Icarus, it has been fun.
Admittedly, “fun” has often meant being mauled by something the size of a suburban bus while attempting to sell coffee in a thunderstorm, but definitions become flexible after several hundred hours on a hostile alien planet.
Still, the writing is on the wall. Soon, CCF will be leaving behind the hostile coffee lifestyle and going to live in a forest, where the trees will presumably be less vindictive and the local wildlife will wait at least several minutes before eating Craig.
There are signs that the end is approaching. The missions are becoming fewer. The technology tree has surrendered its final secrets. The developers have begun repairing the bugs that made the game tolerable.
Most significantly, Myles has respecced his talents.
When Myles respecs his talents, the game is over. The remaining playtime is merely the digital equivalent of checking under the hotel bed to make sure nobody has left a phone charger.
Finishing the Quarrite Mission
The evening began with unfinished business.
The group still needed to locate the exotic Quarrite tunnel, convert the Quarrite armour into exotics using the biocleanser, secure the remaining rewards and return to Winchester without anyone being pulverised by an angry crystalline lifeform.
This was achieved with surprising efficiency.
The tunnel was found. The Quarrite armour was processed. Exotics were obtained. Zaph’s horse was stuck in a cupboard.
Then everyone headed home.
The horse-in-a-cupboard situation was neither part of the mission objectives nor particularly helpful, but CCF has always believed that a successful expedition should include at least one act that would be difficult to explain to an insurance assessor.
With Zaph’s horse safely stored among the household furnishings, the group began the journey back to Winchester.
It was during this ride that Myles finally discovered an important zoological fact.
Myles Realises Zebras Are Not Horses
Myles had been riding Patch for months.
Patch was dependable, loyal and striped. He had carried Myles across deserts, forests, mountains and several situations in which the phrase “Why is Craig over there?” had been followed immediately by violence.
Patch was also slow.
On the way back to Winchester, the others were repeatedly forced to stop and wait for Myles to catch up. Stripes and Crossing would surge ahead like racing animals bred by a secretive billionaire, while Patch followed at the speed of a supermarket trolley with one defective wheel.
At first, Myles assumed this was normal.
Perhaps Dave and Zaph were using some advanced riding technique. Perhaps they had better saddles. Perhaps Patch was simply conserving energy for the inevitable moment when Myles needed to flee something with too many teeth.
After several more pauses, however, Myles began to suspect that something was wrong.
Back at Winchester, he opened Patch’s statistics.
Speed: –3%.
Myles then examined Stripes.
Speed: +20%.
He checked Crossing.
Speed: +20%.
There was a brief silence as the truth emerged from the numbers.
During the week Myles had missed, the group had assigned him the lame zebra.
This had not been discussed. There had been no vote. No warning had been placed on Patch. Nobody had mentioned that every other zebra on the planet could outrun him while carrying a stone house and half of Dave’s reagent collection.
For months, Myles had simply accepted that everyone regularly disappeared over the horizon.
Now armed with this revelation, he inspected the equipment available for purchase from the orbital station.
There it was: a premium saddle guaranteed to increase horse speed by twenty percent.
Perfect.
Myles ordered it immediately.
The saddle descended from orbit in a supply pod, having travelled through interplanetary space at enormous expense. Myles unpacked it, admired the craftsmanship and read the manual.
The saddle was for horses.
Patch was a zebra.
After months of calling Patch a horse, treating Patch as a horse and expecting Patch to behave like a horse, Myles discovered that zebras are not, in fact, horses.
The saddle did not fit.
Presumably somewhere in the station’s customer-service department, a note was added to Myles’s account:
Customer ordered equine equipment for non-equine striped mammal. Refund denied on zoological grounds.
The group instead manufactured a bear saddle.
The bear saddle was apparently so terrifying to have strapped to one’s back that even Patch became five percent faster, presumably in an attempt to escape from it.
Patch was now only two hundred speed units slower than Stripes or Crossing.
Progress.
As the group says:
“We don’t have to outrun the Quarrite, we just have to ride faster than Myles.”
Patch, to his credit, has never complained about this arrangement. Myles has also stopped complaining, mostly because everyone else is already too far ahead to hear him.
Dave Discovers Volatile Material Becomes Useless If You Don’t Use It Quickly
Before leaving on the Quarrite armour mission the previous week, Dave had prepared a batch of volatile material.
