Sol 58

83205 Ti

Okay, it's a brand new day. I just set back off from Ikhlas' Base towards Zeta Base and made my way here, nothing big to report. But I did look at the way that the sand was blowing. It goes almost directly southeast, and blows up against the wall of a big mesa. I have to imagine that some of it is blown up onto the top, especially the lighter material, and that must be what's causing the cascade of sand over the entry to the iridium cave. It's a shame, because if I finish up the process of terraforming this planet the sand might get tamped down by plant growth and stop being blown around that way.

Anyways, tomorrow is going to be spent digging through the Harinth for useful salvage. If Ikhlas survived, and potentially other people did too for a time at least, then there should be some more useful things I can get out of there. If I'm especially lucky I might be able to harvest a transmitter and figure out how to rig it up. Not that it'd be of any use if I could. Planet Crafters aren't allowed to send communications, only receive them when Sentinel says they can, and if I did they'll just abandon me and shut down my multitool.

God, I wish that there was an easier way to do this.

Sol 59

94048 Ti

The wind picked up today and made trying to travel a nightmare. I set up Zeta Base only 50 m from the wreck of the Harinth and yet by the time I woke up the sand had been whipped up so badly I couldn't see it at all. No dumpster diving today, so I was forced to just sit around and wait. I may as well do something, so now's a great time to sit back and evaluate everything I've had to deal with so far.

I've managed to avoid dying three times, and the sum total is that I'm rapidly coming up on a TerraIndex of 100,000. I'm already more than halfway to blue skies, the point at which there's enough nitrogen in the atmosphere to diffuse light to appear blue. It'll be far from breathable, though, but it'll at least be the first visual cue that I'm actually accomplishing what I've been put here to do.

I really don't get the way they structure the "progress" in this. I get they're gamifying the process to try and make it more bearable, but it's still more patronizing than anything else. The dumb thing is that when I look at the progress metrics, a fully breathable atmosphere comes long after I start setting insects out into the environment. That seems dumb but a lot of these insects are specifically engineered to be able to survive in these kinds of environments.

Whatever the case may be, it's irrelevant unless I can actually get there. Too many things to go wrong in the interim. At this point, though, actually talking about all the things I've been doing to terraform isn't really worth doing. By now it's just an extremely routine process: throw down some drills, build some heaters, put up some vegetubes. It's all extremely routine at this point and I feel like just constantly saying it over and over again is going to drive me fucking insane.

Sol 60

100 kTi

The wind died down, so it was time to go dumpster-diving on the Harinth again. It's a lot bigger than the Cirella-IV or that one near to Beta Base, so it's a lot easier to get lost in there. But there's a lot of useful stuff to be pulled out, especially uranium. That seems bad, but bear in mind that until it's refined uranium is okay to be around in small amounts, and lucky for me this is all unprocessed and unrefined uranium. Plus, one thing I can say about this exosuit is that it does a good job shielding me from radiation, otherwise I might have died of acute radiation sickness just being on this planet without a magnetosphere.

Damn, a magnetosphere. That's something that I'm never gonna be able to make on my own no matter how much I try. The best way I could go about it would be to try and artificially shield it from above, but God only knows when I'll be able to do that. I know that the few Planet Crafters who've succeeded at what I'm trying to do were able to do it, once Sentinel saw fit to give them the chance to, but until that time I'm just sitting here wondering what the hell I'm going to do in the interim.

I do have some reason to be hopeful, though. Today I crossed the threshold of a 100,000 on the TerraIndex,

Sol 62

101 kTi

I refuse to die here. I spent half of the morning trying to work out a glitch with the multitool. It took like 10 minutes, and all it took was just turning it off and on again. Same as it almost always is. But in that time I spent a good 9 of those minutes panicking, which I'm not supposed to do.

It's difficult to imagine doing all of this without a multitool. With this thing, if I have the right materials I can throw down an entire mini-base that I can survive in almost indefinitely in the space of about ten minutes. Without it, it'd take days, weeks even. And that's assuming I knew what I was doing.

But even if I did lose my multitool, I'm not going to let myself die here. Even if it malfunctioned and shut down, or if Sentinel shut it off for me and just left me here to die, I'm not going to let that stop me. It'll take a lot longer without some more advanced equipment, but the process is already underway. I can wait it out. There's eventually going to be a point when I can walk outside and take my helmet off without dying.

I'm not going to die here.

Sol 64 (1)

102 kTi

I don't think there's anything left that's worth salvaging on the Harinth now. It's time to pack up and head out. Unfortunately, I can't carry it all with me. It would be easier to just leave it here and come back when I need it, but I can't be guaranteed that Zeta Base won't be buried in sand when I come back the next time. So I need to figure out how to move more stuff than I can carry right now.

I have a lack of vehicles at the moment, and I don't know if I'll ever have any. Everything I can use to move something is entirely in my hands at the moment, and that means devising the most efficient means possible of moving something without pack animals. I'll admit it took me a lot longer to figure it out than I would have liked, especially since I spent a lot of that time trying to figure out how to cobble wheels together and hang them on a chest to carry it like a wagon.

The sand here is pretty soft, so wheels would be annoying to deal with anyways. Maybe I could just push the chest over it, but back around Beta Base the ground hardens up so that's a moot point. Maybe I could make a rope and just pull it behind me, or maybe some kind of sled, or...

Wait a minute.

Sol 64 (2)

Alright, I'm back. So, what I've come up with is a...goddamn it, I can't remember what it's called. It has a name, I know that, but I've forgotten it. I'll just call it an A-frame, since that's basically what it is. It's two long strips of metal salvaged from the Harinth with another one between them to hold them up, and then I can load the chest up onto it.

It's a simple thing, but long ago some cultures used them when the wheel wasn't going to work. Plus, I can use it both on the sand and the hardpack, so it should be good all the way back to Beta Base.

It's weird...it's such a simple solution to it, but it gave me a lot of hope when I looked at it. It's going to be things like this that keep me alive. Small victories, not big milestones in the TerraIndex. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I actually believed myself when I said I'm not going to die here.

I'm setting back out tomorrow. Today I deserve some rest.