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Graduation and Deforestation






I head home to dumbell island. Passing through a mire I spot a Stag and hunt it down. Once again my dog gets almost all the credit here as she chases it to the point of exhaustion, allowing me to come up and easily bring it down. Apparently it tried to kick her or something at one point, because her leg is injured, nothing that won't heal though. Processing the stag gives me a surprisingly large 24lbs hide (which I strap to the dog to lighten my own load) plus more meat than I'll be able to use, most of it being left for the scavengers. On the way back home I spot another Njerpez in the distance. I avoid this one, however, since both my dog and I are weighed down with meat and hide.

Returning to my punt I shove off into the water. I end up feeling a bit silly as according to the map, my dog is dutifully swimming along behind me! This doesn't effect her, so I'll just pretend she's riding in the boat for the well being of my otherwise guilty conscious. After a while we arrive back on dumbell island safe and sound. As a side note, I end up naming my dog Skadi, as Lprsti99 suggested. Its a nice sounding name and while this is Fantasy NotFinland and not Fantasy NotNorway, it still kind of works. Maybe Miska heard the name in stories told by foreign traders?




With my tool collection comfortably stocked (I'm missing a broadaxe, but I'll live) I decide its finally time to get working on my next objective of building a cabin. First however I need to make one useful thing. In the past my gathering of food has often resulted in obtaining large batches, be it numerous fish or large slabs of meat cut from a game animal. However these have frequently spoiled before I've had the chance to eat it all, so it is time to do something about that! I wander my island collecting a few large stones, felling a tree, and splitting it into boards. I then use these materials along with my shovel to construct a cellar, putting it on a tiny mound near my camp. A cellar is extremely useful, it is cooler than surrounding tiles and thus food placed onto/into the cellar will spoil slower. While normally my roasted meat/fish only last 2-3 days in the summer, in the cellar they'll last upwards of a week or so. This'll prove very handy, as a large haul of food is more likely to last until I can eat it. Since I have to gather food less frequently, this also effectively frees up more of my time to do other things.





The next couple days are spent cutting down a few trees, net fishing, processing hides, and a hunting trip in which I bring down a forest reindeer. Pleasingly one of the two shots I took on this reindeer actually scored a crippling hit to its foreleg. Skadi barely had to do any work this time as the leg injury means I was able to catch up by running and finish it off with my spear. The only bad news is the arrow that hit it must've broke as I'm unable to recover it. I roast a good chunk of the meat and throw it and a large amount of raw meat into the cellar. The roasted meat will feed me, while the raw meat will feed Skadi.





With the reindeer meat providing a nice reserve of food, I continue work on the cabin. Trees are felled and cleaned into logs and soon I'm building the first section of wall, a corner. Each section of wall takes 6 logs, meaning it will take a LOT of materials to build this cabin. On my previous character I managed to average about 4-5 logs processed a day, so as you can see, building a cabin is a serious time investment. Still the first piece is all that is required to complete my tutorial task.







Our next task is learning how to farm. For this purpose we're given a metal shovel (guess I shouldn't have bothered obtaining one) and a variety of things to plant. As you might remember from the description of the Kiesselaiset a few updates ago, inehmo in the UnReal World practice Slash-and-Burn agriculture. A quick summary of this method is that one cuts down a patch of forest and then burns it, with the ash fertilizing the ground for planting. Slash-and-burn is one of the oldest farming methods in the world, though URW's version is somewhat simplified. In some places slash and burn is a non-sustainable practice, but with the low populations of the UnReal World, its likely that the land burned in this manner has a chance to regenerate each generation or three. An inehmo's could very well end up slash-and-burning the same stretch of land as their Grandfather did.

