(Forest Edge, 12:24 Night)

Viron's second day in the new world was, for the most part, uneventful. He broke the copper axe after gathering another stack and a half of wood, then had to make a wood pickaxe to dig down under his house to gather the stone to make a set of stone tools, also finding four iron ore and two copper. He explored the shipwreck he had seen the day before, using the age old trick with doors to breathe underwater, but was disappointed that nothing seemed to be there. No chests full of wonderful loot, or even water creatures. He even had his first run in with a hostile creature, a small, pink cube called a brain slime that latched onto his head and instantly dealt three hearts of damage before it died. The pain had been worse than his migraine, though he didn't have any physical injury from it. After that, he steered well clear of the other two he saw swimming in the ocean.

Finding a small cave on the edge of his pond, he had peaked in and saw several strange ores, as well as a creeper and a skeleton. It was different, almost terrifying, to see these things in reality. The skeleton, he couldn't see much of. Just an enchanted leather hat, and the bleached-white bone of an arm, as he peaked over the edge above it. It hadn't seen him, and didn't react, but he didn't want to go against that bow. A nearby creeper, though, had. Viron immediately sprinted away when it turned to look at him, empty black eyes staring into his soul as the green creature started trying to move toward him, but stuck due to the steepness of the cave. Most terrifying about them was that, like him, they weren't made of blocks, but instead were real creatures. It was terrifying.

Even now, as he sat in his dark house, slowly completing another quest and creating a crafting station, he heard wolves growling as they chased a skeleton right outside his door. The rattling of bones was nerve racking, and he prayed that zombies couldn't break down wooden doors like in hard in the game. Closing his quest book, Viron moved to his furnace and retrieved the iron bars, willing his inventory open. Thinking about JeI, the large list of crafting recipes appeared to the right of the now-familiar inventory box. Moving to the iron saw, he smiled as it only took two iron and three sticks- leaving enough for a shield. Crafting the two items quickly enough, he experimented with the saw and discovered he simply had to craft his planks with the saw in the grid, and it changed the output to what he was familiar with already. That would help him with expanding his home in time. He would need it.

After discovering that JeI was present in the world, Viron began to put together that the world was based somewhat around a series of mods. First, WAILA. Then JeI. If this world was like any pack he had ever played, he knew well that he'd need space, and a lot of it. JeI, which showed every item in the world, how to obtain them, and how to use them, showed seventy items on each page, and had over five hundred pages. Fortunately, finding what he wanted was easy. All he had to do was interact with the little search box on the bottom and think of what he wanted, such as "saw" or "shield." From there, he just had to tap on the item to get the crafting recipe. If he instead held his finger on the item, it would instead show what the item could be used for.

Glancing at the time, Viron sighed. It was around two in the morning from what he could tell. This made the second night without sleep, and he still wasn't tired. At this point, he wasn't sure if he even needed sleep. He had already eaten two of the sandwiches he woke up with, but had plenty of apples and seeds by this point. He had also been drinking, and was relieved to find he still got thirsty. At least that was normal. Thinking over what to do as the night passed, he thought of his quests. The next one was to gather some basic resources, like stone, gravel, sand, and clay. The cobble he could do easily enough at night, but he didn't feel safe going out for the sand and clay in the dark. Sure, he could see just fine, but he didn't want to be snuck up on by a creeper or a skeleton- though, he could see their locations on his minimap just fine, and had several red dots near him as it was.

Of course, he ignored that thought and peaked out his front door. Immediately, he changed his mind when he saw a giant spider turn to look at him, then start swimming across the pond to him. He had to say, they were a lot more terrifying when they weren't made of blocks. Knowing the spider was slow in the water, and not wanting it to wait on his roof until he left in the morning, Viron went out to meet it. Two strikes with his axe later, and he now had two pieces of string. It was weird, seeing it float and spin around six inches off the ground, waiting for him to reach out and grab it. After retrieving the drop, an arrow thudding into the grass a block from him made him retreat into the safety of his home, letting the wolves deal with the skeletons. Hopefully, it'd drop some bones for him to try to tame one.

The next two days were spent this way, running or boating off into the distance before returning home. He acquired some more coal and copper from tiny surface caves, food like blueberry bushes, and some things he knew he would need later, like rubber tree saplings. On the fifth day in this world, though, he found the first thing of significance. Two hundred blocks from his house, also on the coast and situated behind a small hill, was a ruin. Made entirely of stone brick and polished andesite, the building had seen better days. The roof was gone, seemingly collapsed inward- and sparking Viron's fear of gravity for his own house- and littered the floor as stone slabs. And yet, the building almost seemed like it was recently lived in. Some of the slabs looked like they might have been moved to create a small, three by three block hollow big enough to fit someone. Though, judging by the dust, no one had been there recently.

