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[B398] (04:17 PM PST): 👋😝 ⛸🏄🔃

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[B398] (04:23 PM PST): ⛸🏄🔃

[B398]: 🔍👀 😋🙃

[B398]: ⛸🏄🔃 🤔

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“🤕🤒😩”

Benate sprawled out against the ground, spread-eagle. He liked the /playdead emote. It matched how he felt right now. The throbbing redness at the edges of his vision had faded away, along with the pain. His out-of-combat vitality regeneration had brought him back to a comfortable state within minutes. As it did, the first cereal he had eaten this lifetime reached durability 0 and depleted. His stomach pulsed once with hunger, and he noticed the moment as his maximum vitality dropped. It wasn’t particularly painful, he just didn’t enjoy the feeling of getting weaker.

He wasn’t sure he really wanted to tell xxLulSk8brdr1080kflipxx just how close he had come to death this time. Talking to his friend was really Benate’s only outlet to let loose, and be himself without having to worry about the hard realities of survival. He kind of still wanted to spare Skateboardflip of that part of his life. Besides, it wasn’t like Benate had figured out how to explain what was happening to him, even if he wanted to.

“🤔, 😑. 😗💨”

Rising to his feet, Benate needed to take stock of his situation. He took a wistful look at the ruined stick in his hand, snapped in the middle with its bark stripped off and hanging in little strips.

Stick

Class: (tem.tool.rod.wood)

Quality: 0.0

Durability 0.11 / 2

WSI: {0.1, 0.5, 0.2}

💪🧠👄 {0.01, 0.02, 0.0}

⚗ Hidden

Properties: {broken}

His weapon hadn’t survived the fight. It was a shame, he’d really liked this one too. Thorn was a such a great item perk, even if it was so miserable to harvest. Benate often stumbled onto items like this, which he only realized their value once it was too late.

He gave the stick the greatest honor he could think of: he focused on the item inspection screen and with an action of will and thought, he gave the fallen, lifesaving implement a –

★ Starred Equipment

There was a tiny shimmer of a feeling of the air. It was easy to miss. Benate could only hope that the system would understand his intention. Sometimes the world had trouble understanding the difference between things that were useful before they were broken, versus useful afterwards. He hoped to find a nice new replacement for his {thorn} stick before he got into another fight, but he expected to sift through a bunch of fragments.wood and shards.wood as they popped up in the meantime.

The sun was still high in the sky, but nightfall would still be coming quickly enough. Benate threw his useless {broken} stick far into the high grass, and then bent down to diligently collect his lost stack::cereal.

Having been forced to contend with a vicious attack so early left Benate thinking again about readjusting his strategy. The raw potential of abusing sigma sorting to extract high quality food out of the base variability of standard zero level plants had really appealed to him (once he’d figured it out). But his rush strategy for hitting a fast tier promotion clearly had limitations of its own. There really wasn’t a good way to get by in this world without a few bare minimum stats. He wasn’t going to turn around and give up on his idea, since getting locked into a full belly of trash-stat food –

“🤢🤮.” It sucked. You felt bloated. You had to run around forever to burn it off and free up slots, and if you didn’t stagger your meals, a bunch of your stats would collapse all at the same time. There had to be a middle ground.

He quickly checked on his belly to see how his current food was doing –

-

cereal-0

0.1/6

cereal-0

0.8/6

cereal-0

1.2/6

cereal-0

3/6

cereal-0

3/6

meat.bug-0.01

3/4

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

And noted that he was going to exhaust half his +maxVit,+maxSta soon anyway.

“😞😣. 🤷🕺, 👷👷👷! 🤤😋, 👍”

No point in complaining! Benate looked as his recovered cereals in hand. There was always some weird damage when you dropped or abandoned things, and food falling on the ground was no exception. He looked and saw that the average quality of his stack had dropped slightly, but interestingly enough the sigma variability had gone slightly up.

stack::cereal x 14, tier 0.07 (σ 0.65)

So, he simply wiped the dirt off of the three best grains he had –

cereal: ({x1, t0.17}, {x1, t0.11}, {x1, t0.08}, stack::{x11, t0.02, σ0.35 } )

[Discard] stack::cereal x 11, tier 0.04, sigma 0.35

And threw the rest away. It cost him a small, but easily recovered amount of stamina to extract the best three items from the stack, and he technically could keep doing it. But once he had, the rest of the stack remaining was only negligibly better than 0.0, and it was just a matter of diminishing returns.

He looked at the green, round seeds in his palm, rolling them about at random and appreciating their healthy sheen.

Cereal 0.11, “😮🌾😬.” Cereal 0.08, “😮🌾😬.” Cereal 0.17, “😮🌾😬. 😌.”

Of course, the quality gains weren’t all that impressive still. Even with his {Scrounger} bonus of +20% +maxVitality, 0.1 was still low-grade tier 0. He skimmed over the exact numbers from his food slots.

+2.68 maxVitality, +2.54 maxVitality, + 2.98 maxVitality

A nice improvement over their natural unmodified base of +2. Still, even with the minor gains he saw, the dominating power of tier was already subtly evident. It was the incontrovertible truth of the world that Tier pretty much conquered everything. It wasn’t linear. The different between tier 0.1 and tier 0.6 might not sound like much, but he had already experienced the reality of the numbers. A regular item would be improved by nearly 20% of its base stats at 0.1, which was nothing to scoff at. But at 0.6? Base stats of an item (barring abnormalities like perks) would increase by nearly 200%.

Benate looked next at the still, yellow softness of the remains.beast-0.41, and shivered. That was why he was so eager to reach the coveted peaks of tier 0 and beyond. There was no protection out here in the world, but strength. He was still half paying attention to his chat channel as he walked over to the body on the ground and hooked two fingers up through its little nostrils. He really ought to do this fast before another predator came investigating. He looked over the body for a good angle, and then kind of stepped one foot to pin down the beast’s lower lip.

Spreading its slack jaw wide, he jammed his free hand into its open mouth and gripped its lolling, cooling tongue. There was resistance for a moment as he pulled, and he jammed his heel down harder to lever his grip better as he strained. Then there was an ugly, sucking sound. Then, pop! His hand pulled away with a squishy, wet red lump.

Meat (beast)

Class: (item.food.meat.beast)

Quality: 0.35

Durability 2 / 2

WSI: {0.3, 0.3, 0.0}

💪🧠👄 {0.02, 0.5, 0.3}

⚗ Hidden

Properties: {messy}{unprocessed}

Food Slots: 2

Food Durability: 9/9

+💪Physical: 7.49

{robust}

He looked with satisfaction from his haul. He was a little disappointed at how his meat was always lower quality than the beasts they came from, but then again, he was a {Scrounger}, not some kind of {Butcher} or {Hunter}. Maybe there was a trick to harvesting meat that he didn’t know about yet. He’d try to see if he could ask Skateboardflip about it later. He worried it would be a hard concept to express, but his friend always had such keen insights into the game world. If it was possible for Benate to get his advice, it would probably be invaluable.

Thoughtfully, he looked down at the sad, deflated little fur balloon; with its buck teeth and cross eyed stare. With reverence and respect, he briefly went into his preferences and turned off his family-safe filter. The ‘remains’.beast were revealed in their true form:

carcass.beast-0.22 {stripped}

He looked grimly at a harvest point that he could only have described as ‘mutilated’, deep in thought. Sometimes, he had to remind himself of the true cost of survival. Finally, he looked away and re-enabled family-safe mode. Then his body filled with power as he stuffed the meat lump into his mouth with a slurp.