I think I hit a tipping point in my current project today. It was less that something clicked into place and more like I’m figuring out enough about how to improve the plant to make educated guesses that are frequently correct. If I mess up the worst that can happen is the plant isn’t useful anymore, but I can just make a new copy of it from before I made a mistake. On top of that I am also getting much better at figuring out what actually works and what is useless or outright harmful to the end result, not perfect mind you, but better. This means that I am able to make sweeping changes and get at least a couple things right every time. Do that over and over again and I can make rapid progress.

I realized something today, I’ve been using the world as a crutch. It wasn’t till I started working on a project that the world didn’t know how to improve that I started to realize this, which I suppose was only a matter of time as the world was only able to create things that it had already seen.

That isn’t to say that the world isn’t a useful tool, it definitely is, I’ve just been using it wrong. Or at least I think I am, I don’t have any way to know for sure. I am now convinced that the proper way to use it is as a way to both store your designs to easily create latter and as a way to get ahold of more energy for the sake of improving something. For mana that last part isn’t very useful, but for Solar Energy it can be incredibly useful. I guess it's also useful if you're creating something potentially dangerous or fragile and want to avoid it getting damaged while you are designing it.

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I am now seeing that there is a lot more to plant manipulation than I originally thought. In hindsight it was fairly obvious, after all, Origin would have had to create creatures before anything could evolve into them. I wonder why I never thought to try and create something new without relying on the world.

Other than that I spent my downtime hanging out with Tiddol. She is getting close to finishing her latest creation, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.

Her clockwork creatures are pretty much everywhere nowadays. I frequently hear the distinct hum of mechanical wings in the trees above me or the whir of gears allowing someone to walk. Earlier today I saw two clockwork birds fight to the death, only for the victor to use the parts of the loser to patch up and improve their own body, and not for the first time either. They’re fascinating to watch as they are basically exactly like any other living thing, but made of something I only barely understand. Yeah, I am learning a lot about clockwork thanks to the fact that nearly all of the gears are plant-based, but even with that I struggle to understand how exactly it works. Tiddol sure doesn’t though.

Even if we don’t really do anything meaningful together, just hanging out with her is fun. Which I guess is meaningful in and of itself.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.