There was no time to experiment like during the tutorial. It’s what it was there for, right? Sure, Tanisha had played games all the way through while misunderstanding a central mechanic, but this wasn’t a game, and any advantage she could take of the system being in “tutorial” mode was a leg up she didn’t want to ignore.
Navigating to the refining section of the blueprints and selecting the cut stone was harrowing, but Tanisha was rewarded with the spectral rock blueprint, while the workbench stayed right where it was. She blew out a breath of relief. All of her progress stayed. She could even start building something, walk away, and come back later to complete it. It took a little of the urgency out of her work, and made it a lot easier to deal with the restrictive inventory.
After a few minutes of banging rocks together, Tanisha had a pair of cut stones, and so she returned to the workbench. The last step required her to hammer her rocks against the tops of a pair of sticks until they were wedged there to create makeshift tools. Why this craft didn’t require rope was beyond her, but Tanisha didn’t really want to question it. Anything that got her out of here faster.
“One thing at a time,” she told herself. “Just one thing at a time until I’m back home.”
When the workbench was finished, the text in the corner of her vision flashed as it updated to the next part of the quest.
Welcome to the False Lands: Craft eight boards. Boards are an advanced crafting material made from logs at a woodworking workbench. They are used in most other constructions in the game. For this reason, a woodworking workbench should be the first thing built at any base. Four boards can be crafted from one log at a woodworking workbench.
Tanisha was glad she’d gathered the extra logs instead of leaving them be. Every second she spent running back and forth between resources was time that Otekah used to get further away. She still held hope that she could track them through the woods to their castle, or at least would be able to see it on the horizon easily enough.
After fetching a log from her inventory, Tanisha deposited it on the surface of the workbench. But nothing happened. With a sigh, she opened the crafting menu and found new entries on the refining submenu. A bit of bold text told her that a woodworking workbench was required for the craft, but it had a little (1/1) next to it, meaning the requirement was fulfilled. When she clicked on the blueprint, she was met with a familiar spectral image of a log, and Tanisha lined her log up with it.
One of the two tools she’d created as part of making the workbench was a small axe. It glowed with a spectral outline, and so Tanisha grabbed that to satisfy the blueprint. The next step was to hack at the log, like she were splitting it for firewood.
“Just a little more precise that I’m used to,” she said with a chuckle, being careful to strike the log only where the spectral axe did.
The axe-like tool bit deeply into the wood with each stroke, and it just took a moment for her to split it into four nearly even pieces. Once they were split off, Tanisha then had to take each chunk of wood and sand them down. The tool she had to use, however, wasn’t something she was familiar with. It was a hammer with a textured edge, almost like sandpaper. She was instructed to drag the hammer back and forth over the cut wood, like she were brushing it down.
Not one to argue with phantom images in a world that didn’t really exist, Tanisha did as she was instructed. Just because she wasn’t familiar with the tool didn’t mean it didn’t have a real-world equivalent, or that it didn’t work.
Working the wood was impossibly easy, just as Tanisha expected it to be. Giant chunks of wood turned to sawdust almost instantly, leaving behind a smooth plank of wood. Tanisha marvelled at it for a moment, but her work was far from done. She still had seven more of these to do, and so she pulled the finished board from the workbench so she could begin again.
The work went steadily on for what felt like ten minutes, with only two brief pauses: one to re-open the blueprint and fetch a second log, and one to put boards into her inventory when the stack grew too tall to keep on her lap. She was excited to find that they all fit into one inventory slot together, stacking with a small eight in the lower right corner.
As soon as all of the boards were away, the quest text flashed with an update. Tanisha sighed, long and heavy. While she appreciated the thoroughness of the tutorial, it was getting to be a little much. Especially since it seemed to be taking her way farther into crafting than she thought necessary.
Welcome to the False Lands: Build a suit of armor. Armor is vital to your survival in the False Lands! There are many dangerous creatures, and armor will reduce the damage they do to you. The armor you will craft now will be made out of wooden boards, and so it won’t provide a lot of protection, but it is the easiest to make. You will use six of your boards for this, along with three ropes. All other armor types follow this same recipe, requiring six of whatever ingredient, as well as the standard three rope. Preparing for regular armor upgrades will be a great way for you to survive here!
Tanisha grimaced—dangerous creatures sounded ominous. It meant that it was only a matter of time before some enemies were forced to spawn for tutorial purposes. She tried to ignore the way her heart skipped a beat at the thought of actually participating in combat. Worrying about it now would do nothing but cause her anguish, and she had plenty of other things to do. It was a trial she could overcome when it arrived.
Until then, she could only roll up her sleeves—not that this shirt had them—and get back to gathering and crafting.
“Don’t go too far, Otekah,” Tanisha said with a determined frown. “We need to have a good, long talk about this.”
Chapter 12
Crafting armor required Tanisha to fetch more grass, and the clearing was woefully lacking additional gathering nodes. Instead of poking and prodding under the trees, Tanisha decided to go down by the creek, as it was likely the taller grass would grow better there.