He also learned something important. He didn't have to break everything to move them. Things that he created, and weren't incredibly heavy, he could just move. He couldn't lift his chests if they had too much in them, but his crafting station was easy to move. He figured that would be useful in the future, for quickly rearranging things as he needed more space. However, this led to his first real issue. When he attempted to create an iron axe, he wasn't able to. Looking into it, he found that anything past copper needed an entirely new recipe to make- and God it was complicated. Needing a Blacksmith's Workshop, he also needed an Artisan's Burner, Hammer, and Pliers, seven iron, four sticks, and 1,250 millbuckets, a unit of measurement in this world, of methane. He knew then and there that this would be very, very slow, and he'd need to follow the quests to get there. By the end of the seventh night, he had completed over a dozen quests with the materials he had on hand, but ran into two big issues. The first was he needed more space. Specifically, either outside, or underground. Both had their issues. If it was outside, he ran the risk of skeletons, creepers, zombies, and other monsters. If it was underground, he'd have to spend a large amount of time hollowing out the earth. Eventually, he settled on building above ground. While underground would be much safer, it would take way too much time and energy to dig out the areas that he would need, which would no doubt be sizeable.

The second, and worse, issue was that he needed to go mining. He needed iron, coal, tin, copper, silver, and gold. He'd be able to get the first four by just digging, as he had already run into ore twice that way, but the last two, he'd have to go deeper for. He'd have to go into a cave, which meant risk. Sure, he had a weapon, and a shield, but he had no armor. If he got hurt, he'd take the full force of it, and if he died, he was sure that was it. Hardcore rules, please delete the world. But he had to progress somehow, just sitting around his home wasn't going to help. Viron sighed, "Well, I should probably get my food situation settled first. I've got some seeds from removing grass, and apple tree saplings from that one quest."

Giving a small stretch, Viron moved out of his small house and toward the pond. It would be a good source of water for his crops, so he started out by leveling the ground using a stone shovel. From there, he quickly chopped down a large amount of trees in the area using his stone AIOT, collecting the saplings that were dropped from the leaves. By the end of that little deforestation spree, he already had three stacks of logs, and two stacks of dirt- which fortunately, still stacked to sixty-four inside his inventory. Using that dirt, he replaced most of the sand around the pond, then turned around thirty blocks of dirt into farmland. From there, he used up all of his seeds, planting some rice, raspberries, tomatoes, and cotton. While the last wouldn't be useful for eating, it would still be good for making string, something he figured he would be using a lot of, from the looks of the tools he would need. Finally, he planted two apple trees beside his crops. While it definitely wasn't a lot, and wouldn't solve his food problems permanently, it would help.

By the time he was done, the sun was setting again. Viron made his way into his home, and descended into his tiny mine, hoping to collect some more stone and maybe run into some ores. By the time it turned morning, he had gained another stack of cobblestone, and a small amount of coal and copper. However, the most interesting thing was that he seemed to be on the verge of a cave, one that was small and empty of monsters if his map could be believed. Breaking into it quickly, Viron sighed in relief. The cavern was exactly that- a large, empty dome. No tunnels in or out, and the walls had a few pockets of copper, iron, and either tin or silver- he couldn't tell from here. Thirty minutes later, he had emptied out the cave and made his way back to the surface. Depositing his ores into a chest, Viron peeked outside to see that it was now day- and his apple trees had fully grown, already bearing fruit. It was surprising how quickly the trees had grown, taking just over a day to begin bearing apples. Even by Minecraft's time frame, that was still quick. Leaving home, he made his way toward the other cavern he had spotted before. A glance at his map told him that it was currently empty, so he quickly descended into the cave to try to gather as much as he could before things started to spawn.

While down in the darkness, he learned a few interesting things about the way this world worked. Firstly, if something was out of his physical reach, but still within the reach of the blocks that got highlighted by the outline, he could still break them only by his will. Rather than physically striking the block with his tools, he only had to swing his pick in the air and as long as he was thinking about striking the block, he would succeed. Provided that the block he was destroying was in open air, as soon as it was broken, the floating object would fall down to the ground where he could easily collect it. However, he couldn't pick up items on the ground simply by being near them. He had to physically grab the item, open his inventory, and place the items into it by holding the item to the obviously magical box. With a satisfied nod at gaining a slightly better understanding of the world he now found himself trapped in, Viron busied himself with collecting as much ore as he could from the cavern before anything troubled him.

(Forest Edge, 03:32 Sunrise)

Day broke and Viron returned to the surface without incident. Nothing had spawned, if the monsters did still spawn, and he had collected himself a good supply of ores. Iron, copper, tin, coal, silver, and lapis. He hadn't been able to collect any redstone, or a wide myriad of the other ores he had found such as lead, uranium, or bauxite, but he was satisfied with what he had. When he approached his house, he paused and gave a strange look at his apple trees. Hadn't the apples been grown? The trees were bare. Giving a now-nervous glance around the clearing, he quickly made his way into his home and stored his ores. Leaving his house again, he made his way over to the trees and looked around them.