The plan was efficient.
The material would continue brewing while the group was away. Upon their triumphant return, Dave would use it to manufacture grenades. There would be no waiting, no wasted time and no need to stand around the workshop watching dangerous chemicals do whatever dangerous chemicals do when left unattended beside Craig.
Dave returned expecting a neatly prepared stockpile.
Instead, he discovered that volatile material has a limited lifespan.
All forty units had become inert.
The material was no longer explosive, reactive or useful. It had transformed into forty units of expensive grey disappointment.
This was a valuable lesson in advanced chemistry: if a substance is specifically labelled volatile, do not leave it sitting on a bench for a week and assume it will maintain a professional work ethic in your absence.
Dave considered the inert pile.
The inert pile offered no comment.
Craig Discovers You Can Make Better Gear, Unless Dave Needs the Resources
Craig had ambitions of his own.
Having reviewed the available tools, or at least clicked through the technology screens until something shiny appeared, Craig decided to manufacture the finest pickaxe available.
The pickaxe required titanium.
Craig gathered the necessary resources and placed them in the foundry, secure in the belief that they had been reserved for his project.
This was his first mistake.
Dave required titanium for something else.
By the time Craig returned, the resources had vanished.
The titanium had been pinched from the foundry and reassigned to a more important project, with “important” defined as “the thing Dave wanted to build at that particular moment.”
Craig’s magnificent pickaxe remained theoretical.
Somewhere, perhaps, there is an alternative version of the evening in which Craig obtained his titanium pickaxe and became the planet’s greatest miner.
This is not that version.
The titanium would later be consumed by something much more expensive and considerably less useful.
There Is Still Money to Be Made in Coffee
The coffee crop was ready.
Coffee had once represented civilisation. A reliable agricultural industry. A reason to cultivate the land rather than merely strip-mine it and flee.
Now, transporting coffee for sale had become a grim endurance activity.
Myles collected the harvest and carried it to the market, enduring weather, distance and angry Quarrite along the way. The Quarrite had apparently taken a principled position against commercial agriculture and attempted to enforce it through blunt-force trauma.
The journey was no longer fun.
Still, the coffee sold for 1,200 Ren.
And 1,200 Ren is better than nothing.
It is also better than forty units of inert material, a horse saddle that does not fit a zebra, or an imaginary titanium pickaxe.
The Winchester coffee industry therefore continued, sustained by stubbornness, orbital commerce and the knowledge that even on a lethal alien world, somebody will pay a premium for a decent flat white.
The Best Part of Icarus Was the Broken Systems
Icarus has many systems.
Survival systems. Crafting systems. Weather systems. Farming systems. Systems governing oxygen, nutrition, temperature, construction stability and the likelihood that Craig will bring several monsters home with him.
The finest system, however, was the one that did not work properly.
For some time, Dave had been exploiting the weightless bag bug.
The technique allowed him to strip-mine caves and collect practically everything that could be removed from the landscape. Ore, stone, coal, sulphur, silica, random objects and possibly entire geological formations could be placed into bags without imposing the consequences traditionally associated with mass.
Dave used this shamelessly.
Where other players saw inventory limits, Dave saw a temporary disagreement between software and reality.
He would enter a cave as one man and emerge carrying the accumulated mineral wealth of a small nation.
Then the developers fixed the bug.
Suddenly weight had meaning again.
Dave was forced to confront a world in which collecting every object in sight caused him to become encumbered. Movement slowed. Inventory slots filled. Choices had to be made.
This was intolerable.
Icarus was simply not as much fun when Dave was constantly weighed down with stuff, particularly when the stuff had been obtained through entirely legitimate mining techniques that merely happened to rely on a defect in the laws of physics.
Dave became a proud, card-carrying member of MGGA: Make Games Great Again.
He remembered the good old days of Dungeon Siege, when a player could own a pack mule, pile every sword, shield, potion, cheese wheel and suspiciously damp piece of armour onto it, then send the mule to the shop by itself to sell the loot.
That was civilisation.
That was progress.
That was a society which understood that heroes should not be required to manage spreadsheets while standing in a cave.
Denied his weightless bags, Dave searched the technology tree for an alternative.
He found the portable dropship recall beacon.
