Securing The First Reserves Of Copper

May 2nd, 0001:

Once the morning came, I once again got everything in motion, except that this time the aura around the settlement was one of either guilt, sadness, or simple awkwardness. This was understandable since pretty much everyone in the settlement had either seen someone they knew die, saw a person get killed, or actually partook in the act of killing someone else.

And while at first, I had assumed that they would have a more emotional reaction than my own, I did have to accept the fact that outside in the wild, it wasn't exactly rare for tribes to try and kill each other.

Regardless, since a choice had been made last night, although there was a feeling of not being able to communicate between the two groups, it ended at that, there was no longer a threat, at least not one worth worrying over.

The settlement was coming together rather nicely, so to fix our predicament temporarily, I decided just to get everyone to continue working on producing wood and letting Daniel set off with Omar, Fransisco, and another person.

As for the other three, they just had to follow me while we took the new members we had begun integrating, and we began to make our way to where the new settlement was. On the way, eventually letting them ride in the boat Daniel was on when we encountered him on his way back from the new settlment.

Once we made it to the new settlement, I just made sure to get everyone to begin collecting the leaves that we needed to set up more beds since it seemed like we would probably be working on that for about as much time as the houses in the settlement. Plus, even if they didn't have 'blankets' or 'pillows,' a leaf mattress still felt better than the floor.

From there, I just hopped on Daniel's boat when we were taking what would be some of the last wood logs taken back to the original settlement (since we had almost already cleared all of the areas that we needed to build the settlement).

Once back though, instead of getting on my own boat to begin transporting wood, I made myself a new spear and sharpened my already pretty worn-out ax before putting some cooked meat into a wooden box split into two with the other half holding boiled water.

Why set up all of this? Well, I was about to enter the majorly unexplored wilderness to locate the cave I saw last time, so it would be best to be more prepared than usual. Plus, if things somehow managed to go south and took too long to get back, causing me to either get thirsty or hungry, I would have relatively safe water and food to eat.

From there, I just took the boat I had and made my way back to the settlement, spending about half an hour explaining and showing everybody how to make mattresses before setting off into the wilderness, sort of forward to the right when positioned looking away from the settlement.

As for how I was going to know that I was close, it was because the cave was connected to the side of a big hill that was fairly high up and was also pretty much the only one like itself in the area, making it really easy to spot from the top of a tree.

Thankfully though, I had an effortless time making my way to the hill as it seemed that there were no predators nearby, probably thanks to the fact that there was a huge human tribe that had previously been hunting nearby.

I didn't even need to make it all the way to the cave to secure copper ore though, as when I was close enough, I was able to see lots of recognizably bright cyan-light green rocks all around the ground.

And while at first I was perplexed as I had assumed that these materials could only be found inside caves, After some thinking, I realized that the reason for that wasn't because they could only be found in caves. Still, because over thousands of years, humans had probably been using up the ones that could be found on the surface.

While I was certainly happy and ecstatic that I would finally be able to get my hands on copper and secured accessibility to better material than stone, at the end of the day, it would all be for naught if I wasn't able to secure tin as that would mean that I wouldn't be able to produce bronze.

Because although, as mentioned before, copper was a better material than stone, it was not so by a large margin, but rather a small one, as at the current moment, it would take more effort than it was worth to smelt copper instead of just molding it through burning, especially considering that as soon as we found a tin reserve, all copper tools would become useless.

So, I continued making my way over to the cave only to be surprised by how large it actually was, as when I had seen it appeared to nearly be large enough to fit people on top of each other ( which was still pretty big). Yet, up front, it was clear that it was slightly less than double that.

And although the light of day was certainly helpful in seeing somewhat far into the cave, eventually, the light could no longer light up the area, making me have to set up a campfire after chopping down a tree nearby.

Despite doing so though, it seemed that I was still not able to secure any tin. Although the cave did still go deeper, it was obvious that the space was slowly becoming smaller the deeper one would go into the cave. As much as I wanted to confirm if there was a tin supply or not, I was not comfortable doing so without at least others nearby if something happened.