Sol 4

430 Ti

Greetings from Walsh Manor!

Okay, so it's no Versailles. It's an iron-titanium alloy box, two cubic meters, with a small airlock on one end. But hey, I'm no longer homeless.

The blueprint for "Living Compartment" stored away in the multitool is actually a pretty neat bit of work. At first I thought it would just be a box I could put air into, but it turns out there's a lot of things packed into the walls. There's a humidity control system, a thermal regulator, and of course an oxygenator. All that together means that for the first time in four Sols I could take my exosuit off.

I was not prepared for the smell. I'm still not prepared. My suit distills but it doesn't clean.

For everything that Sentinel Corp didn't cheap out on, there's something they did. It turns out that my multitool didn't even have a "Build" function built-in (funny, isn't it?), so I had to fabricate one myself. In the grand sense of things it wasn't too much of a problem. There's enough oxides of silicon and magnesium here to get what I needed. But in the broader sense it tells me a lot about what I'm going to end up needing to do, because they sent the blueprints for the microchips and the equipment but none of the materials to work with.

Hell, the only green thing on this whole planet is a vat of lirma seeds that I have stashed away. They're useful to have in situations like these because they're glorified weeds that will grow almost anywhere, but even they have their limits and this planet is going to kill them if I just put them outside right now.

It dawned on me today the scale of what it is I need to do. There's a whole lot of work to be done before Steve gets anywhere near able to grow plants, let alone have animals and complex biospheres. It's been a little while since I did work in geoengineering for my classes but I dimly remember that plants need water to survive. And there's plenty of water around, it's just useless right now.

Sentinel Corp's message says that I need to raise the planet's heat too. I could do that right now, if I wanted, but there's almost no atmosphere so any water turned to liquid would just boil instantly. The goal first and foremost is to build an atmosphere, which will do a lot of the work for me. The more atmosphere there is, the more the greenhouse effect traps heat from the sun, and the hotter Steve becomes. I can augment it with heaters, but there's another problem. They need iridium. And iridium is rare enough on planets. I didn't find any in this area, no matter how many times I scanned around outside. Iridium is more commonly found on asteroids, but with no way to leave the planet or call them down, I'm just going to have to hope that gravity cares enough to throw a few my way.

Let's think about this. Right now there are only a few things I can build. I've got blueprints for vegetubes to start making oxygen but only one set of seeds. Right now I can only build basic materials, barely enough to kick-start the process. I need to find nitrogen somehow, and then release three times as much of that as I do oxygen. And even just having lirma seeds isn't enough. I need more seeds. If I actually do get to the point that I can spread plants on the surface I need biodiversity, otherwise the whole ecosystem will collapse on itself.

Shit.

Sol 5

580 Ti

It turns out I landed in the middle of a sandstorm. I only figured that out when it stopped and I could see further than about a kilometer. This whole planet is a red wasteland, so the moment I see something blue I have to set out for it. It took me to the edge of my oxygen tank, but lo and behold there was one of those standard-issue storage crates you see every ship. More than that, I opened it up and found a set of prepackaged foods, 5 Sols worth. So that's a miracle in and of itself. On my way back I saw another one to the northwest, but I was running out of oxygen so I had to turn back.

It was around this time that I had to give serious consideration to oxygen. There's only so much that I can accomplish doubling back to Alpha Base every time I go outside. Yes, I'm calling it Alpha Base. Between that and planet Steve, it's fairly obvious that my major wasn't in toponymy.

So I need to get more oxygen. Luckily, I know how. Unluckily I need to get the resources for it, so that's more time spent outside until I can scrape them together. On top of that, I also need to put together the resources for spare oxygen canisters, that'll allow me to run my O2 tanks to their utter limit before I can gas up. The problem there, when I look at the blueprints, is that it requires cobalt.

Now, cobalt is a basic element, and like everything else on Steve it's found all over the place in natural oxides. The problem is:

1. Cobalt is toxic in its raw form.

2. Cobalt oxides are even more toxic.

I feel like I'm on the cutting edge of discovering new ways to die on desert planets.

Sol 6

930 Ti

I feel like I've been failing to mention that the last few days, I've been getting new messages sent down to me from Sentinel Corp. I may have exaggerated the degree to which I was alone, because there's a ship orbiting this planet loaded with sensors that are recording most everything that I'm doing. It's all one-way of course but I can at least feel better about my situation. When I die, I can curse Sentinel with my dying breath and know someone's going to hear me.

What they don't tell me about is when the sky decides to fall on top of me. Remember when I asked gravity to deliver me some asteroids? The Monkey's Paw answered. My shelter is underneath a small rocky outcrop so that offered some protection, but even then it's a hell of a thing to feel a small earthquake whenever a rock the size of a bus smashes into the ground.

The worst part is that they were the wrong kind of asteroids. I got maybe a few cubic centimeters of iridium, not enough for a single heater. But they did have some raw materials that weren't totally oxidized, so it was easier to pick them up. I feel like it's that kind of thing when a guy smacks his girl, but then buys her diamonds to make up for it. Luckily I'm easily flattered by gifts, so Daddy Gravity can hit me all he wants.

The terraforming equipment is coming along well. I have a few drill arrays set out, and a set of wind farms up and running. I also scraped together some materials for a vegetube, and the lirma is growing nicely. It's a very basic plant, I can't even eat it and it doesn't generate a lot of oxygen, but plants are plants and there's officially something growing here. Steve is now the tiniest bit greener.

After the meteors cleared up I was able to make my way to that other crate I saw. More food packages, some raw metals, and interestingly some seeds for an eggplant. I have no way to grow them, but I'd prefer to have them than not. I'll figure it out eventually. Right now I have food for 45 Sols, and I saw another crate a little ways west. Maybe Sentinel decided to have mercy and shower me with some supplies