Dropships: The Future of Inventory Management
The portable dropship recall beacon was a handheld device that allowed a prospector to fire a flare and summon their dropship to the current location.
This appeared promising.
Dave manufactured one and tested it.
The device worked precisely as advertised.
His landing dropship, previously stationed on the other side of the map, launched into the sky and flew to Winchester.
This immediately interested Myles.
Dropships contained fifteen inventory slots. Fifteen slots represented transport capacity. Transport capacity represented logistics. Logistics represented the possibility of moving vast quantities of material without riding Patch across half the planet at a majestic –3% speed.
Myles imagined mobile freight services, remote mining depots and a future in which crates full of pouches could be loaded into dropships to create layers of inventory storage that no responsible developer would ever have intended.
He acquired a recall beacon and summoned his own dropship to Winchester.
It arrived successfully.
Craig also wanted to try one.
Craig’s goal was slightly different.
He obtained a beacon, walked to the lake and threw it into the water in an attempt to make his dropship land underwater.
This was not a transport strategy. It was an experiment in whether expensive orbital equipment could drown.
The dropship landed nearby.
Craig’s contribution to aerospace research was therefore inconclusive.
Still, the recall beacons worked. Dropships could be summoned. Inventory could theoretically be transported.
For several glorious minutes, it appeared that CCF had defeated inventory management through aviation.
Then Dave looked farther down the technology tree.
What Goes Up Comes Down in the Same Spot
At the very end of Tier 5 sat the dropship landing pad.
It was the culmination of advanced technology: an expensive, powered platform designed to receive dropships with precision.
Dave studied the description and developed a plan.
The group could construct a landing pad at Winchester, deploy a dropship somewhere else, fill it with supplies and then recall it to the base.
It would be a freight network.
A revolution in logistics.
A solution to the tyranny of personal carry weight.
Dave convinced Myles to build one.
The landing pad was extremely expensive. It consumed all the group’s titanium, including the titanium Craig had earmarked for his pickaxe.
Craig’s pickaxe died so that aerospace might live.
The device was completed and carried outside for installation.
It would not deploy.
The land surrounding Winchester was gently sloped, which was apparently too severe an engineering challenge for the most advanced landing technology on Icarus. The platform that could receive spacecraft descending on pillars of flame could not tolerate a mild change in elevation.
Dave therefore extended the platform over the lake.
Myles placed the landing pad on the new structure, connected it to the power grid and claimed ownership.
Myles’s dropship immediately launched.
There was a roar of engines. Fire erupted beneath it. The ship rose into the sky with all the majesty of humanity’s triumph over gravity.
Then it descended onto the landing pad.
This was encouraging.
To test the freight concept, Myles rode to the lakehouse to collect sulphur. The plan was simple: travel to the remote location, summon the dropship with a portable beacon, load it and then return it to Winchester.
Myles reached the lakehouse and activated the beacon.
Back at Winchester, the dropship rose gracefully from the landing pad on a pillar of flame.
It climbed into the sky.
Then it came back down onto the landing pad.
It had travelled several metres vertically and none horizontally.
Myles tried again.
The dropship launched.
The dropship returned.
Apparently the portable recall beacon had issued a complex navigational command which the dropship interpreted as:
Go somewhere else, unless there is a landing pad immediately beneath you, in which case reconsider.
Further testing commenced.
Dave switched off the landing pad’s power after the dropship took off.
The dropship rose into the air.
Then it descended once again onto the powerless pad.
The landing pad did not require electricity to attract dropships. It had become a gravitational anomaly, a sacred nesting site or a piece of airport infrastructure governed by union rules.
Myles unclaimed the pad.
The dropship took off.
For one thrilling moment, it appeared that the curse had been broken.
The ship descended nearby and crushed part of the greenhouse.
Technically, it had landed somewhere different.
The greenhouse would have preferred a less literal interpretation of the test criteria.
Myles then threw another recall beacon near Dave’s dropship.
Myles’s dropship ascended, ignored Dave’s pod, ignored the beacon and returned to settle obediently on the landing pad.
The group had built a device whose sole purpose was to ensure that a dropship already at the base could leave the base briefly and then return to exactly the same place.
It was a vertical transport system.
What goes up must come down, apparently in the same spot.
The landing pad was destroyed.
It was a totally useless device.