The creek was small, little more than half a foot of water moving languidly across a two-foot-wide bed. It was dotted with rocks and fallen trees—much too sturdy to be considered branches but too thin to be used for crafting purposes—in an almost idealistic way. If it weren’t for the gentle sound of the water moving around fallen objects, Tanisha would have thought she was looking at a painting.
She was momentarily overwhelmed with the desire to go down and drink from the creek. It would likely be cool and fresh, as pure as snow and twice as refreshing. Had she been in her normal chair, it would have been almost impossible. There was no path to the water that was clear of debris, and the uneven ground leading down the banks would have been a nightmare to navigate without risking being tossed from her seat.
But before she could even get close to the water, she remembered her mission. The long grass brushed against her shins—even this high up in her mechanized chair—and its presence brought her back. She took one long look at the water before lowering her chair and setting about fetching more grass. Tanisha got to picking grass until she received notification that she reached Level 2 in Herbalism, and it wasn’t the interruption that stopped her. Instead, it was the realization that she couldn’t remember getting Level 1 in the skill, and so she must have been too far in the zone to be interrupted by the notification.
And that was terrifying.
All in all, Tanisha had a bundle of grass too big for her to put both hands around, and she dutifully put it in her inventory. When she saw how much she had gathered—ten units of grass—she knew she had enough for three rope, but she wouldn’t have much left after that.
Her first instinct was to gather more. Sure, she had enough now to complete the armor for the tutorial, but what if she needed more after that? Traveling even twenty feet from the woodworking workbench to the creek would add minutes to her time in the tutorial if she needed to do it more than once. What if she needed more—and not just for the tutorial, but for the future?
Tanisha shook that thought away, violently. Her plan was to escape the
False Lands as quickly as possible. To deal with Otekah and get back home. She wasn’t here to play with the crafting system, or to get to the top of some leaderboard. Any amount of extra gathering or crafting would be just as much of a waste as excess traveling.
With a frown, Tanisha pulled three handfuls of grass back out of her inventory, opened the blueprint for rope, and got to work. When she was finished, it was time to make the armor itself. The blueprint was under the outfitting menu, next to a bunch of strange items she didn’t recognize. She paused to examine them, but they seemed to be just ordinary shirts and pants, but made from fur or animal skins. They had no listed stats, and no real purpose that she could see, other than the obvious. Utility-based equipment—like the stealth outfit she’d used during the event—had been added after the first anniversary of dARkness.
The lack of those outfits, and the presence of these normal clothes, told her two things. First, if this world was actually built off of dARkness: Online, then it was based on an early patch. Which was pretty terrible for her, because there were a lot of quality-of-life improvements she’d be missing out on, like the utility equipment, or the buff to armor ratings from last spring. And the considerable buff to low-level experience gain.
Second was that the designer of this world expected her to be in this place long enough that she would need to replace the clothes she was wearing.
“I refuse,” Tanisha said, stabbing her finger in the air to select the board armor from the blueprint list. “Over my dead body will I be here long enough to need to craft any of the rest of this crap.”
She took a moment to swallow her anger before she started the actual craft, however. While the system seemed to be super forgiving, Tanisha still wasn’t convinced that she couldn’t mess things up. It wouldn’t be great for her to break something out of anger, and be forced to craft a replacement.
The blueprint started her with lining up the three boards side-by-side, which Tanisha struggled to do from her seat. She only had the two hands, and she couldn’t balance the boards on her lap, either. Eventually she climbed down to the forest floor so she could craft more easily. The blueprint moved with her, and so Tanisha was able to move on to the next step. She was instructed to wrap rope around them, which was incredibly awkward to do. When she properly arranged them and tied off the ends, the finished product seemed flimsy and sloppy. But the spectral instructions moved on like this was all perfectly expected, so Tanisha just continued.
She repeated the process for the second trio of boards, creating another flimsy bundle of planks. They were bound with an unfamiliar hitch knot, and she’d followed the spectral instructions very carefully to make sure she got it right. But she wondered what would happen if she’d substituted her own knot—perhaps a clove hitch—instead. Would the instructions continue on with the same end result, or would she need to undo it and try again?
For a long moment, Tanisha argued with herself over the practicality of learning such a thing. It didn’t serve her any real purpose, and it would only waste time if she had to re-do the work. But her curiosity won out, and so she set about testing it on the next part of the craft.
The final spectral step used the last rope to tie the two bundles together using a knot she recognized as two half hitches. It was a common knot for setting up tents, as it was used to tie the tent to the stakes in the ground.
Tanisha decided to try a bowline. She’d always been taught that the bowline was the quintessential knot, and that almost any knot would be replaced with it without any danger, at least for the purposes of outdoorsmanship. It was simple, too. Just a rabbit coming out of the hole, going around the tree, and then back home. Tanisha tightened the knot, and watched.
But the blueprint’s instruction persisted. Tanisha cursed aloud. The spectral rope, still overlapping over her knot, insisted on the two half hitches.
“What if i know better than you? There might be something wrong structurally with two half hitches here! What if the bowline knot is actually objectively better?”
