Tanisha was about halfway to Level 6, and she wanted to get there to even out the balance between her stability and hunger. But she knew the fastest way to gain character levels wasn’t through grinding crafts or gathering. It was through weapons.
She opened the crafting menus and found the outfitting workbench. Every morning, she was reminded of her desire to eventually craft herself a length of cloth to use as a towel. The workbench required a few more materials, things she didn’t have. They weren’t unobtainable. She’d gotten a claw and fur from the bear she’d hunted, and so she would likely only need one more to get the remaining amount. The stinger would be the hardest part, since it came from soldier bees. But luckily she’d already found bees, and would just need to go through the tedium of tracking them back to their hive.
And so that was her next day. She started with the bear first. It was easier to find one when she knew what she was looking for. She spent another hour dancing around its attacks and wearing it down with her hammer. The bear alone wasn’t enough to level up her hammer skill, but it got her pretty close. She knew she’d wrap it up when she got to the bees.
But her hammer was too damaged to be used further after the bear, so she tossed it to the ground beside the butchered animal and crafted another. She was glad things despawned eventually—there was nothing she could do to deconstruct or recycle the discarded weapons. And if they didn’t despawn, leaving them lying around would feel way too close to littering for Tanisha to feel comfortable with.
While she was crafting, Shinji picked up the hammer. For a moment, Tanisha thought he might do something with it. Could he repair it? But after examining the tool, he instead just gnawed at the handle like a teething puppy. She let him have his fun until she was finished crafting her new weapon, and then together they moved on.
Finding a beehive was more difficult than finding the bear. When she found the worker bees again, they were meandering around in seemingly random directions. She knew that they would return to the hive for the night, but she didn’t want to wait until then. Instead, she searched around the area, taking advantage of her chair’s ability to tower over the environment. It took about thirty minutes or so to find the vaguely-hexagonal, mound-like shape of the hive, nearly hidden by tall grass. It was something like an anthill, with a large opening at the top. In other words, nothing like a beehive Tanisha had ever seen. But it was studded with little yellow hexagons along the six sides of the structure, and so Tanisha knew she’d found the right thing.
“I wonder what state it’s in,” Tanisha whispered to Shinji, as they watched the bees milling around the hive. Beehives in dARkness gained levels as the workers returned, based on the number of plants they’d visited. Higher leveled hives produced more bees, especially soldiers. There was a maximum level that caused the hive itself to transform into a Queen Bee boss when threatened. She hoped this one wasn’t that far along. Only a single stinger was needed, and she didn’t want to fight the boss with an under-leveled weapon.
Taking a few deep breaths, Tanisha turned and attacked one of the nearest worker bees, who was still bumbling around in the high grass near the hive. As soon as she struck it, there was an audible buzzing from the hive, alerting her that the soldiers were on the way. Luckily, the bee fell before the might of her hammer quickly, and she was positioned and ready when the first enormous soldier emerged. The hive still buzzed though, and so Tanisha knew more would be coming.
Fighting the soldier was much like a scaled-up version of the worker. They only took three more hits to kill, but she could only fit in two attacks between the thrusts of their bulky stingers. The hive disgorged four of them total, one at a time, but faster than Tanisha could manage cleanly. It was a challenge to deal with more than one, since their attacks were fast. Instead of trying to take them down quickly, she focused on avoiding the attacks. She tried to make sure all of the blows from her hammer landed on the same target, and just lashed out whenever she felt safe.
Once the last soldier was felled, she went around and gathered her spoils. It wasn’t a whole lot, for the amount of time she’d invested. Last time she’d fought bees, she’d walked away with a ton of materials. This time, she had barely a handful of wax and honey, but three stingers. And that was all that mattered.
