Survivor: Definitely Not Minecraft

The table was a two-by-two workspace supported by a short column of blocks. It came up to my waist, its surface taken up by what was clearly a crafting grid carved into the birch wood. There were no attached tools, which had always been a purely cosmetic feature in the game, but there was a small crank lever sticking up from its right side.

My System had something to say about this, and yet another tab.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Worktable]

This isn't just any table—it’s a Worktable, the cornerstone of creation, a fundamental fulcrum for your future feats of fabrication. The Worktable is where mere materials metamorphose into magnificent masterpieces.

Alright, that’s enough alliteration. You know how this works. Place the coins into the grid according to the formula of the item you intend to craft before pulling the lever. Incorrect formulas will result in wasted materials. Pulling the lever while the grid is empty will collapse the table for easy storage and transport. You’re welcome.

Thanks, I guess. An image was included with the entry, a simple grid pattern with the coins from my materials log placed according to the recipe for a worktable. I knew the basic tool recipes by heart. The table had a three-by-three grid, just like in the game, and what I wanted now was easy. Stick in the center and bottom center. Three wood blocks to fill up the top left corner.

I pulled the lever.

Plep.

Considering how important this was, the creation of my first tool felt anticlimactic. No flashing lights or trumpets, just a small popping sound.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Wooden Ax]

The ax is a trusty companion in the wilderness, a weapon and a harvesting tool. Wooden tools are the most fragile and least effective of their kind, but it’s your first day. Your tools may be mediocre, but that doesn’t mean you are.

Damage Rating: 7

Attack Speed: Slow

What a pep talk.

Damage Rating? Minecraft had relatively straightforward mechanics for attack and defense. Players had ten hearts as their health bar, and hearts were worth two points each. So an ax would do three and a half hearts worth of damage to an unarmored opponent. But how in the heck did any of that correlate to real life? There was no health bar in my status screen, and health bars in general were completely inappropriate for real world combat. Games with hit points rarely considered where you got hit, other than counting a head shot as a critical. The number could refer to a deeper part of the System I wasn't privy to, in the same way the true meaning of my letter grade attributes was a mystery to me. Still, if all weapons had damage ratings, I could use that to compare them even if I didn't know what the numbers specifically represented.

I’d already used up half of my wood supply, but there were more trees within walking distance. This was a world that had never suffered an industrial revolution, and if I walked far enough, there was forest in every direction. But I didn’t need a forest. There was a thirty-foot ash overhanging the stream not far off.

Felling it was a little tricky, as I had to worry about which direction it would fall, but I made an educated guess and managed not to be crushed to death. A single mature tree was more than enough material to fill out the basic tool set, and using an ax made harvesting feel like lightning speed. It still took a lot longer than it would have in the game, but in real-world terms, I was working as fast as a sawmill.

I made a pick, a shovel, a hoe, and a sword. The System gave me notifications for each of them. They all had lower damage ratings than the ax. Even the sword was only a four, but it had an "average" attack speed instead of slow. It was certainly easier to swing around. Picks were best for mining stone and metal, though a wooden pick wasn’t hard enough for ores. Shovels were the most efficient tool to use for dirt and gravel, and you could use a hoe to start a garden. The sword was a sword.

What I really wanted was pants.

Minecraft avatars came into existence fully dressed, for obvious reasons, as it was a game for children. You crafted armor, not casual wear, because whether or not you were wearing a shirt had no effect on gameplay. In real life, clothing mattered for avoiding hypothermia, as well as common decency.

Grass would not make for an ideal fabric, but I hoped that the System would throw me a bone in this case. It had hewed pretty close to the Minecraft formulas so far, but there was an entire world of materials out there, virtually infinite combinations. Who was to say a grass skirt was out of the question?

Harvesting grass had diminishing returns as far as advancing the Miner skill was concerned. A single patch no longer rewarded me with any progress, though three or four of them would give me a single percentage point increase. Harvesting wood and sticks was more effective, and after processing my second tree, the skill was well into its third rank.

The materials tab in my journal had an entry for every new material I collected, which was how I knew the difference between birch and ash. The entries consisted of the name of the material beside a blue-tinted representation of their corresponding coin, as well as some basic information free from the commentary of whoever was behind the System notifications. Birch was less dense than ash, and had a slightly better heat output, apparently.

I was getting hungry, so I used the hoe. When I tapped it against the ground, the soil shifted into a one foot square section of a garden row. It wasn’t instantaneous. I could actually see the dirt moving as I tapped, and each square foot took about fifteen seconds to terraform properly. Once I had a sizeable path, I threw grass coins at them to see what would happen.

Wherever a coin hit, green shoots sprang up. If I was lucky, at least some of them would mature into wheat in a day or two. It was a ridiculous expectation, as that was not how plants worked at all, but my System hadn’t let me down so far, and in Minecraft, random field grass matured into wheat when you replanted it in tilled dirt.

All of this was interesting, but it didn't get me pants.

I ventured back to the crafting table and started wasting grass coins. As the notification had promised, when I placed a single green coin in the top left corner of the grid and pulled the lever, it vanished, giving me nothing in return. Aside from planting it for wheat, grass didn’t have a meaningful function in the game, so I felt comfortable throwing away some of my resources on an experiment.