The blueprint, of course, made no response. It just flickered back to the beginning of the two half hitches knot and completed itself again.
“Fine. Have it your way.” Tanisha grumbled under her breath as she fumbled with her knot, tugging it for nearly a minute before it finally came undone. “I hate having to follow your dumb instructions to the absolute letter, but I guess I really don’t have a choice.”
Despite her outward frustration, Tanisha felt pretty good about the discovery. It was better to know now, while she was safe inside the tutorial. Now she would take time to do every step right, even if she was rushed.
Once the new knot was in place, the armor shifted under her hands. The boards bent and stretched and reshaped themselves in ways that Tanisha wouldn’t have believed if she didn’t watch it happen. Instead of a poorly-constructed sandwich board, she was holding something that was passably a cuirass. She wasn’t sure what to expect from it, since it was made of wood. In dARkness, wood was historically one of the lowest-tier crafting materials. But it was better than walking around without, she supposed.
“Otekah did say the tutorial was increasing survival rates, or whatever.” She shrugged on the armor and was relatively surprised by how well it fit. Immediately she could tell all the places it would rub, and she could even see where she was going to be restricted in movement in regards to her shoulder rotation. But it slipped over her head easy enough, and it settled into place relatively well.
Once the armor was in place, Tanisha checked the flashing text of the quest.
Welcome to the False Lands: Defeat a blue crabstrosity. There are many creatures in the False Lands—some are aggressive and some aren’t. All of them provide important materials necessary for crafting through the butchering system. The next part of this tutorial will instruct you to construct a sword, which requires you to have a blue crab shell. As such, a blue crabstrosity has been spawned nearby. It is not aggressive, so take your time in sizing it up and preparing your attack. Using tools as weapons is an acceptable strategy at this phase, though it is not recommended in the long term.
“Interesting,” Tanisha said, looking around her general area for her target. It didn’t seem to be spawned in directly near her crafting area, and instead she could now hear sounds coming from down by the creek. “As long as you’re providing me the materials, I guess I have little choice in weapon classes, eh?”
With a sigh, Tanisha made her way over to the creek. As she approached, a roughly human-sized muddy creature emerged from the water, pushing through the long grasses into the grotto. It resembled a crab, but it was larger and was covered in thick muck. She couldn’t tell exactly what the color of the shell was under the dirt and debris, but she had to assume it was blue if it was here. In the game, crabstrocities were color coded. The blue were the lower level ones, and were the weakest by far. There were also red and purple ones, and even black-shelled versions that were usually used for events.
Tanisha wrapped her fingers around the haft of her axe, and faced the lumbering crab.
Unlike the saladmanders, she was ready for this one.
Chapter 13
She circled the crabstrosity slowly, taking the quest text’s advice and sizing up her opponent. Tanisha was painfully aware that this was her first time dealing with combat in the flesh, and she expected it to be a terrible experience. The creature seemed unconcerned with her, and instead moved around in a very small space, as if it wasn’t able to leave.
Tanisha tried to decide her plan of attack. “When all you have is an axe, every problem looks like a tree,” she said, mostly to herself, but also maybe to the crabstrosity itself. She knew she was going to end up charging in and hacking away at it, but she wanted to make sure she was doing so intelligently. She was familiar with fighting crabstrosities in game, and she’d seen how similar Otekah’s fight had been with the saladmanders, but there was no guarantee this crabstrosity would act like that.
If it
was, its attacks would be forward-facing cones, and deceptively fast for the creature’s size. But how would the attacks affect her, if one landed? She had an HP bar, sure, but would it hurt? Would it knock her from her chair? Disembowel her entirely? She didn’t know, but she also didn’t know what her own attacks would do. Should she aim for its limbs, possibly remove the claws entirely? Or would her strikes always do the same damage, and she should just flail as much as possible?
The tutorial was the place to find out.
With a firm frown, Tanisha tested her grip on her axe, sweeping it through the air a few times. Despite the rough materials she had used to make it, the axe was well constructed and sturdy. Combine with the armor, she felt almost okay about doing this. She remembered the old days of dARkness, when fighting with armor equipped was considered an extravagance. If she was the equivalent of starting a new character in early dARkness, then she was better equipped than most to deal with a simple blue crabstrosity.
Not that it helped her anxiety.
She was nervous, and more than that, she was absolutely terrified. There were so many unknowns, so many factors that could change how she would approach this that she just didn’t have data on.
With a start, Tanisha realized she was so nervous she wasn’t even talking to herself anymore. She wiped her clammy hands on her brand new skirt and stared at the lumbering blue crabstrosity that was obviously ignoring her as it trundled around the area.
Sure, she’d be hunting before, and had killed her fair share of animals. She’d gutted and skinned so many deer that the idea of violence and viscera was not something that worried her. That wasn’t why she was nervous. Those kills were for food, materials, or trade. They weren’t a necessity, sure, but they were life giving.
This would be for survival. And not in a way that would promote extended life, the way a deer butchered for meat would. This creature would be one step on a long fight against what her family had taught her. The things she’d known growing up.
Darkness Named Page 9
