Sol 15
3504 Ti
The move went perfectly, for once. This plain that I've moved up to has lots of extra space to expand out through, so I even went about getting a third unit hooked up. Beta Base now has three times the leg room and, at last, a bed. For once I actually feel like I accomplished something worth doing even if the TerraIndex has been steadily going up more and more.
First things first, I spent Sol 12 getting everything moved up the hill. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me that now that I'm outside of where the water level will be, I should be fine for a while. Especially since I'm in a better position to start expanding my base outwards, so now I can go about getting a fourth unit set up. The only problem is what I'm going to end up doing with it all. Well, that and the Greek alphabet only has 24 letters so once I end up with Omega Base I'll have to figure something else out.
After that Sol 13 was a second expedition to collect up the rest of what I could salvage out of the Cirella-IV. Once I got my hands on some of the aluminum and the fabric I was able to make those agility boots. It took a bit of adapting to get to, but I can move so much more easily now, which will save on calories. I also brought over the other plant seeds, two more lirma and even a shanga seed, along with some more food and some other blueprint chips I could decode.
Sol 14, meanwhile, was much less interesting. I was able to put some solar panels into place, setting up a decent farm to gather energy while I set more drills out. I was also able to drag back a heater from the wreck. Once I got it dusted off and reassembled, it fit perfectly with Beta Base's energy grid and is now happily converting energy into heat.
My bigger focus is these solar panels. The drawback of the turbines is that the air is paper-thin here and I can't wait for the atmosphere to thicken enough to drive them with any decent amount of force. The sun, though, shines with full power every day, and the moment I get the panels assembled they're operating at 100% capacity. But because I can't have nice things, they've got their own problems too. For one thing, this planet is dusty as fuck, so I have to clear off the panels every few days to get the most I can out of them. For another every so often there's a dust storm and the sun gets blocked for as much as a few days. What's worse, the sand is statically-charged, so it sticks to everything, and that means more effort to get the panels cleaned.
Whatever. Right now I'm most looking forward to actually having somewhere decent to rest. I'm sorry Floor, you were real good, but I'm sleeping with Bed now. Hopefully you can understand.
Sol 17
3938 Ti
Dust storm today. I could go out and set up some drills, they're more than capable of withstanding the wind here, but I didn't feel like it. The key thing to remember is that Sentinel just said I could only do things that are pursuant to the further efforts to terraform Steve. Nothing anywhere said that resting wasn't pursuant to that, so here I am sitting at my desk, making this long and studying a spare pot of lirma that I have left over.
Lirma is a very useful thing for terraforming. They cooked this stuff up in a lab 500 years ago and ever since then it's been standard-issue for both Planet Crafters and actual terraforming efforts. They spliced together five different plants to make it, and as a result it sips water while growing like mad.
My issue is that the lirma I've got here is the bullshit version. They have two types of seeds they issue to people doing my job. One of them is the fertile kind that can make more of its own seeds, and the other one is the sterile one that grows but doesn't make seeds. Guess which ones Planet Crafters get. So I'm dependent on finding seeds from any other wrecks in the area, and I'd better hope that one of them is virile.
I haven't gotten around to using the shanga seeds yet. They're better than lirma at producing oxygen, but more importantly they produce flowers. Whenever I manage to get this planet to a point when plants can just grow out and about on the surface, flowers are going to be critical to getting plants spreading around on their own. Plus, if I have some of the right ones they'll grow fruit that I can eat.
Tomorrow I'll make a new vegetube to get these growing. Insects are a long, long way away.
Sol 20
4830 Ti
The air was unusually clear today, so clear that I could see almost all the way to the wreck of the Cirella-IV. But more importantly I could also see the other way. And there's another wreck too, about 50 klicks north of here. Apparently Steve was even more popular than I had thought it was, which is good news for me. Of the five or so Planet Crafters who've succeeded, they most often had wrecks they could salvage on their planets, which gave them the boosts they needed to keep the process going.
So, now I'm planning for the next outing. Once I get a radar array going, I'll get a better handle on my surroundings. There's still resources that I don't have plentiful access to yet, among which the most important is aluminum. Along with that, I only have so much iridium on hand, and if I really want to get things going I'm going to need to find more. If I'm lucky there'll be more on that other ship, but if there's no source of naturally-occurring iridium on this planet I'm doomed when it comes to heating. Either I find a place to collect iridium or I set everything on this planet on fire.
