#the requirement for this would be that the caves aren't collapsing

[clownprince]

Don't get me wrong I ADORE the Endgame finale it is beautiful and so heartbreaking. But personally I just think it would be so funny and so upsetting if it was like. Joker kills Batman and then almost immediately has a panic attack / mental breakdown about it and promptly shoves his ass in the dionesium

[greatwyrmgold]

Dungeon Logistics and Water

A follow-up to my Dungeon Logistics post. Like most fantasy-dungeon-related media, I tacitly assumed that potable water wouldn't be a problem. If your dungeon is full of clean fountains and ponds and stuff, or full of stagnant water that the mage can easily purify, you don't need much water storage.

But if you do? Well, that can cause problems.

The Problem

How much water do people need? That depends on a lot of factors, but the rule-of-thumb estimate for soldiers on the move seems to be about 6-7 pounds of water. (Let's round up to seven—waterskins aren't weightless.)

Mules need something like 85-105 pounds of water. Luckily, you can get away with dehydrating them a little between bodies of water; most pack animals endure short periods without water better than humans. According to my "research," if you stop every 2-3 days to let the mule drink a lot, you probably don't need to water it much in between.

If absolutely no water is available in the dungeon, operational range collapses. The ~30 pounds of supplies a dungeoneer can cover ten days of food, or three days of food and water. A porter can carry a month of food, or ten days of food and water. Two porters and three dungeoneers can last twenty days if they only need to carry food; they'd struggle to last six days if they need water, too.

For the three dungeoneers/two porters/one mule group I've arbitrarily picked as a standard, the maximum operational endurance is about eight days. A second mule increases this to ten days, a third to twelve, a fourth to thirteen. Carrying two weeks of food and water requires more mules than people.

Oases?

If pure (or purifiable) water is sporadically abundant—big springs of water separated by dry corridors or caves—you just need to carry enough water for the humans to drink between watering holes. (Of course, you're in danger of dehydrating if you can't find water as often as you expected...)

If you need to carry two days of water at a time, a dungeoneering group can last about two-thirds as long as if they didn't need to worry about water.

This assumes they don't have any pack animals on a "feast-and-famine" watering schedule. Adding one mule to that three-dungeoneer-two-porter group has surprisingly little effect, only boosting their operational endurance from ~14 days to ~16. But adding a mule to a five-dungeoneer group boosts their endurance from five days to twelve. With a second mule, those groups' endurance increase to 17 and 14 days, respectively. If you keep adding mules, the group's endurance is mostly limited by their hunger for hay, topping out around 18 days.

If oases are much scarcer than that, you need to start carrying water for the mules, and mules drink a lot more than people. If the "standard" group has to go four days between oases, carrying four days' of water for themselves and about 1.5 for the mule, they can carry about ten days' worth of food (which weighs only slightly more than the water).

Incidentally, if that "standard" group left their mule at home, they could still carry about ten days of food. If oases are separated by five days or more, they should probably leave the mules at home—including a mule cuts two days off of their operational efficiency. Unless they resort to...

Butchery (again)

In the distant past, when two-wheeled carts were the height of logistical technology, armies had two choices. First, they could stick to places where water was abundant; this was usually easy, since most things worth throwing armies at also need water. Second, they could kill a lot of pack animals.

The plan is simple. Step one, load up your worst livestock with as much water (and food) as they can carry. Step 2, march through somewhere no sane general would take an army. Step 3, don't give your pack animals enough water; abandon them once you've drunk all the water off their back. Step 4, reach somewhere with better water supplies before you run out of pack animals and/or soldiers.

If you sacrifice one mule per three humans, they can carry all the food and water those humans need for the first three days of their journey. They won't be much good for food if you haven't been feeding or watering them, but this gives you a logistical head start.

What if you want to take this farther? Well, the second set of mules will need to be fed and watered at least a bit on the way out; that will increase your mule needs by about 50%. So a group of six humans would need two sacrificial mules for a three-day head start, and three more for another three days.

Anyone familiar with Tsiolkovsky rocket equation can see where this is going.

Do you want a nine-day logistical head start? A third set of mules probably needs to be fed and watered for the first week or so of the journey, which requires about two and a half mule-loads of extra supplies per mule. Those two and a half mules don't need to be fed for quite as long, so they probably only need around one and a quarter mules, who you can get away with starving. A six-human group would need ten mules, on top of the five they needed to get a six-day head start.

Getting a twelve-day head start would need something like four mules per person, and a muleteer ("guy who makes mules go where you want them to go") can only handle five at most. Any farther and your expedition is just a mule-corpse-delivery service.

