Thursday 24 September 2015

Sunset Six: Sticks and Stones

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Continuing with our prep session, wood can be used as fuel by itself too to fire kilns for making pottery items or bricks.

Burn baby, burn.

However, wooden boards can also be treated in a chemical tank to gain different properties such as "white, pliable" which are needed by some structures later on. Balthazarr gave me a quick lesson on how to achieve this properly using 10 second bursts of various ingredients. Pin the other windows to mark the attributes you are interested in then see which ingredient will give the result closest to what you want.

The trick is finding the "result" bar closest to where the "current" bar is. The smaller the difference between the two, the faster the bar will move. This means it's sometimes OK to use an item that has an unfavorable property if the bar difference for that between what it is and what it will be are far apart as it won't move that much.

Mark the "current" bars with corners of the other windows.

Balthazarr also teaches me the "spiral rock method" of turning stones into gravel. Using a sledgehammer you can play cat and mouse with the stones that continue to roll away from you as you smash them which eats up time. The Spiral Rock method is more effective: by dropping each stone individually at your feet and smashing only what stays beside you, it goes quite fast and is actually one activity I really enjoy.

There's a reason it's called the spiral rock method.

Why all the gravel? I need to mix it in with cement to make concrete! Now since cement is a pain to come across I was fortunate enough to have it provided to me by Gander, Anyolina and Markanthony. If you want to know more about just how to get it, I suggest you read Jeromai's old post which should give you an idea of how tough the early days of a tale are.

Clearly not invented yet. ;p

No comments:

Post a Comment