Fortunately, dismantling equipment returns half of the resources used to construct it, allowing the group to recover a portion of the titanium that had been sacrificed to this monument to technological optimism.
Not enough titanium for Craig’s pickaxe, obviously.
That would have been absurdly convenient.
Craig Is Quiet
While Myles and Dave were wrestling with the dropship landing pad, Craig became quiet.
Too quiet.
CCF has learned over many years that Craig’s silence should never be interpreted as inactivity. It means only that whatever he is doing has not yet become visible from the main base.
The group needed more wood.
A conventional player might chop down nearby trees and transport the timber home.
Craig identified a more ambitious solution.
He moved to a nearby hill where trees were plentiful and began constructing a sizeable stone house overlooking the lake.
The house was not a temporary logging shelter. It was a proper building, positioned dramatically above the landscape like the country estate of a minor aristocrat whose fortune had been made through unexplained monster incidents.
Having completed the house, Craig confronted another problem.
The direct route down the hill was inconvenient.
Riding around the hill would take too long.
Craig therefore built a double-width staircase from the stone house all the way down to ground level.
The group had requested wood.
Craig delivered a hilltop residence and a monumental public-works project.
The staircase descended across the hillside with the confidence of something designed by a civilisation expecting several thousand daily commuters. It was wide, imposing and entirely proportionate to the needs of one man who did not want to ride around a corner.
Nobody had asked for it.
Nobody planned to visit.
This has never stopped Craig before.
Tonight’s Campfire Song — by Dave
To be performed beside the fire while staring mournfully at forty units of inert material.
Started out with a C64,
Loading games from tape.
Waited twenty-seven minutes,
Then watched the program break.Came to distant Icarus,
With drills and guns and beans.
Built a home, grew coffee plants,
And murdered local things.Dave found bags with weightless space,
And mined the mountains bare.
Then the developers repaired them,
Proving life is never fair.Now every pocket’s full of stone,
Each pouch has reached its end.
The landing pad goes up and down,
But will not go round the bend.So spread the maps and pick a world,
Find somewhere new to stay.
Keep the bugs that make things useful,
And throw the rest away.We’ll pack the mounts and leave the base,
Find forests, fields and prey.
But Patch will still arrive tomorrow,
Though we all left yesterday.
There was probably a final chorus, but Dave was interrupted by the sound of Craig adding another flight of stairs.
Did We Learn or Achieve Anything This Week?
Against considerable odds, yes.
We learnt:
Icarus developers fixed a useful bug and replaced it with top-tier, broken equipment.
The weightless bag, which solved an actual problem, was removed. The dropship landing pad, which solved no identifiable problem, remained proudly available at the end of the technology tree.Our time on Icarus is drawing to a close.
The missions are nearly finished, Myles has respecced and Dave has begun nostalgically comparing modern game design with a pack mule from 2002.Myles will ride for months on a lame zebra and not complain.
Provided nobody shows him the statistics, Myles will accept being two hundred speed units behind everyone else as an ordinary feature of group travel.
Achievements Unlocked
Dave — WTF Devs
Build super advanced, yet useless technology.
Dave reached the pinnacle of the technology tree, consumed the group’s titanium and created a landing pad that allowed a stationary dropship to briefly become airborne before returning to where it started.
Humanity has conquered space, but not lateral movement.
Myles — Endless Possibilities
Try to stick a crate full of pouches in a dropship to achieve infinite transport capability.
Myles looked at fifteen inventory slots and immediately began planning nested storage systems that would inevitably be patched by the developers three days after he perfected them.
Craig — Hill of Dreams
If you build it, they still won’t visit.
Craig solved the group’s timber shortage by constructing a substantial stone house and a double-width staircase down an entire hillside.
The house overlooks the lake.
The staircase is magnificent.
Nobody knows why either exists.
Next Week
Tune in next week to discover whether this was CCF’s final night on Icarus.
Will the group complete one last mission?
Will Dave find another broken system worth exploiting?
Will Craig extend the staircase across the lake?
Will Myles finally acquire a mount capable of keeping pace with moderate continental drift?
Or will everyone abandon the hostile coffee lifestyle and move to a forest, taking with them several tonnes of unused building materials, half a landing pad and one deeply inadequate zebra?
Whatever happens, Patch will arrive shortly afterward.
