Sol 32

12693 Ti

Great news! It turns out those big gray rocks are actually giant chunks of aluminum, just sticking right up out of the ground. More aluminum than I'll ever need, too, although only some of it can easily be gathered with a multitool. At some point I'll need a drill to start extracting it, but right now I've finally got a full source of aluminum.

On top of that there was another wreck out here too, albeit a much smaller one, but wrecks are wrecks and right now they're one of my best means of getting resources I don't have easy access to. I'm starting to wonder, though...that makes three wrecks on this planet, and there's probably more. Even finding one wreck on a planet is unusual for a Planet Crafter, much less three, and now I'm seriously wondering if there's some kind of ulterior motive beyond simply having me here to make Steve habitable.

There'll be time for that later, anyways. Right now I was able to gather up a few cubic meters of aluminum, which isn't a lot but which is more than enough to kickstart some more advanced processes than what I've been working with. Plus, it's especially useful for a new upgrade to my exosuit and for a new microchip that'll increase my multitool's mining speed.

Not much else to report beyond that, though, but these giant aluminum spires are definitely asteroids. Speaking of which, there were another few asteroids that came overhead the other day, but they landed a few klicks south of me in that giant basin. I was hoping one of them was another ship. Far be it from me to wish malice on anyone, but I could use some company.

Sol 34

14991 Ti

More great news! I found iridium! After checking out the aluminum hills to the east, I decided to head west and see what that sand was falling from. As near as I can tell, sand blowing off the desert to the northwest collides with the mesa and forms giant piles of sand on top of the cliffs, after which it pours down over the cliff face like a waterfall.

But the important thing, though, is that the sand falling off the cliffs was actually hiding the entrance of a massive cave complex. More than that, there's iridium here. At last, I have the main resources that I'll need to start really kicking this stuff into high gear. Later, anyways. Right now the only thing I can use both for is building heaters. It's all coming together.

There was a giant wall of ice at one end of the cave, though. I could see daylight coming through the other side, though, so clearly there's something else over there. I'll have to get the heat up long enough to actually melt it though, which will be good for when the atmosphere is dense enough to support liquid water on the surface. Quick tangent on that: the state of matter of any given material is defined by a relationship between pressure and temperature. Right now any water that doesn't freeze will immediately boil off. That sounds counterintuitive, but boiling is simply when the energy in a material overcomes the atmospheric pressure. Helium boils at -268.9°C, but no one thinks that's strange because no one sees liquid helium often enough for it to be a concern.

On that topic, right now my heaters are all indoors too. That one's the same principle as the vegetubes. They give off heat, and the living compartment expels excess heat into the environment. That one seems less comprehensible, but "heat" is just the fancy word we give to the amount of movement the molecules of something have. The principles of refrigeration are a millennia old, and the basic idea of moving heat energy is still sound. The only real difference is that right now the compartments are being used as a kind of inverse refrigerator: rather than cooling the inside, I'm trying to heat the outside.

It's not keeping up fast enough, though, because I'm sweating. A normal bodily function, perhaps, but I don't have a water reclaimer in the compartment, just in my exosuit. So every time I sweat in my living compartment, I'm wasting water that just gets filtered out into the environment. And that means water which isn't going towards keeping me alive. This is worrisome.

Sol 35

17840 Ti

I've managed to find a solution to my heating problem. It's extremely simple: just make a new compartment, and move all the heaters out of my base and into a new unit that isn't attached to where I live. It took me all day to manage it, but by the end of it the living compartments had normalize their temperatures all the way back down to their normal 21°C.

Speaking of temperature, right now planet Steve has warmed all the way up to a balmy -80°C, which is enough to kill me slow enough to hurt but quick enough that I can't do anything if something goes seriously wrong. Insofar there haven't been any serious problems, just a minor logistical issue here or there, but that's honestly just me starting to worry exactly what will end up going wrong when it does. The longer things go without screwing up, the more things I put into motion, and the more potential issues can happen and the more cascading problems emerge from there.

I know I sound paranoid but until the environment outside gets to a point that I don't die instantly upon contact with the atmosphere, paranoia will keep me alive. That's ultimately what paranoia is for, keeping us alert and aware of potential threats. The problem is that when we conquered Earth and bent the environment to our will, those problems stopped existing but our minds didn't change. So we just moved the problems inside of our heads, and now we're stuck with threats we can't see or hear but that we can feel.

And right now, I'm looking outside through a window that I managed to get set up with some extra cobalt and a bit of iron to create a strong plasteel, or at least what I hope is a strong plasteel. Every time the wind kicks up I wonder if there'll be a tiny little pebble that hits in just the right way to smash it open and I won't have the time to get my helmet on before I end up freeze-dried.

My head is spinning too much. I need to lie down.