Toggle Background Color
A FORTUITOUS FOX
The one goon that responded suggested trimming back my shopping list a bit, arguing I can manufacture simpler (if less effective) equivalents for the shovel and punt. After playing a bit with the barter process a bit I end up agreeing with this wisdom and eventually withdraw the splitting axe, the punt, and shovel from the trade. This leaves the Fine Woodsman Axe, the Carving Axe, the hand axe, and the fishing net to trade for still. Again I offer my necklace and Nortern spear and the Sage informs me I am extremely close to making the deal. Thankfully I got something I can make small change with. I offer him four of my rough arrows, half of what I've got. Arrows don't usually break in my experience so as long as I'm careful to recover any misses I figure I should be fine. Plus these ones are "rough" and I can eventually make replacements if I get some cord or leather rope (which I can cut up my clothes for if I'm desperate). Anyways, with the four arrows thrown in the Sage decides the deal acceptable and we make the trade. I now have some really useful tools. I'll miss the splitting axe a bit, its not just for chopping firewood, but the handaxe and woodsman's axe should be able to fill the gap well enough.
With that done, I notice it is evening now and I'm getting a bit tired. I decide I should just stay in town until tomorrow. Wandering around town I get the idea to visit and use the town's sauna, an activity I've yet to partake in, but is a core part of medieval (and modern) Finnish culture. However, to my surprise, I find no sauna! This is the first town I've been to where one is not present, so its somewhat surprising. I wonder if its because its a walled town, or just a bit of random chance. Disapointed I wander around the town a bit trying to decide what to do. As I pass near the entrance of the town I spot an animal.
Is that a fox? 
It is! 
At first I'm surprised one ran inside the town, but then it starts running away from me and I realize that this is a golden opportunity! I chase after it and herd it towards the south east corner of the town walls. My bow is already in hand so I pull out an arrow and take a shot. Unfortunately I miss due to its small size (bows are more for hunting big game, of course). Figuring that I probably won't do better with successive shots I put away my bow and pull out my Kaumoan spear.
I herd it further into the corner and close in. As I draw close it attempts to slip pass me, but I quickly move to intercept and catch it against the wall. I thrust my spear at it, aiming for the head. The game has a surprisingly in depth combat system, allowing you to choose which damage type of Blunt, Edged (slashing), or Point (piercing), if applicable, to use and what part of the target you want to aim at, body, arms, legs, or head. The fox dodges and I only nick a paw. Fortunately its attempt at dodging means it can't move away and I take another thrust with the same result, it dodges too slow and I knick a paw. I apparently have effectively "stunlocked" it at this point, as it must dodge my attacks and thus cannot run away. My third thrust scores a better result, instead of scoring a glancing blow on its paws I score a glancing blow on its neck and the Fox falls unconscious, perhaps from pain.
Its time for the kill blow. I flip the spear around and use the blunt end to crush its skull, killing it as mercifully and quickly as possible while trying to avoid damaging its hide. Next I pull out my knife and go about the grisly task of skinning and butchering the poor creature. I got to say, this was a stroke of luck! Once cured this fox hide should provide a nice bit of trading fodder for picking up one or two other things I wanted, plus the meat will feed me for a day or so. To be honest, if I knew the proper rituals, I would sacrifice some of the meat to the supernatural guardians in thanks for this luck and for killing such a precious and somewhat sacred animal as a fox. Sadly I do not know any appropriate rituals, so I shall just have to hope the spirits do not mind.
This changes the plan a bit, I can't really stay in town since the townsfolk are liable to steal the fox hide while I'm working it, so I quickly leave and head down to a tiny lake south of the town. Approaching the lake shore I clean the skin, which requires a cutting weapon (my knife does just great) and some water. The task takes only 15 or so minutes for a small hide like this. The next step is to begin the tanning process by using water and either animal fat or tree bark to begin the tanning process. In my experience almost every animal I've ever skinned and butcher had provided enough fat to tan its own hide and this fox is no different. This process takes about 20 minutes. With that done the skin gets left by the water side for the and the game informs me that it will be ready for the next step in a few hours.
I'll have to continue that in the morning. For now its time to set up camp. I turn around and approach a nearby small spruce, first I cut a couple batches of branches from it then chop it down (you cannot get branches from a young/thin tree after cutting it down). Some of the branches I push a few tiles away and start a fire with and begin roasting the fox meat cuts. Unlike the 8 pound pike, these 1 pound each meat cuts will only take a half hour to cook, plenty of time for me to set up a shelter. I take 3 slender trunks and 20 spruce branches and with a bit of axe work build myself a shelter.
Naturally, this completes my current objective of building a shelter. My next task is to use one of the rituals I know. This is easy enough, while my Hunting Incantation can only be used in the "Early Morning" my Origin of Fire can be used any time, so I do that now (even though I do not intend to build a fire again). The ritual takes 15 minutes to complete. Upon completion, a window appears showing the verses of this ritual in English and what I presume is some old Finnic language. It also plays a really annoying sound byte of someone pesudo-chanting random babble (I'm pretty sure its babble, if its not I apologize to the Finnish people).
My next tutorial task is using my tracking skill to track something, but that will have to wait for now. For now, its bedtime. I eat some more of my pike, drink from the river, crawl under my shelter and go to sleep. I wake up in the early morning and have more pike for breakfast. Walking over to the waterside I take another drink and grab my fox skin, as the tanning process should've finished hours ago during my sleep. Now its time to rinse the tanning material from the hide, basically every step in the tanning process save the last requires water so its usually easiest to do it by the water side, though you can use water from containers if you want to. Anyways, it'll take another few hours for the hide to dry sufficiently for me to continue, so until then I've got some time to kill.