Anyways, the task is fairly simple. There is a spot nearby that looks good for this, so I clear a few trees from it and chop one up into blocks. Further splitting the blocks into firewood, I spread them around into a 5x4 grid and then start lighting fires. The fire spreads across the field of firewood and soon only a plot of ash remains. The next day I simply til the soil with my shovel and wait for the "burned ground" effect to go away, at which point I plant my various seeds. I decline to plant the rye and barely though, as I don't think they'll grow fast enough to be harvestable before the winter arrives. Honestly, with my shitty agriculture skill (14%!) I'm not expecting much from this field, but every little bit helps.




My next task is to obtain an animal. At first I worry Skadi won't count and I'll have to trade for another one, however after reading the tutorial text more closely I see I just need to leash an animal, cool. I wander over to the tree where I tied Skadi up (she was getting in the way of cabin construction), unleash her and releash her. Thankfully the objective completes nice and easy.





Only one task remains in the "Living in the Wild" course! That task is to obtain a companion, an inehmo this time. This honestly is a good idea, especially because of what I'm doing. Companions typically want to be paid in food and possibly weapons/tools, so I load my punt up with some extra food and my extra handaxe and head up to those Kiesselais islands in the great lake northwest of mine. A few people decline my requests to employ them, but eventually I find an old Kiesselainen who is interested. I trade him the last of my roasted reindeer meat and a trout and he agrees to work for me. He'll follow me around and be a useful companion for 4 or so days. He isn't equipped to fight, but that is fine, as we'll just be working on my island.






With a companion hired, I've finished the "Living in the Wild" tutorial course. As a reward I'm given a choice between buffing some skills, increasing my stats, or learning 3 new rituals. My stats are already pretty awesome and I'm learning rituals at a pretty fast rate at this point (even faster if I bothered to visit a sage more often), so I choose to buff three of my skills. I pick stealth, timbercraft, and carpentry. Stealth will be useful for hunting (both two and four legged creatures), while the woodworking skills will help with the construction of my cabin and creating various other useful things.






Worker hired I travel back home. Much like Skadi, poor Vetka seems to have to swim alongside on the map. Once we get back, I hand him my Fine Woodsman's Axe and we head up into the wooded hill that makes up one half of the island. I tell him to start felling trees and he eagerly gets to work. While he chops the trees down, I use my fine carving axe to clean them into logs. Vetka proves to be one hell of a lumber jack, cleaning a log takes me 40ish minutes (it'd be faster if I had a broad axe) and in that time it seems Vetka is able to fell 2-3 trees! We spend the next several days logging with occasional breaks to check my nets for fish, which provide a catch so large that I stop putting out my nets for a while.





Eventually Vetka's time is up and he heads off. I'm glad I made sure to grab my Fine Woodsman's Axe from him before sleeping the previous day, as I suspect he would've run off with it. Still, Vetka Kiesselainen was a HUGE help. Out of curiosity I follow him as he walks off to the north west corner of the island, where he just kinda wanders around at the shoreline. However when I check again the next day he has disappeared, maybe he swam back?

With Vetka gone, I decide to gather the results of our work before I continue building the cabin. This turns out to take longer than I thought. Each cleaned log weighs a mighty 400 lbs while the tree trunks weigh 500lbs. Dragging them around proves to be tiring work and I have to take frequent rests to restore my fatigue and need to sleep more often than I do with other activities. In fact, it takes close to a week to haul the logs and trunks back to my worksite! For good reason though, a final count shows I now have 43 cleaned logs and another 33 tree trunks waiting to be processed. Some of those trunks will be split into boards instead of cleaned into logs, but overall I believe I have most, if not all, of what I need to build my cabin. Again, I cannot state how much time hiring Vetka saved, and it only cost me about 10-15 lbs of meat and fish!

Unfortunately I checked and it seems companions cannot help build cabin segments (which is why I have a partially built section in those screenshots). This sucks as the construction part takes quite some time, around 6-8 hours per tile of cabin wall. Still, I've got the materials gathered, so now all that is left is to build the damn thing. I've got over 40 lbs of fish left in my cellar too, so I should have enough food to work for a while, though I'll have to be sure to put the nets back out once the fish start turning stale.