Neither the center placement nor the bottom slot rewarded me with a new item, so I filled up the entire board. It was a Hail Mary, as I assumed only an exact formula would work, but what if that wasn’t the case? What if having the right coins in the right places was enough, and only the excess materials would be wasted?

I pulled the lever, resigning nine grass coins to oblivion, and a woven mattress appeared. It hung over the edges on both sides of the table, six feet long and close to three feet wide. The mat was six inches thick, all grass, woven by an expert hand. It was also way more material than the coins it had come from could have possibly contained.

I had not expected that to work.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Grass Mat]

A patchwork of patience and resourcefulness, woven from the very essence of nature. Your Grass Mat is an emblem of survival, a testament to your ability to turn the simplest of resources into something remarkably useful, or at least your willingness to try bad ideas. With this mat, you can rest in the heart of nature, under the stars, rejuvenating for the adventures that await with the break of dawn. Ants not included.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Achievement: Crafty (1)

You have discovered your first nonstandard recipe, keep experimenting and you may discover something useful.

Even entirely apart from the knowledge that the Survivor System included recipes that weren’t in the game, this was a big deal. Beds would reset your spawn point after you slept on them. That golden thought lasted as long as it took me to remember that I wasn’t actually playing a game. If I died here, I died. My soul would go on to whatever journey had been delayed by my being sent to this world. The mat was just a mat.

That being said, I had no other choice but to now continue messing around with grass. I shoved the mat to one side and set about trying other combinations. There were only so many distinct shapes you could make by arranging materials in a three-by-three grid, and the correct arrangement was often evocative of the item it would generate. The recipe for leggings was an upside down U, filling in all the slots except for the center and middle bottom. You could make leggings out of leather, iron, gold, and diamonds. Why not grass?

I laid out the coins, held my breath, and pulled the lever.

The result was not pants.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

[Fish Basket]

The basket weir is a most ancient and noble excuse not to learn how to fish. Placed correctly, this device will entice unwary swimmers into its depths, where they cannot escape. Their silent, gaping terror as they struggle to turn around, trapped by sharp reeds, will add a delectable umami flavor to their meat.

As morbid as it was, this notification was actually helpful, as it made me realize what I was looking at. The trap was almost as long as the grass mat, composed of two wicker cones, one inside of the other. A fish could swim in, but it would have trouble getting out again. I’d seen someone make something like it on the History channel once. The stream was too shallow for the basket to be of any use, but if I could follow it to a river, we would be in business.

By the time I had exhausted my supply of grass, I had discovered only one other new recipe, and it was my favorite by far. The formula for a chest was filling the eight outer slots with wood planks, and while I hadn’t tried making a chest yet, doing the same thing with grass generated a backpack.

Nothing fancy, but the weave was tight enough that coins wouldn’t be able to slip through, and there were a couple of sub-compartments inside. It was more brown than green, so from a distance, it might have been mistaken for a regular pack. It didn’t come with a way to tie the top flap, but with a pair of straps to secure it over my shoulders, I could trust it to keep my resources with me when I went walking about.

The formula tab listed everything I’d made already, complete with a diagram of where the coins had to be placed in the crafting grid. It would definitely come in handy if my System went any further off script as far as recipes went. Still no pants, but a pack was more useful, if less comforting.

It was getting into the afternoon, and I wanted to get a better look around the area before I started working on a shelter. With my pack full of coins, and an ax in my hand, I set off toward a stand of trees about a quarter of a mile from the space I was already beginning to think of as my base. Hopefully, there would be something I could forage around here, as my garden was not an immediate source of sustenance. There was still plenty of daylight when I made it to the trees, but the shade of the canopy made it seem later than it really was. I heard birds calling to each other, and small animals rustling around, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with them even if I was competent enough to catch them, which I wasn’t.

I sing in the car a lot, and being alone out in the woods and in a positive mood had me going through my limited repertoire. If I had been hunting, making so much noise would have been ill advised, but mushrooms or berries, if they existed, would not be spooked. I did "Fly Me to the Moon," and "House of the Rising Sun," and a few snippets of other songs I didn’t know as well. I’m not a trained singer, and as far as I’m concerned, keys are objects you put in doors, but there was no one around to complain about me mangling beloved classics.

The forest was more overgrown than I remembered forests being, with nearly every step requiring me to step over or around something rough or pointy. There was a thick coat of fallen leaves, enough to make the process just bearable for my unprotected feet. Fortunately, I found a blackberry bush soon after I began tromping through the underbrush, and most of the berries looked perfectly edible.

There had been blackberries near my house when I was a kid. They grew in the summer, and I assumed seasons worked the same way on Plana as they had on Earth.. I avoided the ones that looked like they had already been nibbled, and after collecting a few handfuls, realized I was being stupid.

After harvesting the bush, I ended up with four blackberry coins, with each coin translating to about a cup of berries. That would take care of storage for fruits, at least, assuming I could do that same thing for apples and pears if I ever found any.