"Well, the apples aren't going to just fall from the tree, now are they?" Viron said, giving a soft hum. Looking down at the ground, he saw the grass was flattened in a rather large area. It almost looked like something had fallen out of the tree. "Are there actually others here? Not just in this world, but in this area?"

It was an interesting thought. He wasn't foolish enough to think that it was like Minecraft, that he was the only sentient thing in the world. The villagers, of course, were likely intelligent themselves. That did bode the question though, were they able to alter the world like he was? Or did they have to do things the more mundane way? Or were they not even able to do things like that at all, and were left to live in existing houses with no chance to expand? Viron sighed in exasperation, he still had a lot to learn about this world and it would not be quick nor easy.

Leaving the apple trees and returning to his house, Viron returned to his prior work. The next two days passed quickly, working quickly to improve his situation. His stone tools were quickly replaced by copper, both from his own crafting and from quest rewards. Ingots became plates, wood became sawdust, and the Tinkers' Construct workbenches were quickly formed. Clay, sand, and gravel was mined, shaped into grout, and smelted into seared bricks. By the end, the very familiar Foundry sat outside, away from the pond and at a carved-out side of the hill. He had flattened it out and turned the side into a shear wall, placing his Tinkers' Construct equipment against it as well as some copper chests to store his ores. The only downside was it still wasn't usable as he needed at least one bucket of lava, something he hadn't found yet and wasn't sure how he'd even transport the molten liquid inside a metal bucket that conducted heat quite well. However, he had set aside the ores to create brass, so that he could create the tool casts once the smelter was actually running and upgrade to iron that way. And yet, he wasn't done. He continued to work, well after the two days had passed.

The clearing was expanded in size, tearing down trees and even small hills, making room and acquiring dirt to fill in the various pocks in the ground. The farms were expanded, adding rubber trees, more fruit trees, more vegetables and grains, and setting aside more plots for future use. He had been collecting a good amount of infernium, a curious green dust that could be obtained from killing creatures, or mining the ore underground, so he knew that whatever ran for Mystical Agriculture existed in this world, and that it needed an obscene amount of space. Viron figured now would be a good time to get started with the space management rather than waiting until he needed the space and had to replant his farm plots.

And yet, despite the constant work, Viron was sure to return to his home every night. He had yet to truly encounter any kind of monster beyond the one creeper and skeleton he had seen before. Even still, he had yet to truly become tired. Sure, he became physically tired after work, as well as hungry and thirsty in spades, but he hadn't felt the need to sleep since arriving in this world. It was double-edged, though. While the pain he occasionally felt from small accidents made him believe this was real, the sheer absurdity of the situation and the world, as well as the lack of needing sleep, kept him from truly accepting that it was real. As the days passed, he found himself slowly beginning to talk to himself. The isolation was tough when the only sounds were the thudding of wood, the clanging of metal, and the quiet noises of tools being put to use.

By the end of the second week, he found himself becoming more and more anxious with each passing day. He was rushing down the questlines, trying to progress as quickly as possible to tough armor and strong tools. It was a trap he had found himself falling into often when Minecraft had just been a game- the desire to progress as quickly as possible in the most efficient way possible. It was leading him to taking more and more risks, staying out later and delving deeper into caves. Fortunately, the sight of a creeper sprinting at him, as fast as he could sprint, was enough to get it through his thick head that he needed to be slow and safe.

Throughout it all, crops would still occasionally disappear from his farms. Originally thinking some kind of animal was eating them, or trampling them, he threw up some nice willow fences around his farmland to keep wild beasts away. However, Viron quickly realized that maybe he wasn't dealing with just an animal when one day, he returned from the mines to see the gates to his farm wide open. Thinking about it more, it also didn't make sense to be a pig or something, as it had gotten apples out of the tree three meters above his head. Slowly, he began to realize that someone was stealing crops from him, and based on how often things went missing, it was either their only source of food, or he was unintentionally feeding multiple people. To date, nothing had gone missing from inside his home, only the farms outside, so he wasn't too angry and didn't feel the need to try to trap them or chase them down. Instead, he placed a chest near the edge of the forest, and filled it with some basic crops and rice bread. He felt that if the food went missing now, it pretty much proved that whatever was eating his crops was intelligent enough to know what a chest was and to use one.

It was.

Not only was the food in the chest now being taken every couple days, but crops stopped disappearing. He tried a couple times to catch whoever was taking the food, but they were either smart enough to realize when he was waiting for them, or smart enough to track where he was at and wouldn't take the risk whenever he was near home. For the time being, Viron decided to put it out of his mind and instead focus on his home. With all the new materials he was getting, he needed a dedicated storage room, and needed to expand his house to include a kitchen. However, two weeks after arriving in this world, his plans were put on hold when he returned home from a mining trip to find something more important than just bread and fruit had gone missing.