I set down the copper knife on the growing pile of other miscellaneous metal tools I’d created so far. Visually, my latest creation was far improved compared to my first few knives. There wasn’t much skill involved with the skill at the moment, so I chalked up the difference to my improved smithing level.

I set another copper ingot onto the anvil and began crafting.

The ingot morphed under my hammer into the latest item available to me: a rather ugly lump of copper attached to a rather incongruous wooden haft. It was a mace of sorts, clearly recognizable despite the shoddy construction. It made for a mean sort of weapon, ugly and grim, though perfectly usable.

Attack: 30/27

I hefted the haft of the weapon, enjoying the feeling of polished wood in my hands, but not sure as to the purpose of the weapon. If both sword and mace increased attack by the same amount, and the game didn’t yet have damage types — like crush, slash, or otherwise — then what was the difference? Querying the system revealed nothing tangible, so I shrugged, resolving to test out the difference myself.

Perhaps it was just a reskin at the moment.

“Nothing for it,” I said, making my way over to the mining camp. The ashes of several campfires littered the sides of the area where I had lit and cooked rat meat. My cooking level had increased all the way to 14 with the huge pile of cooked meat stacked in the corner.

The rock golem enraged on me as usual, and I clobbered it head-on. I could bob and weave to avoid the damage, but with a readily available source of food, it would waste recovery experience not to get hit. However strange that sounded, it was better to tank a few blows. Besides, the direct way cut down the average kill time from nearly a minute to just a couple of seconds.

The golem fell, and I busied myself with mining the copper ore rocks while I waited for it to respawn. One thing I’d learned about this place was everything took time. One kill with the copper mace wasn’t enough to figure out what it did.

On the third golem kill, I received a stunning notification.

“Ha!” I smiled, lifting the mace high. “So you’re how I train defense!”

With that figured out, I hunkered in to grind. Every time the rock golem spawned, I beat it down with the mace, then spent the respawn timer mining the copper. I did this over and over again, getting into the rhythm and slowly increasing my efficiency.

I wasn’t dealing any more damage with my blows as I was definitely not gaining attack experience, but my defense skyrocketed. I also started to get a better feel for mining. In the beginning, it sometimes took several minutes to squeeze an ore out of the copper rock, but as I gained levels, that time went down to the point where it only took three hits to extract an ore. Once I got to this point, I realized that the ore had a cooldown, not so dissimilar to the rat's respawn timer. No matter how hard I worked during the minute after acquiring an ore, I wouldn't get another.

After a bit over an hour of efficient training. I took a pause to review my gains.

I grinned and rushed over to the rat. A quick thwack drew aggro, and I grinned like a lunatic as the small rat chewed on my ankle entirely ineffectually. It tickled. Its teeth dimpled my skin, almost like it was trying to bite through plastic instead of tender flesh. It was still doing damage, but the amount was tiny. If I kept letting it gnaw on me it would eventually decrease my health, but it would take minutes, if not a whole hour, before it made any progress.

I crushed the rat and returned to the mining camp. I had a massive pile of copper ore ready to be smelted. It took several trips to drag all the raw material to the smithy, but eventually, I’d converted all the ore into ingots and started hammering out more knives.

I tossed aside the twentieth knife and turned to the pile of gear that had resulted from the grind. At level 4, I’d gained the ability to make a shield. At level 7, a chisel. Then platelegs, a battleaxe, and a chainbody at levels 8, 9, and 10. Each one looked shoddy as I’d made them the moment my level permitted, but that didn’t hinder my excitement at all as I tried on the armor.

Defense:13/10

Each piece of armor increased my defense by one for a total of three additional points. With the way that stats scaled, the armor would make me completely immune to the rat's attacks, and maybe even the golems, though that would require further testing.

Things are coming along nicely, I nodded to myself and examined the chisel. By process of elimination, it was a tool used in crafting, just as the axe was for woodcutting and the pickaxe for mining. I hadn’t yet started crafting, so I set the chisel aside and picked up the battleaxe. Wielding it didn’t increase my attack any more than the other copper weapons, so I went out to test it.

At first, I thought it was the same as the mace since I started gaining defense levels. That seemed odd since, so far, the system had been fairly consistent. It would make the most sense to me if the battleaxe granted a mix of experience or perhaps random experience on kill. I didn’t gain any recovery levels though, which ruled out the latter option.