And of course, this strategy doesn't result in clean cuts of mule meat to alleviate your supply burdens—keeping the mules healthy means bringing way more supplies with you, which defeats the whole purpose of butchering mules. Human food is a rounding error on this trail of waterskins and blood.

Conclusion

We need a lot of water to live, and water is heavy. Pack animals don't need water as urgently as humans, but when they need it, they need even more.

If the dungeon has no water, it's basically impossible for a group of dungeoneers to last more than a week, unless they're willing to leave a lot of dead mules behind. If water is only sporadically available, the dungeoneers need to carry a fair amount of water with them; if water is scarce enough, pack animals become a liability.

On the surface, rivers and wells and lake-fed springs provide abundant water almost anywhere humans want to go. Dungeons are another story. And unlike food, it's usually hard to extract significant quantities of water from monsters you slay. Sure, you can drink blood if you have to, but that can cause problems, and draining all the blood from a giant bat is easier said than done.

Senshi has the right idea: Stay away from dry dungeons.

[pixiemage]

MCYT Fic Worldbuilding Concept: BLOCKS, GRAVITY & CRAFTING

This is now the second time I've decided to ramble on about the way I picture the Minecraft universe functioning in the fic world. The first time I chattered on about armor and inventory space, and this time it's how Minecraft blocks behave in a world where the characters...uh...aren't so blocky. (This is gonna get long, so strap in!)

Blocks are such an intrinsic part of the Minecraft in-game universe that it felt wrong to exclude them from fics, even though the characters we portray are decidedly less cuboid and sharp-edged on paper. So when I write within the MCYT world, I tend to write under the assumption that both crafted items and hand-made items exist at the same time.

Now, this all comes down to the idea that any MC universe is based in code, that every single item and person and mob and - anything, is made of ones and zeroes. Crafting is the same, and it works as a shortcut of sorts to bring new items into being using specified supplies. Two sticks and a few iron ingots? Boom, you've got a pickaxe. However it's also possible to build one by hand, if you have the skills required to do so. (TFC is one such player who I tend to imagine built his mining equipment with his own hands rather than a crafting table because the craftmanship would have been higher quality and it was a more personal and enjoyable way to gain his tools.) Crafting tables often result in cookie-cutter, standard-built tools that work well enough for what the average player needs...but if you're looking for something higher grade, you'll want to go to a professional. For example, a crafted bed would be comfortable enough, but getting a bed hand-made would potentially be softer, larger, and/or more intricate than what would come from a crafting table.

(This also means that personalized items can't be stacked in your inventory. So if - say - Impulse was to hand-make the clock he gifted Bdubs in Double Life, then it would always occupy its own inventory space, even if Bdubs dumped half a stack of crafted clocks into his inventory with it.) (EDIT: It JUST occurred to me that this ACTUALLY ALREADY MAKES SENSE with in-game mechanics! If you name an item, that item is now different from other items of the same type and it cannot stack with items that don't also have that name. So this tracks!)

BUT coming back around to blocks - the same concepts stands. A single block of wool is a whole block, a standard item recognized by the coding of the MC universe as a craftable item. So is a standard chest, a block of obsidian - even Pixlriff's precious deepslate emerald ore. Blocks like those, when placed, are assigned that location by the coding of the server, and have the ability to defy gravity if no blocks are placed beneath it. (Excepting, of course, gravel or sand or concrete powder or - you get the picture.) Once a standard crafted block is altered, it no longer can defy gravity the way its unaltered brethren can.

For example: the burning of the ranch in Double Life. If I were to write this scene (which I definitely need to do in the future), then any blocks that were burned would lose their structure and have the capacity to fall and crumble. A ceiling could cave in or a wall could collapse or a door could fall off its hinges. Any unscathed blocks would remain in mid-air...but damaged ones wouldn't be so lucky.

On a related note, a player could alter blocks purposefully if they so choose, either to carve detailing into wooden walls or break pieces off of a block of ice or...so on. A block of wool could be torn apart into fluffier pieces or spun into yarn, and a block of wood planks could be separated into individual planks if a builder wanted to so something a little more hands-on than simple block placement. Copper could be hammered into jewelry, glowstone could be chiseled apart to make small ornaments, and slime blocks could be...uh...separated into...smaller slime? (I'm not sure what the practical application would be for that one, but hey, it's possible.)

The crafting-vs-hand-made concept also works for food, in that a crafting table (or furnace, sometimes) can give you good food, but the choices are more limited and you can't personalize it the way you can if you cook/bake something yourself. Though I suppose, it also would mean the flavor of what you've crafted would be consistent and reliable every single time, meaning that - for anyone who has sensory issues - there would never be a risk of a favorite food being different and unpalatable if that favorite food is a crafting table recipe.

