Entry 10 - Burning
rating: +5+x

I cooked myself a shovel, and with that I can now start prospecting for deeper ores.

As I’ve explained before, my tribe wasn’t blessed with the knowledge of much past stone and copper. I have to instead rely on what I learned in my travels after.

I’ll have to make a lot of prospecting trips around the area, not just for metal, but for food too. And anything else that might help me out.

So away we go.


Alright, it’s been a couple days. I’ve marked out in the dirt the dimensions of the residence I plan to build up. As well as testing which of the wood will burn the best, I should also figure out which is the best building material. Speaking of…

I’ve burned all three of the types of trees around here, plus I wrote a few pages ago that I wanted to test the sap. The brown trees gave off this strange scent as they burned, and before I knew it I felt like I was about to die and wake up in the replicator all over again. I didn’t even try the sap.

The purple trees didn’t convert well, but they were strong, and it took many axe-swings to take one down. These would make sturdy frames for my home. There wasn’t much sap within them, as I was starting to suspect, but what I could squeeze out was good. Future salad dressing?

The black trees? That’s where the goldmine was. I now have about 50 pounds of nice, combustible, charcoal. The sap was strange and red, and tasted oddly like human blood. Don’t ask how I know.

This stuff will come in handy when I start making iron and steel, and I’ll be using a lot of it.

When I was orbiting this planet, all that time ago, I do remember seeing some small ice caps. Let’s hope I alone won’t cause a climate shift.


Sometimes I forget that I’m most likely the first sentient creature to see this place. Every new thing I see, every new place I go. I’m the first thinking brain that’s looked at it. All of this, existing by itself for billions of years. Until I set foot.

Biospheres are fragile, I know that. Many humans thought of us as some sort of nature-worshippers. We didn’t worship nature. When you’re living a nomadic life, hunting and gathering, there’s no such thing as nature. It was the world we lived in. We worshipped spirits of the trees and the sky and the animals because that’s all there was.

Like primitive humans hunting the mammoth to extinction, we too hunted large beasts until they disappeared. But even then, we didn’t destroy the balance of our planet. We never got the chance.

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