With everything in her inventory, Tanisha checked her character sheet. She was just about to level again. For a moment, she considered picking another fight to finish off the level. But the sun was low in the sky. It was the problem with using a hammer as a weapon, instead of actually taking the time and effort to make a real weapon. Fights took longer. The trade-off was that the tool was easy to replace. If she was using a sword and it broke after fighting the bear, that was a huge loss and she would have spent the whole day dealing with crafting another. It would have required farming and crafting she just didn’t have to do for the hammer.
Tanisha wasn’t sure if time spent in preparation or time spent in combat was more worthwhile, but this one was less of a pain. And right now that was enough.
She gathered Shinji—who was hiding a few feet away behind a handful of rocks he seemed to pile up in front of himself—and they took off towards camp. She didn’t want to get caught out after dark.
The next morning, Tanisha delayed her morning routine so she could focus on getting the outfitting workbench crafted. As with the others, the base was a pair of legs to make the working surface, while most of the other materials became tools, like a sewing needle made from a bee stinger, and a pair of shears from bear claws. There was also a raised surface made of rock that she didn’t quite understand. It wasn’t until she was finished the craft that she saw it was supposed to be a loom.
But once the workbench was complete, she wasted no time. Crafting cloth took just a few grasses, but the job itself took a lot of work. With the bear claw shears, she followed the spectral blueprint’s directions and sliced the long grasses down into long plant fibers, before affixing them to the improvised stone loom. After that, it was a simple process of weaving the fibers together until they formed a square cloth. The finished product was as soft as cotton, and about eighteen inches on each side.
She didn’t see a blueprint for what she wanted, so Tanisha took her time and crafted about six squares of cloth, and then fumbled with the makeshift needle and thread herself to combine them into a single large sheet that totaled three feet by four and a half feet. It wasn’t pretty—without the aid of the blueprint system, Tanisha knew very little about sewing—but it would function. She headed down to the river, eagerly stripping out of her clothes so she could take a proper bath. And then towel off after.
Once she felt clean—and her hair was tucked into the towel which she then wrapped around her head, instead of freely dribbling water down her back and keeping her shirt uncomfortably damp for hours—she took a deep breath and looked around the camp, trying to figure out her next improvement. She had plenty of meat now—both from her bear hunts, as well as from the three traps catching at least two raquail a day. Raw food would spoil if left uncooked for too long, and while cooked food lasted longer, it would still eventually go bad at the rate she was accumulating it and then not using it.
Going through the crafting menus, Tanisha found the solution to that problem. Drying racks were, to her memory, added to the game in a later patch, but it seemed she was mistaken. Or that Otekah had added them in on their own. In dARkness: Online, they could be used to process raw meat into dried jerky. The jerky was slightly less filling than cooked food, and so represented a loss in hunger gain per material, but it spoiled at a drastically reduced rate. A piece of jerky in the mobile game could last well over three months.
Not that Tanisha wanted to be here that long. But it would be nice to be prepared. And jerky was portable.
The drying racks were easy to craft, consisting of just a handful of sticks to build the frame, and a couple of ropes to secure them. By the afternoon, all of her bear meat was hanging out to dry.
It wo
uld take a couple of days for the meat to finish its transformation, so she moved on.
There weren’t too many other things she wanted to do to the base. She’d already decided she was going to stick with the hammer—the potential of a weapon breaking while she was away from her crafting materials made her nervous—so she pulled out some ingredients and set about crafting a bunch of hammers. If she was going to use a sub-par weapon, she’d want it to be a good one. A high-quality weapon would make a big difference. Not only would it be significantly more durable, it would do more damage. In theory. Other tools didn’t, but Tanisha had never used the hammer as a weapon in game.
She made herself thirteen normal-quality hammers in a row before she managed to make a high-quality one. That was way faster than she was expecting. She was almost disappointed that she didn’t get through an entire toolmaking level on the way there.
The high-quality hammer itself didn’t even look all that different from the others. It was just… nicer? Tanisha wasn’t sure how it was different. Maybe a slight coloration change?
But she could tell it was different on sight.
