to work with. You suppose it's possible there's a better spot somewhere else within the crater but it should be good enough.
This is after all only meant to get you started.
By the time the sun is starting to set you have a 5 by 10 meters box marked out on the ground. Roughly half a meter below the topsoil a lip of bedrock protrudes up, which, with some brute force and judicious use of your limited explosive, should allow you to give your workshop a back wall and a bit of a floor. And the debris from shaping the rock should give you enough material to reinforce most of the rest of the floor and walls. It'll mean putting all your heavy machinery to one side of the space, but given that the other choice would be to accept unstable footing or just not use them you'll take it.
Planning it all out is the easy part. Turning that plan into reality is straightforward, but laborious.
It takes almost six days, tens hours a day, of you and Opal-Nine digging out the soils to form the rough outline of the semi-buried structure. Watching the khar dig is nothing like you expected.
For some reason you expected him to use his forelimbs like natural shovels or something. Instead he uses them to steady himself along with his rearmost limbs while he uses middle limbs to grab a shovel and dig. He does this funny sort of shuffle-waddle whenever he moves from one spot to another and never actually seems to be looking directly at where he's digging.
It's strangely unsettling. Like watching a dog walk sideways.
Also once you're a bit deeper, about tw days in he sometimes forgoes the shovel entirely and kicks the dirt up and over the edge of the hole in a wild flurry of activity. Which turns out to be much more efficient than you would have though.
You of course have to make due with the shovel and your own hands, which are thoroughly unsuited to moving dirt in any quantity.
Natya meanwhile is posted up on top of the Prefab, monitoring and guiding the automatic systems for the pilings. It is a slow and annoying process. You can tell because sometimes when you look up from your own back aching labor you spot her glaring fiercely down at the collection of small screens on offer to her.
Owing to her distaste for dirt Nosta keeps your friend company throughout the entire process, avoiding your own company every day until after you've cleaned up from the day's work.
She at least is seeming to get a good lay of the land and learning where the best hunting grounds are. Every couple of days you finish up to find her proudly feasting on her latest kill.
Finally, at last, both your and Natya's tasks are done with.
Which simply means you all have to move on to the next stage of the project. While Natya joins you down in the hole, climbing carefully down the steep slope you cut out where the entrance will eventually go, to begin the hand drilling out holes in the bedrock for the explosives Opal-Nine busies himself by going off to find yet more wood for the roof, supports, and flooring. Even being conservative with your calculations, blasting through all that rock is going to use up almost half of your supplies of explosives. Halfway through your fifth hole you come to the conclusion that you absolutely have to get your hands on some better equipment and materials before you even think about setting up a lab.
Even the most rudimentary laboratory set up you can imagine requires an order of magnitude more reliability than you could provide with what's on hand. Wood and rocks on stabilized soil simply won't do.
No, for the time being you'll make the Prefab your lab and deal with a little extra crampedness. It's not as if you have that much equipment for your lab anyways.
Setting up the explosives takes the better part of a day. You often jump ahead of good sense and dive headfirst into questionable territory, experimentally speaking, but you aren't suicidal or stupid. Growing up in Pravj around miners gave you a healthy respect for the power of explosives, plenty of graves and old, crippled miners drinking themselves and their kids into poverty because some pitboss somewhere didn't want to delay the schedules or pay for simple safety measures.
If you're going to end up in an unmarked grave or blow off a limb or two it's going to be for a good reason; like say because your creation inevitably turns on you or you were meddling with forces better left to immortal minds.
When you finally set off the blast the rocky mostly shatters rather than explodes. Less exciting, but it also still leaves you with something in the way of blasting power, just in case.
From there the work is supremely simple, if no less exhausting for being so. Posts go into holes along the walls, and a couple in the center, rock is gradually shaped by hammer and chisel into something like a smooth plane, and bits of stone are laid into the dirt to create good footing where there was none. Nosta even comes out to observe the work, perching herself on top of the support beams, now that most of the dirtiest portions are over with.
Opal-Nine also shows you how to shape a log into beams and planks with nothing but a hand axe, though he turns out to have a number of woodworking tools on hand as well. At the end of thirteen long days of hard work you finally put the finishing touches on your workshop. It's not pretty and there isn't even a hint of creature comfort to it, but it'll keep your tools dry and give you a little extra room to work once you have something to work on.
Where to start?
[] Building up your base. Specify:
- [] Lab: rudimentary lab for studying anything you find not literally inside your living space. More room to work, better conditions, not in your way. You need better materials and tools. And for those you need money.
[] Explore your surroundings. Might discover something unexpected.
[] Go into 'town' Not yet. You'll need money to buy things.
[] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [] Crashed Spaceship
- [] Broken Fortress
- [] Sword Mausoleum Must first Explore your surroundings
- [] Lonely Tower
- [] Abandoned Base