It wouldn’t make for a balanced diet, but that I’d found anything was an incredible stroke of good fortune. Not wanting to push my luck, I headed back to my arbitrarily chosen campsite before I could get myself lost. The sun was my guide, and that was about as deep as my survival skills went. I ate some blackberries on the way.

After felling a couple more trees, my ax was showing serious signs of wear. The edge was chipped and blunted. It wasn’t like I was actually hitting anything with it, but the use of Miner clearly had a cost in terms of durability for my tools.

The blocks and logs I dropped on the ground weren’t stuck in space like they would have been in the game. Overall, that was a good thing, but it called into question how I was going to build anything solid out of them without learning joinery.

Wood blocks were too heavy to play with, so I set out a few logs and went about trying to stack them. They were round and smooth, so they rolled right off of each other. But their ends were perfectly flat, and they balanced when I put one on top of the other vertically, though they didn't stick together.

“Alright,” I said, setting up another log in the clear patch of dirt in front of my worktable, “how about now?”

Instead of trying to stack a second log, I took a log coin and bounced it against the flat top of the first one like I was playing Pogs.

Plep.

And there it was, my deliverance, a double stacked log. I put both my hands around the top section and lifted. They stayed together. There was a visible seam where the two objects met, but it was very fine. How strong was the connection? Raising the wood over my head, I slammed it into the earth like I was swinging a sledgehammer.

The impact jarred my hands, and the bark scraped some of the skin off of my palms, but the logs remained sealed together. I made an entry in my journal.

"Captain’s Log: I am a stranger in a strange land. The rules of physics are not universally applicable, or else operating as a subset of some higher formulation of laws. Matter can shrink or expand without an apparent change in composition. Gravity is sometimes ignored, and materials can be affixed in place without any physical bonding agent as an intermediary. TLDR: The crafting force sticks things together when you pog them."

To make a frame for my shelter, I dug a couple of feet down and stacked logs up for poles. When I tossed a dirt coin into the holes with the logs, the soil filled in around the pole and kept them upright. By volume, planks would be more efficient than blocks or logs for filling in the walls, but no matter how I threw them, the resulting plank would not stick to the round sides of the log. They would, however, affix themselves to the flat tops.

The first time I did this, I ended up with a vertical plank sticking up from the top of the log post, which was not helpful. The force that held them together was strong enough that I couldn’t even loosen the seal with my hands, but I could harvest the plank like any other material and it popped right back into coin form.

After several attempts, I found that if I hit the end of the log right on its edge, the plank would appear placed horizontally, though it wouldn’t convert at all if I was standing in the way of where it wanted to come into existence. The planks would bond either on their ends or their edges, and I had to be careful about where I placed the coin, or they wouldn’t line up. There appeared to be three viable positions for affixing planks edge to edge; even center, off left and off right.

To make the placement easier, I tried slapping the coin against the desired area instead of throwing. It worked, and my hand jumped back as the new plank appeared. So it was that my shelter had a roof before it had walls.

Structures in Minecraft were comically undersized if you considered what they would look like in real life. Houses that were generated in villages were often a single cramped room, half filled up by a chest and a bed. Real life construction took a lot of material, and though my shelter wasn’t intended to be luxurious by any means, I ran out of blocks by the time I had finished filling in two walls.

I had myself a tiny tunnel, a little longer than the grass mat, with only about a foot of space on either side to the walls when I laid it out. Dusk was painting the world in hues of orange and purple, casting long shadows across the landscape. The forest was looking more ominous than it had in full daylight. I had seen no signs of predators, or any megafauna, for that matter, so I would probably be safe for one night. It wasn’t like I had any fresh meat hanging around to attract nocturnal scavengers. For one day, I felt like I’d gotten a lot done.

The grass in my garden patch had already grown to full height, and some patches I’d harvested earlier in the area were sprouting up as well. That was not natural. It looked like having Minecraft adjacent powers extended to improving the growth rates of surrounding plants, which would be wildly convenient if I ended up being alone for a while.

As the sun continued to fall, my thoughts drifted to zombies. In the game, monsters spawn around the player in any area below a certain light level. At night, that meant everywhere that wasn’t lit up by a torch. But those monsters were an aspect of the game world, not a player ability. There was no reason to assume monsters would randomly come into existence here. If Plana suffered from that kind of mechanic, it would be hard to imagine how people could live here at all, let alone develop a functioning civilization. This was a standard fantasy world, I assured myself. No monsters had popped up while I was roaming around during the day, which suggested there either weren’t a lot of random encounters in this world, or I was in a relatively comfy beginner zone. There was no reason to assume that would change just because the sun went down. There weren’t any more standalone trees close to my shelter, so I would leave off gathering more wood to complete it until morning. It wasn’t like the System, or Mizu, had given me any kind of hint that I should be prepared to fight for my life every night.

A light breeze caused me to shiver as I watched the grasses sway in the plain before me. Their tips caught the fading sunlight as the edge of the world passed through the bright hues of evening, orange and gold and pink dying out into purples and grays. It was a beautiful sunset, and a sense of peace descended on me as I watched the first stars appear. A new life, a new world, and the barest possibility that I might not screw this one up.

The sun fell away, and my System dinged.