I'd love to see how this concept could be expanded upon as well! I imagine that it would be fun to write into other worlds, or fold this idea into the mold of certain characters and their known tropes and characteristics. Grian, as a known skilled builder, may be more likely to alter his building blocks once he has a crafted-block base built for the sake of detailing, while Mumbo - who has only begun to expand his building skills in more recent seasons - may rely more heavily on crafted materials. Tango, being knowledgeable in intricate redstone, may have a custom set of tools he uses specifically for manipulating his circuits, while Bdubs' fascination with the intricate inner workings of clocks has led him to acquire a very different set of tools of his own. Maybe Gem is skilled in hands-on gardening the way TFC is skilled in the world of true mining, and maybe Welsknight creates his own armor by hand since his more medieval apparel isn't something that can be made on a simple crafting table.

Just...some food for thought. 😉

[aprillikesthings]

Being an American and visiting Europe can be really surreal sometimes. Here's a list of random things I noticed in Spain while on the Camino Frances (which goes across northern Spain), while I was there (from a list I found while looking for something else in discord).

(Note: none of these are exclusive to Spain, that's just where I happened to notice them--and also, I've talked about some of this flavor of surrealness before, in a post from before I left.)

I kept bumping into old things next to new things. Sometimes very old! Like brand new buildings next to medieval churches, basically sharing a wall.

I kept bumping into history, in general; and Spain has had a lot of it. Here's a memorial to the victims of a massacre from the Spanish Civil War. Here's a church where a medieval king was crowned. This city has existed since BCE, was ruled by the Visigoths at one point, and was four different walled boroughs during the late medieval era. Here's what's left of a church from the 1200's after a different war in the 1800's. Here's part of the original city wall from the Roman era, it's next to the supermercado. Here's St. James portrayed as the Moor-Slayer.

(There's also the caves outside of Burgos that are an archeological site--they found hominids (ones who aren't our ancestors but our relatives) from 1.5million years ago!)

Storks! It was wild to be reminded that they're…real birds. Not just silly stories about where babies come from. Also they make a rapid clacking noise with their beaks, and love making nests on church towers.

A lot of places have near-daily bread delivery. The bread delivery vehicle honks constantly while delivering in some towns so people know to come get their bread, which is hung off their doors in a plastic bag.

Spain in general had very firm beds, both in hostels and hotels. But as a side-sleeper with bony hips it was a real problem!! Also there were a number of nights I couldn't sleep on my back because of blisters on my heels! So I'd end up just tossing and turning all night. (Note: I have since discovered this is a common complaint of Americans visiting Europe lol, beds are just harder there!)

There are a lot of nearly-deserted small towns. (it's much worse in places that aren't along the Camino, with entire towns basically sitting empty.) Even the ones doing reasonably well always have multiple stone buildings in various states of collapse. I always wonder how hard it is to rebuild them the way they were originally built, or how much maintenance they require.

Also in rural areas, houses/property for sale will often just have "Se Vende" and a phone number spray-painted on the outside wall.

Houses with yards often had walls instead of fences, which is just rarely done in the USA. Your back yard, sure; but not your front yard.

BUT there were very few suburban homes the way an American would understand it, at least in the parts of Spain I saw. Cities are often almost abrupt--you'd be in farmland, then a handful of single-family homes, and then suddenly nothing but multi-story buildings. I never ever saw American-style shopping centers with acres of parking--if they exist, they're just much rarer. A town in the USA with the population of like, Navarette (a bit less than 3k) would be entirely single-family homes with maybe a few two-story apartment buildings; not mostly what an American would see as city blocks. Like, if you were walking from downtown Portland--an American metro area somewhat known for being denser than most!--to outer Hillsboro, it's just over 16 miles. An entire day's walking, on the Camino. (Most of my days averaged around 13 miles.) But the day I walked out of Burgos I was in rural rolling farmland in a couple of hours, having started in the central part of town. Burgos has 175,000 people.

Wait. Let's do a better comparison.

Salem, Oregon also has about 175,000 people.

Measured across a narrow-ish section, Salem is 6.32 miles across.

Measured along the longest line, Burgos is still less than six miles.

And yes, they both have a handful of suburbs that are just a dozen buildings or fewer. Hell, Burgos has MORE of them. But Burgos is still just denser, and those suburbs are dense, too. Every city/town I visited in Spain was just way denser than an equivalent city/town in the USA. And it's not like Spain doesn't have the space.