The Dark Lord of Crafting

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Captain’s Log: Five days until I visit Erihseht again. Why isn’t there a calendar function to this thing? Immediate versus long-term goals.

Personal Quest Update: Improve Skills

You currently have two skills, Miner and Artisan. Kevin is going to have more skills and they are significantly better than yours. Since you don’t know how to get more skills, improve the ones you have as quickly as possible. Miner progression has stalled on basic materials. Leather is worth a little, and stone is worth a lot as far as advancing it, so focus on collecting stone. Goal? Get Miner to level 20 to see if it unlocks new materials. Test out iron when you get some.

Reward: Metal tools? Ice cream. Also, invent ice cream so you can reward yourself with ice cream.

Personal Quest Update: Kevin

So Kevin is the Dark Lord of Dargoth, and Dargoth is basically Mordor. He’s been chilling for a long time, so either they are going to attack soon and you will have to deal with it and save the lillits or whatever, or when you unlock everything the Survivor System offers you will have to go to Dargoth yourself and deal with him. Capture or kill? Not sure yet. He’s got demons, apparently, so find out more about demons. Having allies is a big deal, so make friends with the locals, including Lord Godwod.

Reward: It’s hard to tell. The goddess gave me one quest, so I’m going to do it. Will success mean I get to stay in this world forever or send me home or lead to her giving me something else to do? Regardless, ice cream party upon completion.

Personal Quest Update: Kill Bill

Evolving monsters are a problem. Keep an eye out for changes in him and the other mobs. Stealing my skin seemed to be the catalyst for making him special, so, uh, don’t let monsters steal your skin anymore. Capture Bill if you can.

Reward: Not getting harassed by a smart zombie.

I’ve always been extremely goal oriented, and I felt better having those goals written out and broken down in a way that made them more manageable. There were too many unknowns involved for me to truly codify what I would need to do about Kevin, but advancing my System had to be the priority from now on. I ate a carrot on my way to the boulder.

Given that I was in the best shape of my life, any life, I decided to run instead of walk. With nothing to compare them to, my ability scores were hard to quantify. What did having a Might score of E mean apart from making me more muscular? My stomach had noticeably flattened, and the weight loss had occurred too quickly to attribute it entirely to my low-carb diet. A handful of vegetables was more than I needed to not feel hungry, but that I was visibly leaner after only a few days in this world suggested that I was burning absurd amounts of calories relative to my intake. Hungry or not, an enhanced physiology appeared to come with a metabolism set to overdrive. I hadn’t seen my abs since I was in my early twenties, and while there was still padding left around my midsection, I felt like they were well on their way to making another appearance.

Jogging was almost too easy. The morning was cool, and I barely felt the weight of my pack and tools aside from how they bounced around as I went. The air smelled clean, though my body odor left something to be desired. I’d put the soap to good use as soon as I got back.

By the time I got to the boulder, I was winded, but not wheezing. There had been periods in my previous life when I’d done a fair bit of running, but cardio had a way of dropping off quickly if you didn’t keep up the habit. Might was definitely a measure of endurance as well as raw strength.

One stone pick could break a hundred stone blocks before it broke itself. While I didn’t have a watch, my rough estimate was that it took about half an hour for me to do that much. Using the worktable I’d left by the boulder to re-equip myself as necessary, I went through five picks in quick succession, and the outcrop was essentially gone. There was still a knuckle of stone sticking up from the ground, but it was no longer something a mob could hide under.

Checking my status screen as I went along, I saw that each harvested block was worth about one point of progress, which meant that the Miner skill had hit level twenty somewhere into the fourth pick. My overall level was also much higher, though it had capped out at fifteen. There was no accompanying notification for either form of advancement.

As far as the overall level went, it looked like harvesting the same materials over and over got me less and less of a reward. I didn’t think fifteen was a hard cap, just that I would have to harvest something new to get past it, whereas the Mining skill was still clipping along a point at a time.

By midday, Miner was up to level twenty-one, and as the sheer number of coins I’d collected was getting hard to manage, so I converted them all to tokens. It was tedious, though also strangely satisfying, to take a hoard of coins and convert them into a more compact stack nine at a time. As they generated in the same material and style, there wasn’t much difference between a coin and a token aside from their size. When nearly all the coins were converted, my System dinged, and I checked the notification screen.