It took 29 more rock golem kills to confirm that the battleaxe indeed granted a mix of experience. It was significantly slower than using one of the pure weapons since the exp was shared, but it did mean that one of my stats wouldn’t be left behind. I wasn’t sure if that was worth doing just yet.

With that, I’d officially surpassed 17 combat, and the rock golem no longer aggroed onto me. That was nice, and all the levels allowed me to figure out that recovery had an abysmal weighting of 1 for 8 in the combat level formula.

Five daggers later:

I eagerly set another ingot on the anvil but frowned when no new options revealed themselves. Just to double-check, I used up the rest of my copper ingots.

My smithing level now matched my mining, but it seemed as if no new items could be made. At least not with copper. I did have a fair amount of that silvery ore, though, but trying to turn it into bars directly didn’t work. But what about if I combined it with copper? I didn’t know much metallurgy, but weren’t alloys a thing?

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I went out to collect some more copper and that silvery ore and tried smelting them together in the furnace. To my elation, out came an ingot with a golden brownish hue that kinda reminded me of that powder in the GlowLuxe kit Rebecca had gotten me for my birthday. I thought it was called...bronzer? Wait...Rebecca?

I shook my head, struggling to suppress the memory. I had no interest in another...episode.

Copper was definitely one of the ingredients in bronze, so I supposed the name was accurate enough. I named the ingot and tossed the resulting lamp in attack — my highest stat. The only problem now was I couldn’t quite remember the other ingredient in bronze.

It wasn’t silver, even though the second metal was silvery in color. The issue was, most metals were silvery. I spent a good while on it, taking a walk around the chunk as I dared delve into my memories for an answer. Luckily, I experienced no more strange episodes which was a huge relief. Eventually, after the tenth lap around the chunk, I settled on naming the silvery metal tin.

There was a chance it was wrong, but it felt right. Besides, I had no way of confirming the information, so instead of wasting more time, I named it and moved on.

The lamp didn’t grant a level, but 280 attack experience was a far better time save than 10 crafting experience. It really showed the scaling experience requirements for higher-level skills.

Anyway, with a bronze ingot in hand, I went to the anvil and found I could recreate all the copper items in bronze. Crafting the bronze chain body took level 20 smithing, so I had to return to the mine to get more ore a few times. It took a grand total of 53 more rocks before I saw the twin notifications.

With that, I made a full set of bronze tools and put on the bronze armor. Bronze had a stat increase of 6 instead of copper's measly 3, and the moment I put it on, I felt a rush. Querying the system revealed that the simple act of smithing and equipping bronze gear completed most of the chunk objectives. Reviewing the list revealed that I only had seven more tasks.

Cut an oak tree, burn an oak log, acquire something, wield 3 somethings, and chisel something.

Cutting and burning seemed like the most straightforward tasks, so I returned to the forest and set about chopping trees with my axe. To my surprise, my bronze axe simply bounced off the trunks and created an error notification from the system.

I used the copper one instead until I hit level 10 woodcutting at which point I switched to cutting the large oak tree with the bronze one. The bronze axe was much faster than its copper counterpart, chewing through the regular trees like nothing and even speeding up the time to cut the oak tree to manageable levels. I tried timing myself, and my rough estimate put the bronze axe at 30% faster.

That seemed odd to me. Not the increase between copper and bronze, but the inconsistency within the system. Why was woodcutting different from everything else? It seemed fairly intuitive for a copper axe to increase woodcutting by 3 — just like the other copper-grade tools — while the bronze axe should increase woodcutting by 6.

It didn’t, though, and within an hour, I completed the chunk objective.

The oak campfire burned cheerfully before me. There was something calming about staring into the flames after a long day of physically strenuous activity. Sitting beside the oak fire increased my recovery stat by an additional six, which handily made cooked meat heal five health. As I ate more food and experimented with fires, I did some napkin math that indicated that each recovery level likely increased the effectiveness of cooked food by 5%.

The sun was heading down by now, flickering below the horizon. I watched it vanish, shrouding the land in a dim twilight that lacked the colorful beauty of a real sunset.

I considered tucking in for the night. I didn’t feel tired, and after my short rest beside the campfire, I felt too energized to sleep.