“Well, it’s too late to go out for a test drive now,” Tanisha said to Shinji before depositing the high-quality hammer in her inventory. “But have you got any plans for tomorrow? I think we might go out for a real hunt. Or, you know, I’ll hunt. You hide.” She smiled down at the creature before turning to get dinner set up for them. “Gonna need a lot of levels.”
Chapter 32
When the sun rose the next morning, Tanisha was already awake. The nervous excitement from the prospect of hunting kept her from sleeping deeply. She had made sure to get as much sleep as possible though, forcing herself to a meditative state whenever she caught her mind rumbling through a potential fight. There was no room for a sluggish stamina and stability bar.
Her morning ritual went by quickly, aided by her ingenious towel, and Tanisha and Shinji were off into the forest just a short time after dawn.
Tanisha didn’t want to hunt down another bear. Not only did she have no need for its resources, it wasn’t enough of a challenge. She wanted to face a herd. This wasn’t real life, where she was forced to follow law to bring back just one trophy. Instead, she wanted to hunt like she was in a video game, like she had with the bees. She would clear as much as she could and collect the spoils after, bringing back a huge pile of resources to process and grind up her skills on.
Truth be told, she didn’t want to hunt at all.
She wanted to farm.
There was a biome split somewhere in the forest. The area behind her was full of berry bushes and trees, and in front of her was tall grass and trees. It reminded her of the area she’d spawned in, for the tutorial. Was it the same one? Tanisha had crossed that border sometime during the sprint in the pitch black of night. If it was the same one, it was disturbingly close to camp.
Had she been running in circles in the dark, to still be in this forest when dawn broke?
Tanisha tried to move past the thought. She focused on the hunt.
It didn’t take her long to pick up the trail. Once she was in the grassy woods, it was easy to locate a spot where the grass had been trimmed down. Since it was just her out here—at least, so she’d seen so far—and she hadn’t gathered this grass, it meant it had to be something else. She’d already seen sleipdeer eating grass on her first day, so she hoped that meant some would be nearby. The ground wasn’t marked with tracks, but she could see another clipped-down bunch of grass near at hand. Tanisha made her way towards it, looking for the next sign. And then the next one.
After about an hour of easy tracking, Tanisha and Shinji caught up to the herd. There were more than a dozen of the creatures, and Tanisha felt her heart flutter with the adrenalin of approaching combat. She readied her hammer.
Common sleipdeer were no large threat, unlike the Uber version she’d fought what seemed like weeks ago. Their attacks were wildly flailing cones of damage from each of their six legs, as well as their bucking antlers. The only real time a sleipdeer was dangerous is when it was in a herd. Their attack angles could overlap, turning the herd into an impenetrable ball of hooves.
And the issue was, sleipdeer didn’t travel in herds in dARkness: Online. They were solitary creatures, unlike these. So, she wasn’t exactly sure how to approach them here. She could stalk the herd for a while, looking for a chance to pick a few off if they separated. But that could take all day. And they might not even separate at all. The trail she followed to find them had not branched, so the herd might be predisposed to sticking together at all times.
If she was going to do this, it was going to be done the hard way.
Approaching the grazing sleipdeer was no challenge. Because they weren’t hostile, they ignored her. Even when she approached with hammer in hand, getting so close as to being able to reach out and touch one of them on the flank if she wanted to, they still didn’t flee. It wasn’t until she actually struck that they reacted to her presence.
Of course, when she struck? Their reaction was not minor.
The whole herd turned on her as soon as her first target cried out with a warbling high-pitched whinny. She was happy to see the little red twelve that popped up out of the hit, confirming the high-quality weapon increased her damage. But her excitement was cut short by the anger in the herd’s collective eyes.
Tanisha ducked out of the way of her first target’s attacks, as its hooves flailed wildly when it kicked and bucked. But she was unable to move back in after the attack ended. Instead, another sleipdeer had stepped up past it towards Tanisha, and was just beginning its attack animation. She kept back, just to be safe. But then another charged in and started kicking and flailing. Tanisha found herself stuck with her hands at her sides, directing her chair to backpedal around, strafing carefully as she tried to keep track of the sleipdeer she’d struck.
