Sol 7

1339 Ti

I was wrong. I'm also not the first person to have landed on Steve.

The third crate was much the same as the first two, but it was next to a ship engine that had clearly come here under duress. The air has been steadily clearing, and now I can see all the way to where said ship landed. It looks like a freighter crashed here, how long ago I'm not sure. Once all the oxygen rusted into the ground there was nothing around to start the process of decaying a wreck like this, so for all I know that ship might have been here for one year or one hundred years. Sentinel didn't tell me anything about this wreck, or really anything about the planet at all, so this is something either they didn't know about or something they wanted me to find.

Maybe that's why they were so insistent on this planet. There's some valuable salvage here, but they wouldn't bother sending a regular salvage crew. No, they send the poor son of a bitch who doesn't have anything better to do but prepare the planet for them. I wouldn't put it past them, they've done stupider shit before. The day before I was arrested there was a news story that talked about how the effort to terraform Giran V was the cover story for trying to salvage the wreck of the Reman, which had crashed there about ten years before. That doesn't sound bad on its own until you learn that the Reman was hauling a metric fuckton of animals poached out of the Sirsa Secunda sector, complete with a manifest implicating Sentinel in the whole thing.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why they were so quick to push me into this job, looking like they were going to crack down on "illicit activity", as if me having to work triple overtime is a motive for accidentally causing a shipwreck. It's easier to send salvage contractors too, Planet Crafting is really more of a net loss for Sentinel until they can get boots on the ground.

That's part of the process. They tell it to you the moment you're sentenced here, that you can't claim value for anything on the planet or even claim anything on the planet. Well, they can say whatever they want but clearly, because I am the only human on this planet, I am the rightful tyrannical ruler of Steve. Even if it's not true nothing's stopping me from saying it. People lie all the time. Here, watch this: I an a trained ornithopter pilot. See? It's easy.

Anyways I could probably reach the wreck if I stocked up on refills for my O2 tanks. I was actually able to craft an improvement to them, it extends my tanks to as much as an hour and 45 minutes. With the refills I could go as far as 10 hours if I carried nothing but oxygen. I'm going to need a bigger inventory pack, and I have a blueprint for that already.

Sol 8

1629 Ti

I got halfway to the shipwreck before I realized that, among other things, Sentinel didn't give me an active microchip to operate the goddamn torch. Why even put the light on the multitool if you're not going to give it the capacity to actually work? How the hell does Sentinel operate anything if they're going to make everything a half-measure and then act like they're bold and innovative?

Anyways, it's not so much a problem even at night, the problem is that the inside of that ship is dark as hell, and if there's anything to be had then nothing's going to happen until I get that light chip. The materials are right around me, so it's not a problem. But I'm not missing an opportunity to complain.

Another problem I'm having is the fact that I only have so much room on my exosuit for materials storage and equipment. I can still upgrade it, but that needs more resources too. I don't think I fully realized just how much I would end up having to do on my own, but then again this is supposed to be a punishment.

Okay, let me think.

Step one is getting all my equipment together. That I can do on my own, and the more that I get prepared ahead of time the easier it'll be for when I scout that wreck. That'll take at least a Sol, and all the resources I need are right around here. I'll need to upgrade the exosuit, and then I can get the light chip installed. I can get a bigger storage pack, too.

After that, step two is scouting the wreck. There's enough in the way of drill arrays right now to where I can just let them run for a while. Fun side effect of all that: the more the drills work, the thicker the atmosphere, the more that my wind turbines can work until I scrape together the resources I need to get solar panels set up.

Wish me luck.

Sol 9

1930 Ti

God my body hurts. I think what I miss more than anything right now is vicodin.

It was a backbreaking but productive day. I have all the materials I need, all the equipment I can fit on my body, five oxygen refills and four liters of water. I even have half a ration saved for a calorie boost. Tomorrow morning at first light, I'm heading out for the wreck.

There's a part of me that really hopes I can manage to figure out a situation for a rover soon enough. I do have a blueprint here for an exoskeleton augment, which will be great for lifting and walking with less effort, but there's only so much the human body can physically do. This is why we invented such simple things as fire, the wheel, and alcohol. It's weird to think that I'm not the first person here, even if accidentally. I'm guessing that wreck has been there for a while. Anyone who survived would have seen my pod drop even through the sandstorm and either come out to see what the disturbance was, or sent up their distress beacons to try and signal for help.

Then again, if someone had survived this planet I would have heard about it. I remember reading about a Warp Gate they were building in the Izitial Prime sector a few years back, but something went wrong and it ended up crashing onto a planet. There's a warp gate now, but they moved it a whole parsec over before they started again. Sentinel Corp has been trying to develop the Izitial Prime sector for years now, but apparently something keeps getting in the way. I'm guessing that they want me to develop this planet so they can have an anchor world for future development.

No rationing for me tonight, a full serving of space slop for dinner. I'm going to need all the calories I can get for tomorrow.