I was thirsty, though.

A pang of fear shot through my chest. There was no water on the chunk. Zilch. Zero. I was sure of it. This wasn’t the first time that the system had failed to set up basic necessities, and I really didn’t want to experience death by dehydration. Sleep was off the table. I had to figure out what the crafting grind entailed as swiftly as possible.

With that, I set about experimenting. Crafting was a non-combat skill, so I first used my five tools — knife, axe, pickaxe, chisel, and tinderbox — on anything and everything I could think of. The knife on logs or cooked meat didn’t do anything. And the chisel seemed to have no purpose whatsoever. The axe, pick, and tinderbox had a single use I had already explored.

The light faded further, making it even harder to see. Funnily enough, because the sun had set below the ground, it was still plenty bright near the edges of the chunk, especially in areas where the tree branches leaned out over the edge. The light from below gave the leaves a hellish cast as it diffused through them.

It was then that I remembered. One of the chunk objectives was to acquire something. It was likely — probable even — that the rock golem had a rare drop like the rat did. With nothing else to do, I rushed to the mining camp and started killing the rock golem.

To my surprise, only 18 kills later, I dug out a new item from the clear gel of the golem’s body. It was a gemstone of some sort. Colorful bands of yellow to orange to red ran across the surface of the rough stone. Bits of dirt and rock clung to the surface in places I couldn’t dislodge with mere finger strength.

I cycled through my list of tools, and once I tried the chisel on the uncut gemstone, I received a familiar error message.

“This is an...uncut agate,” I named the thing with the first gemstone name that came to mind and slammed the lamp into attack.

I dismissed the notification and pulled up the chunk objectives. Two of them had changed:

Acquire an agate, and chisel an uncut agate.

Two down, I sighed in relief. Now, I just needed to figure out what the three somethings were that I needed to wield and how to increase my crafting level by making those things. It was possible that the rock golem had another rare drop that I hadn’t received yet, but there was another option. The rat’s rare drop was still a mystery, and I also hadn’t used the rat tails for anything just yet.

The only problem was getting the raw materials, but I was confident as I began my rodent extermination.

It was well into the night by the time the mysterious third drop reappeared. It was a small square of hide with the short brown fur of the rat still attached. It had taken 89 rats to get it, and I’d collected three rat tails in the process.

I named it, then tried each of my tools on the fur. Once again, the chisel triggered a response.

Dammit, I gritted my teeth. It was another mystery item, but I still had the rat tail to test. Running through the tools revealed that the knife, this time, had an effect. The rat tail in my hand split into a long, floppy, gummy string. I tried crafting the rat fur again with the string in hand, but it didn’t work.

Hours passed as I futzed around. Eventually, morning found me sitting on the eastern side of the chunk, staring into the void. The ashes of a burnt-out campfire lay at my side and a coil of dark braided cordage in my lap.

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I’d done it, finally. After hours of trial and error, I learned that you must cook the gummy string to finish processing it. Like honestly. How does that make sense?

“Animal sinew, and string,” I named the two. Putting the two lamps into attack gained me another level, but I barely registered as I again used the chisel on the rat fur.

Like for smithing, a list of items I could craft appeared faintly in my mind. There were only five items on the list this time, but the last one was clearly chiseling the agate. It was hard to tell, but assuming this skill followed the pattern, it would likely take level 10 to chisel the gem.

With a firm nod, I selected the first item on the list. Before my eyes, the rat fur morphed into a pair of brown leather boots. Trying them on revealed that they granted an additional point in defense.

No crafting level, though.

I glanced at my status, reviewing the changes from the most recent rat genocide.

Combat level:18 Health:20/20 Attack:29/29 Defense:22/22 Recovery:8/8 Woodcutting:11/11 Firemaking:11/11 Crafting:1/1 Mining:18/18 Smithing:20/20 Cooking:14/14

Combat level:19 Health:21/21 Attack:30/30 Defense:22/22 Recovery:17/17 Woodcutting:11/11 Firemaking:11/11 Crafting:1/1 Mining:18/18 Smithing:20/20 Cooking:14/14

I’d gained a bunch of levels in defense and health since I was using the bronze mace. The problem was, through all that effort. All the hours of grinding rats. It had only given me one measly rat fur.

Which hadn’t even gained me one crafting level.