But that was useless. The herd became an endless storm of flailing hooves, and she lost the injured sleipdeer in the chaos. It was interesting to see that, even though the sleipdeer hit one another with their feet, they didn’t seem to do damage to each other. Instead, they blended together and became an amorphous blob of potential damage.
She had to keep moving. It had taken her days to get back to full health, and a suit of armor was a considerable amount of wood that could have been used for fuel. She was loath to waste it by taking avoidable damage.
“Not good,” she said to no one in particular, since Shinji had long since abandoned her position to flee among the trees. “Regretting this!”
Tanisha started flailing attacks at whichever sleipdeer she could reach safely. From these creatures she drew red twelves. There was no way to tell if she was making progress against any particular target, but it didn’t matter. It was going to take too long to do this. She was just whittling them down, and a dozen creatures would have a lot of HP for her to work through. There had to be a better solution.
She backed off. If she put enough distance between her and the herd, they would reset and go back to grazing. They weren’t aggressive mobs, so they should turn away sooner rather than later.
True to her expectations, most of them turned around and wandered back into the forest after a moment. But a handful stuck with her. These five seemed insisted on chasing her down despite the distance. Almost as if she’d angered them more than the others. Most likely because she’d hit them.
Five was manageable.
Tanisha turned her chair around and re-entered the fray.
Things went much better.
With only five enemies to engage with, she was able to position herself to synchronize their attacks. She would swing at one of them and dart out of the storm of flailing hooves before repeating the process. There wasn’t a consistent number of hits it took to fell each sleipdeer, which made sense. She had just been flailing into the herd.
As soon as they were down, she rushed forward to engage the rest of the herd. They ignored her once more, and Tanisha
wasted no time. She dove in and landed as many hits as possible, then retreated again when they came for her. This time she kept three as she approached the carcasses of her previous kills. Three were much easier to handle than five, and it was only a few minutes of slamming red twelves out of them before she was able to circle back and grab more.
It took the better part of the day to get through the whole herd this way, but she showed no mercy. By the end, her hammer skill was by far her highest level, and she was getting thirteen damage from each strike instead of twelve.
When the last sleipdeer fell on the pile, she opened her character sheet to check exactly where she landed. What she saw shocked her.
She had gained three whole character levels.
Tanisha grinned, although it was a tired grin. Her stamina was pretty low, and she was starting to feel fatigued. But she ignored the prompt to apply her levels to her bars and instead opened her inventory. She wanted the haul from her kills before she worried about levels or even returning to camp.
Butchering the herd went faster than getting the kills in the first place. She gained another level in butchering, but that was small potatoes compared to the enormous advancement of her weapon skill. Even if the high-quality hammer was starting to look a little worn down.
At the end of her efforts, Tanisha had a whopping thirty-five meat, eighteen hides, and seven antlers. It seemed like more than she should have gotten, but perhaps she’d gotten a high-quality find at some point. Her butchering skill was higher than her toolmaking, and she’d gotten a high-quality off that already.
Tanisha directed her chair back towards camp, but not before she located Shinji. The furry creature had been hiding among some low brush, a decent clip from where all the combat happened. She was glad he wasn’t scared off by the fighting, and instead just kept himself safe.
Since she wasn’t sure what she needed antlers and hides for, Tanisha perused her crafting menus. Antlers were used for mostly weapons, although there were some trap options that used them that wouldn’t require a metalworking workbench. That made them automatic winners. Hide was used for warmer clothes, which Tanisha didn’t really need. The weather was fine, and her own clothing was still in good condition. But they were also used to make temporary shelters, and that was nice. She could make a little lean-to that she could use to sleep safely while traveling.
Darkness Named Page 23