I decide I might as well waste that time fishing and wade out to try my luck again. This time luck is with me and I catch something in a bit over an hour. The good news is I caught ELEVEN fish! The bad news is they're roaches, which are tiny little things and all 11 of them together weigh only 4 pounds, half of what the pike did. Still food is food, so I prepare another fire and roast them. Because they're so tiny it conveniently takes maybe 10-15 minutes for them to cook. I decide to lighten my load a bit (I'm carrying a lot of crap) and throw my rough club and rough staves into the fire. I originally planned to craft the staves into javelins, but because they turned out rough I decide it'd be a pointless effort at this point, especially since I still have my longbow.
I check my fox hide and the game tells me it shall be ready "Shortly", meaning less than a half hour. So I kill time by staring at the clouds. Or I would if there were any in the sky. What I actually did was use my weatherlore skill, which informs me of what the weather is and what I predict the weather will be in the near future. I do this several times and the fact it says I'm not sure of the forecast is accurate is pretty evident as I waffle between deciding whether or not its going to rain in each attempt. They all say things will be getting warmer soon, but that is pretty damn obvious since were at the beginning of summer...
Anyways, after twenty minutes of staring at the sky, my fox skin has finished drying and I pick it up. The next step is the final step and requires a beater (my club does excellently) and a hard surface. Now I could just chop a tree down and use the trunk, but honestly, why cut a tree down just for that? In addition boulders that you can see strewn about sometimes aren't a valid surface for some reason. I leave my one night stand of a shelter behind and head back into town. On the way into the gates I see exactly what I hoped to see, footprints. See the tracking skill just wants me to track something and human foot prints work just as well as animal tracks. Unfortuantely, I apparently forgot to take a screenshot of the footprints, but they show up on the map. I'm sure I'll show some tracks off in the future. I use my tracking skill which informs me the footprints are heading eastward, which is unsurprisingly in the direction of their farm fields. Another thing I forgot to screenshot was the fact that when I gained the tracking task, the game increased my tracking skill from somewhere in the low 40s to the low 90s. I guess they want to make sure you can find some tracks even if your character is lousy at it. When I finished the task my tracking skill went back down, but not to its original level. My tracking skill is now 62%, compared to 42% when I started that task. This is the reason I reduced my tracking skill in character creation for an extra point. A bit gamey, but hey, that is what roguelikes are all about, isn't it?
My next task is to have an encounter with a wild animal. I'm almost positive you have to do this on the overworld map, so the fox wouldn't have counted even if this task had been active at the time. Oh well, I'm sure I'll run into a bear wolf lynx Njerp harmlessly cute and furry creature soon enough. For now, I have a fox fur to finish up. I head into town and find a building with a table or bench and soften the skin by abusing it in various ways. After a half hour the work is done and the end result is one decent fox fur. Decent is the "normal" quality, so I have no real complaints. The fur weighs less than a pound, meaning it isn't much material for creating fur clothing with. The value of most furs is based on size as far as I know, but fox furs are considered more valuable. The fox fur took only a day or so to completely process, but larger skins can take several days to work into furs and even longer if you want to dehair it, which requires a lengthy soaking process, to create leather instead of a fur.
Well, let's see what I can get for my luck and hard work. First up I grab the splitting axe I wanted and offer the fur. Unfortunately they say my offer needs to be doubled if I want that axe. Well shit, I guess fox furs aren't that valuable after all... Disappointed I put the splitting axe back. Axes are pretty valuable since they're forged metal items, so what can I get? Grabbing the shovel I wanted, I try the trade again and I'm told its only two-thirds of what I'd need. Ok, so no shovel, again a forged metal item... Well what about that punt? Its just made of common wood (though I cannot build a punt myself, unfortunately). Sure I could make a raft as Infrequently pointed out, but that requires cords and weighs a lot (80lbs vs the Punt's 30), meaning its less conveniently portable over land and I'm not sure if you can disassemble your raft to get your cords back. I'm told the fox fur is "pleasantly close" to getting me the punt. Alright. how about 11 freshly roasted roaches to sweeten the deal? No? Ok, what if I throw in a spare fishing rod? Still no? Ok... uh, how about two rough arrows? Yes? Alright Deal.
Plus one boat! Of course, now I only have two arrows, but whatever I can make more later... 
Now with a set of useful axes, a punt, and some nets, I have almost everything I wanted out of trading with the Driik. I can hopefully acquire a splitting axe later. Now comes the big question of NOW WHAT? Obviously I still have half the tutorial course to complete and all the tasks from here on out will require larger amounts of time to complete (it took me several months to finish the course on my last character). In the mean time I have to go about surviving and prospering in the UnReal World. At this point the natural next step would be to set up a semi-permanent long-term shelter/camp somewhere until I'm prepared enough to start constructing an actual cabin to live in (Which will be vitally important for surviving winter). However, I've already settled down at the edges of Driik lands/Westerner peoples with my last character and, honestly, it wasn't that great. Wild animals seem hard to find around here. I'm told they're more plentiful to the east, so I'm thinking of heading that way, living off the land day by day until I find somewhere nice to settle down back in the lands of the Easterner peoples. As an added "bonus" that will bring me much closer to the lands of the vile Njerpez, so there is a chance I'll actually run into them too.
It will be quite a journey though. The lands of the Easterner peoples are at least 50 kilometers or more away as the crow flies. It will probably take me a few weeks to travel that far, especially since I don't really have any provisions for the journey and will have to feed myself along the way. Still, I think it would be more interesting than hanging around Westerner lands, so unless the supernatural goon spirits have a convincing argument to do otherwise, I think I shall undertake the journey. At the very least it should be interesting.