Sol 96

396 kTi

Home again, home again, jiggity-jog. Finally back, and ahead of schedule. With the rations that I salvaged from the warp gate and the wreck in the Aluminum Hills, I'm now well up on my calorie reserves, and I have enough for 400 Sols. On top of that, the crops grew even better than I had expected. Because these aren't the kind that Sentinel rations to Planet Crafters and are the kind settlers actually use, they're actually really good. They'll be ready tomorrow.

I wanted to take an opportunity to just rest after the expedition, but I need to keep things moving, so I made sure to get the uranium refined and set into a new reactor so that I could put more of my terraforming equipment back online and speed things up again. I actually took some time to look at the design of these reactors. It's a pretty basic thing, the kind that hasn't evolved for a thousand years. Boil water to make steam and turn a turbine, and that's it. But it's refreshingly simple so there's fewer chances for something to go wrong, and if memory serves the reactors that have exploded in the past were much bigger. Even if this goes off it wouldn't end up like a city-buster, but it would make things extremely unpleasant.

I set it up a full kilometer from Beta Base just to be sure.

After a full day of beefing up the power grid, I can finally relax. The next few days will be for rest and recuperation, along with using some of my resin supply to fix up spots on my suit that need some strengthening. There won't be another incident like last time if I can help it.

Sol 97

417 kTi

The crops are finally ready. I have a squash, an eggplant, some beans, and a mushroom. I don't have a way of cooking them, so I'm going to have to eat them raw. But it's at least some kind of variation on the standard food packs.

Since I'm taking the next few days off, today I had the chance to try out the crops and see how each of them tastes. Mind you, this is me eating them raw, I'm sure if I figure out how to cook them they would get better. I like the beans the most, they have a kind of savoriness to them even if they have a very mealy texture. The squash by contrast is chewier, and has more of an almost butter-like taste to it but a somewhat chemical aftertaste. The eggplant meanwhile is bitter, but in a good way, though I'm not a fan of the texture.

The mushroom is the most interesting. It seems like it grows the fastest, because of course it does, but I've never really seen a kind of mushroom like it. I suppose this might have been one of their gene seed variants, and it probably wasn't designed for eating because it has a very rubbery consistency that makes it almost like trying to chew styrofoam. But, and I'm very pleased to report, it's got a distinctly sweet taste to it. Maybe it's not actually sugar, but whatever the case is I actually have something I could enjoy as something approaching dessert.

So, I have a new source of food. It's not entirely sustainable, mind you. Taking into account the time it takes to grow, the number of crops being grown, and the calories that I get from them, it's still a calorie deficit even if I don't have to waste calories on actively cultivating them. One thing I can do, though, is get seeds from the crops grown and replant. Irritatingly, where I might normally get multiple sets of seeds from one plant I can only get back as much as I need to grow them. So I have a functionally endless supply of plants, but not enough to actually cover my calorie needs nor the means to get enough to provide that surplus I need.

That's on top of not presently having the resources I need to build more crop growers. I'm certain I could probably find some means of making something more efficient, or maybe just find a more efficient design either through a blueprint or seeing if I can personally upgrade the design somehow. Exactly how, I don't know. I'm not a programmer or a mechanical engineer, so I'll just have to figure something out.

Sol 98

429 kTi

I decided to do some more drawing today. I'm no better at it, but I decided to just make some maps to try and help sort my thoughts. The immediate area of Beta Base is relatively flat but with some rock stacks here and there that are useful for navigating. Right now the entire "known world" as far as I can see it is probably the size of a small city, which is difficult to get a hold on given that I can just walk almost anywhere as the crow flies. But it's good to keep a handle on where everything is in relation to each other.

So right where I am is a flat sandy area, to the north is a bunch of slot canyons, west of me is the Iridium Cave, to the east is the Aluminum Hills across Carlos' Gulch, and to the south is the Starting Basin. These are all just names I came up with because it's in human nature to name things. Northwest is the Dune Sea, where the Harinth is wrecked, and southeast of here around the Hills and the Basin are the Pinnacles. North of the Hills is a secondary basin, and on the eastern side of the Pinnacles is a narrow passage into that one canyon where there's a cave that I could gather uranium from, and then north from there is the Warp Gate Desert.

There's probably even more places that I could go from here, but I've done enough walking for now. Going everywhere available to me would probably take more time than I've already spent here. Man, I would kill for some teleporters...

Sol 99

441 kTi

Alrighty, I think I've worked out a calendar. Starting with a Sol being 25 hours and 17 minutes, the day is split into 20 strikes (y'know, "striking the hour") which are about an hour and 16 minutes long. Ten strikes in the day, ten strikes at night. I've been here for almost 100 days and the days haven't changed their length much at all, which tells me that seasons are basically nonexistent and so I don't need to worry about the length of a strike changing based on how long the day and night are.

On top of that, the moons are also super helpful for me here. I've spent some time watching the orbits of the three moons here, and from some basic calculations they seem to be in a 1:2:4 resonance, which is to say that Larry (the innermost moon) orbits 4 times in the time it takes Bob to orbit twice, and all of that in the time it takes Mike to orbit once. They actually align roughly every 29 Sols, so I'll say that a Stevonian month is 29 sols long. I can't exactly remember how long they said it took this planet to orbit its sun, but since there's no cycle of seasons the solar year isn't particularly important. For the sake of simplicity I'll just use 12 months as with the normal calendar, which gives a full cycle of 348 Sols. Since that's probably not an exact year, I'll call it an annus for simplicity's sake. Stop laughing, it's Latin.

Why am I going on about all of this? Why does it matter? It doesn't. But it's something to do and keep my mind engaged, which is important for me to try and keep myself sane. I need to do something beyond working all day long, and I haven't found a way to decrypt and use the media files I salvaged from the warp gate yet. So this is all I have to try and occupy my time right now.

The suit should be fully repaired by now, but tomorrow is Sol 100. I don't have anything special planned out, aside from marking the day and not actively working on building more equipment. I need to have milestones for myself, the aforementioned "staying sane" thing.

I think that after Sol 100, I'll spend some time putting down more equipment before I try to navigate the slot canyons. I don't know how complicated they might get, so I'll probably need to find a way to mark my path through them without getting lost. My kingdom for some bread crumbs...

Sol 100

454 kTi

Whoooooooo.