Fixer-Upper

I spent much of today in Dawnlands doing something I should have done long ago: tidying up my base. After about three hours of moving stuff around, about the best I can say is it's not as bad as it was.

Really, I ought at least to break everything down and start over. I should more probably move. I'm still operating out of the Grasslands Shelter, for the sole reason that very early on in the storyline one of the NPCs suggests you move in there and I did as I was told. It was fine for a while but it's far from convenient now. It's only the free, instant map travel that's kept me from doing something about it already.

As I posted a while ago, I have my eye on a sumptuous residence in a far more aesthetically pleasing location. It's all ready and waiting for me to move in but so far I've done absolutely nothing to make it happen. Instead, I've been squatting in a shack in a corner of the first village I washed up at, cluttering the place up with more and more crafting stations and storage boxes, giving no thought at all to what an eyesore I've created or how hard I'm making things for myself.

Something had to give and this morning it happened. I was ferreting through my dozen or so chests looking for something, when I finally snapped. I decided to clear the whole lot out and get organized for once. 

I began by making a whole load of fifteen-slot cabinets to replace my ten-slot chests. Then I made a wooden framework so I could stack them three high since you can't place them directly on top of each other.

Once I had that done, I moved everything from the chests into the cabinets, making more cabinets as I needed them. I also did something I really should have done from the beginning; sort everything into categories and put like with like. The game allows you to give each container an individual name so I labeled everything according to what was inside: Ore, Ingots, Herbs, Crystals and so on.

I invite you to imagine me, playing the game day after day, all the way back to the beginning of August, just dumping things randomly into unlabeled boxes, then having to search through all of them every time I wanted to find anything, which was all the time. 

This, of course, is what I always do. In most games I stop playing before I run out out of patience with the chaos. Not this one.

Everything was going very well until I hit an unforeseen snag. Dawnlands uses an excellent proximity search to populate a menu of all nearby storage, allowing you to select each container from a list rather than having to find its exact location. I was placing all my containers close enough to each other that the search would find everything, or so I thought.

It would have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky kids a previously unknown limit to the number of containers displayable in the menu, which weirdly seems to cap at 21. I had closer to thirty cabinets stacked tightly together before I began to notice some of them weren't appearing in the list. I'd packed them too tightly to be able to inspect them all directly so I had to split them.

Only there wasn't enough space. That's how I ended up moving all my heavy industry - kilns and smelters - out of the Shelter altogether. I got out my hoe and flattened an area just outside the perimeter. Then I moved the big crafting stations, which you can just pick up and carry, fortunately, and built a second framework for storage in the space that was left.

After a deal more fiddling I got all my inventory into the new locations. I broke down all the empty chests and then took a look around. It was better but still not good. Time for more drastic measures.

Last week, having tired, finally, of roasting meat one piece at a time over an open fire while watching the ten second timer tick down, before picking it off the spit and starting on another, I'd taken a tip from Kazeyo and stacked ten spits together over another fire, this one well away from my sleeping hut. 

That allowed me to roast ten chunks of meat in the time it had been taking me to finish one but it also meant I no longer needed the single spit. I'd just left it there out of laziness but today I broke it down for mats so I could use the space for something else.

Before I could put anything else there, though, the fire had to go too. It was still cheerily burning where the spit used to be. I knew I needed a fire close to my bed or I wouldn't be able to sleep so I couldn't just get rid of it altogether, which was how I came to have the bright idea of putting the fire inside the hut. I mean, there was plenty of room, now I'd gotten rid of all the chests.

I picked up the still-burning fire and placed it on the floor of the wood-and-thatch hut, which promptly burst into flames. As I'm slowly coming to realize, Dawnlands is much more complex than any F2P mobile port has any right to be.

I grabbed the fire and put it outside again before the whole hut went up in smoke. I got some wood and thatch out of storage and made good the damage. Then I picked up the fire and put it next to the hut, only this time on the outside. It immediately set fire to the door, which quickly burned to ash.

On my third attempt I managed to get the fire settled sufficiently far from the hut so as not to set it alight but still close enough to keep me warm and dry in bed. As I type this, though, I realize I've left the fire unprotected from the elements, meaning the first shower will put it out. When I log back in I'll either have to move it yet again or build a roof over it.

I could always put it back where it was but then I'd have to find a new home for my loom, which is now where the fire and the spit used to be. I moved it out of the hut I'd made to keep it out of the rain. A lot of things in Dawnlands don't seem to work if they get wet.

I'd put that hut up in a hurry when I realized I couldn't just plonk a loom down in the road and expect it to work in all weathers but I'd built it in a really stupid place. It blocked the path and made me have to go around it every time I left the Shelter, something I somehow just got used to doing. It's astonishing how easily you begin to treat these little inconveniences as something you just have to accept. I could have moved the damn hut any time. I just never did, until today.

With the hut gone and the windmill, also an obstacle to foot traffic, now re-located at the far end of the cotton field, the whole area looked a lot tidier. It still has the air of some kind of shanty-town, quickly thrown up after a natural disaster, but at least it's orderly and you can get from one place to another without literally going round the houses.

After all that work I find myself in something of a dilemma. I could carry on and complete the job, turning the whole place into a neat, functional base with everything just so, but that would only make it less likely that I'll ever leave. Or I could belatedly bring my Grassland Shelter era to an end and move somewhere more appropriate to my level, either the aforementioned house on the hill or perhaps some other scenic location, somewhere I can begin work on that castle I always planned to build.

I think the most important thing is not to make any hasty decisions. That's how I got myself into this mess in the first place. I'll take a while to think it over. After all, moving home is one of the most stressful things you can do. No need to make it any harder than it has to be.