Caught a bird! Its uh...really tiny. It tried to fly a way when I jumped at it and its wings got caught in the bird glue. I just kinda broke it with my hands. Brown with a white belly. I'm trying to collect its feathers as I'm plucking it but its starting to look tinier and tinier as I do. Butchering didn't go great. Everything is kinda squished. I think I found the heart and the liver but I don't really trust myself on the other bits right now. I'll start roasting it and eat what I can for dinner.
Yeah, birds are usually small and even the large ones are super fragile. It took centuries of breeding to make modern chickens. Look out for signs of large birds, though: grouse and turkeys are both plausible finds given the flora around where you are. Wild turkeys are quite large and pretty much unmistakeable; you might be able to take one down by main force if they lack fear of humans wherever you are. Grouse are smaller, but still a decent meal, and very noisy: if you hear something that sounds like some kind of angry feather-muffled drummer riffing wildly in the trees, it's probably a grouse trying to get some. This sound can be heard from a great distance, so there's a good chance you will hear it if they are around, but you may need to do some searching once you do. Both species are regularly found on the ground, so you should be able to spear them, and, while they're big enough that it'll be hard to pin them down with glue like you could a pigeon or something, the glue traps will still help make their escape more difficult.
Rope is done too. I've got a couple of several feet ropes that are still kinda amateurish but look better then my previous vine-work. Not sure what to do with them.
Try setting snares. To make a snare, tie a noose knot by making a loop in your rope - called a 'bight' - and then looping the rope from one side of the bight around the other side and pulling that same free end through the second loop from 'below' (ie, the side of the bight) to make a knot that will slip tighter when pulled on. See below:
You can then tie the other end of this rope to something and lay the bight on the ground, where animals may step in it and pull it closed on themselves. You wouldn't think this would work very well, but it's actually quite effective, because animals are stupid.
So stupid.
Well it means I'm going to get really cold I guess. Is there any valuable resources in this area?
You're going to have a serious problem come winter. We need to work on that. That's the main reason I want you to be able to get skins. The area you might be in is too wide to say anything about specific resources but you've got a good chance of finding minerals, at least. There are also many edible fruits (and many inedible ones).
Actually, this lends itself to an interesting experiment. Look around and see if you see any relatively short broadleaf trees with grey bark, often with multiple trunks, with short (approximately thumb length) oval leaves with a point opposite the branch end and slightly serrated edges, and which, depending on the time of year, may have white to pink flowers that look a little like a rose, or may have round green to red fruit a couple of inches across. If you find this, you're looking at some kind of apple. There are crabapples native to the Americas, but the domestic apple was only introduced by European settlers, so if you should find one, we might narrow down your time period. To tell the difference I'd need you to describe what you see, though, and we might not be able to tell until we see flowers or fruit, so it's low priority.
Someone suggested making an oven, so probably that to start with. I do seem to have to use fire a lot.
Bricks are a lot of effort. The best way to make bricks in your situation is probably going to be to make what's called a
clamp, a kind of primitive kiln. You'd have to make as many brick forms as you can, then take bundles of wood laid on the ground and stack the bricks around and over them into a kind of large brick pile. Insulate the pile by packing dirt and mud around the outside and most of the top, leaving space for airflow and to ignite the wood... then, well, ignite the wood with a torch. You will probably get uneven results at first, but you'll get better at it over time - it's all in how you build it. I'm not sure I have any good starting tips I can functionally convey with words, though, so you'll have to get the practice.
You can also make charcoal in a clamp, using a similar principle but with wood and making the mud covering more airtight to limit burning, and smelt small quantities of tin or copper if you're lucky enough to find any. I'll circle back to copper in a bit.
I just didn't know if heating it up then solidifying it made it not-sticky. I guess its something I'll have to make whenever I want to bird hunt instead of just making a bunch of and keeping in a jar or something.
It doesn't stop being sticky, at least until it hardens completely, or if it gets too dirty so that the stickiness is covered with dust or something. You should be able to keep it in a jar if you had one, but you'd need to reheat it to soften it before applying.
Careful. If you're not you guys will end up as the gods of this world. I'm not sure what to feel if my children start sacrificing goats to you.
I'm
all for this. Well, I gave that away earlier. I did read this part first, though.
I was sleeping! People don't sleep with a pocketknife!
Well now you know better.I could get it open but between my toolset and throttling as mentioned above it got messy. I can probably eat the important parts at least. Maybe next time I can kill it gentler and it'll be easier. Birds are a lot more delicate than I realized. I think I broke all of its bones between murdering it and trying to get it open with pointy sticks and rocks.
Birds are extremely delicate. In fact, their bones are hollow. It helps them fly. Don't worry, you'll improve with practice, probably. I mean you might be a total idiot, but in that case you're probably screwed, sorry. Let's stay optimistic.
Both worked out reasonably well, and I do indeed have pajama pockets. Someone else mentioned exploring and I'll ask the same thing I did earlier, should I try making some shoes first?
I have no idea how you're going to do this. Make sandals out of rocks? You can't even cut down a tree yet so I can't recommend wooden sandals. Definitely focus on breaking those rocks you hoped were chert, see if you can get something sharp enough to make an axe, I guess.
Is there any particular reason I need to use a USB connector?
No, and, like I said, you're not likely going to be able to, but if we know what the connector is, I'll know (well, I'll look up) what pin the power goes into, and we can connect a wire to it. Well, two pins, obviously, if you know how electricity works, but you get my point.
I figured I could rip it out and recharge the battery more directly or replace it with a water wheel or something.
Trying to directly power the device, such as with a water wheel - which we totally could build if you can get the right minerals - would probably fry it, unfortunately, since it's expecting a specific amount of voltage and current. If you can open the phone and find the battery without breaking it, and lord knows the manufacturers all make it difficult these days, we *might* be able to charge it without setting it on fire, and I'm willing to try that. I still need to know what the power input is expecting, though, so I need the connector type.
It’s an IPhone XR. Rectangle port. Charger is a weird thing with a couple of copper colored marks on each side. I remember being annoyed at the upgrade because my old headphones couldn’t plug into the new charger without an adapter.
Goddamnit, Apple. All right, that should be the Lightning connector, cord looks like this:
Please confirm.
And uh I’ll hold off on declaring you my lord and savior until I get more input on the theological front. Call it my doubting Thomas moment.
Your loss man. And don't worry, I'm okay with you worshipping the other posters too. I am not a jealous god.
So, when you get to the point when you can explore for minerals, you're going to want to look out for
blue or green rocks, very colourful ones. You might also see some orangey-gold metallic rocks. Any of those could be copper-bearing! Copper-bearing rocks are usually very colourful. Copper is easy to smelt, which is why the copper age is one of the early ones, so if you can find some you won't have problems. What MIGHT be a problem is that you will also need a magnetic mineral like lodestone. If you have anything iron on you, keep an eye out for anything that attracts it, I guess. Lodestone is a fairly dark grey stone that has a slight sheen that looks, to me, almost oily. It's going to be more rough and dully gleaming than shiny, in my experience. Of course you could find a perfect crystal face which would look different. Unfortunately, lodestone is somewhat rare, although it
has been found in the continental US, so it's not impossible. Lodestone is almost always found on the surface, too (a theory goes that it is magnetized by lightning), so you don't need to dig for it or anything.
Hey,
King Zultan, he should totally worship me, right? I'm sure you'll have my back on this.
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Topic: Restarting Civilization from Scratch- With the Help of a Forum (SG) (Read 16518 times)