Journal Quests Notifications Materials Crafting

Achievement: Hoarder (2)

You have collected fifty tokens of a single type. How cumbersome. New storage unit unlocked [Medallion]. Why not merge the tokens?

Don’t mind if I do. As the System obviously functioned on a base of nine, I counted out that many tokens, piled them in my palm, and slammed them all down on the worktable at once.

Plep.

The resulting object was the same size as the medallions that appeared when I converted things like tools and furniture, an oversized coin with an intricate design around its border in the style of Celtic knots. I held up the medallion to the light to get a better look at it; the embellishments were as clean and crisp as if they had been freshly minted, if there was a mint that could have worked with granite. It was heavier than it looked, but considering that the object represented eighty-one cubic feet of stone, half a pound was nothing to complain about.

There was still rock left to collect, but I had one more skill to grind and crops to look after, so I jogged back to base. The exercise was enjoyable, rather than exhausting, and after forcing down a beet to quiet my growling stomach, I got to work carving a few more figurines.

The practical applications of the Artisan skill hadn’t presented themselves yet, but the System wouldn’t have given it to me for no reason. Maybe there were tools or equipment that could only be crafted by hand, or it would give me more customization options when it was higher level. There was no way to find out except to improve the skill.

The afternoon went by with a series of carvings. Logs transformed under my knife into seemingly random figures. The process required little thought. I simply let my hands do the work, stopping occasionally to harvest any patch of carrots or beets that matured and replant the seeds. The wheat was nearly ready, though I’d spaced the stalks out more than was necessary, and the cabbages were coming along nicely as well.

Part of the plot had been ruined overnight. The fencing was good enough to keep out shamblers, but there was nothing to prevent them from spawning inside, and at least one had, so I’d had to do some replanting and hoeing to clean it up that morning. I doubted the zombies had any interest in my vegetables, so I was going to leave the gate open during the night from now on.

My first full figurine had been a representation of the goddess, but the new ones were all monsters. I whittled a shambler, a phantom, and hulking creature that I thought of as a troll, though it had a long snout instead of a flat face like the trolls from Lord of the Rings. As I was looking it over, I glanced up to see Gastard riding toward me along the river.

“Hail, hero,” the man said, dismounting as he reached my garden.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

He spent a few moments checking over his horse before untying a bag from the saddle and leaving the animal to munch grass.

“Mayor Boffin sends his regards.” He said, hefting the sack with difficulty. Its sides bulged with hard edges.

“Thanks.” The bag held iron ingots, and I took them over to my work table to count them out. There were eight relatively uniform rectangles, good enough to stack but not nearly as exact as something that I would have crafted. The sides and edges bore evidence of being beaten into shape by a hammer.

Gastard watched me tap one of them with a fresh pick. I kept at it for a minute, with no sign of a change in the metal suggesting that it was going to be converted, before giving up. As I had assumed, my skill wasn’t high enough for me to work with metal yet.

“What are you doing?” He asked.

“Just testing it out. I think I have to work with stone for a while more before I’m ready to craft iron. I really appreciate this, though. Did Boffin say if he needed anything? I’d like more ingots if I can get them.”

“I will tell him,” Gastard said, looking over my garden. “Will you kill more koroshai tonight?”

“I was thinking about it,” I said.

“Then I will stay.”

“Sure, you’re welcome to. I could use the help.” Even with a complete set of leathers, the idea of facing Bill again had been stressing me out. The zombie was better at fighting than I was, but Gastard looked like a guy who knew how to handle his sword. With him backing me up, I was less likely to be overwhelmed, and we could double team Bill when the other mobs were taken care of.

“I was just doing some whittling,” I said. “Do you want a carrot or something? I’ve got plenty.”

“Whittling?” Gastard examined my figurines. His face was always serious, but it grew more so as he picked up the troll.

“You have seen this?” He asked.

“No,” I said. “It just came out of me. Do you know what it is?”

“Koloss.” He spoke the word in a low, hard tone.

“Are they bad?”

He nodded.

“Well, hopefully, we won’t see one anytime soon.”