I had a lightbulb moment today. I’m fed up of chasing fish.

Every time my hunger dips, I stop what I’m doing, grab the knife, and head outside like I’ve never planned further than the next five minutes. It works. It keeps me alive. It also feels temporary.

The island has fruit. The fruit grows on trees. Trees can be replanted.
The solution has been sitting there the entire time.

If I’m here for the long haul, I need to act like it.

I headed back to the island with one job: harvest what I need and leave. No sightseeing. No heroic dives. Just infrastructure.

As soon as I arrived, I noticed a distress signal directly below the island. Of course there was. I added it to the list and focused on the plants first. Priorities.

I moved through the vegetation carefully. Some of it looks useful and isn’t. Then I found the Bulbo Trees.

Knife out. Controlled hits. Samples collected.

Once cut, they’re on a timer. That’s all I could think about as I made a quick detour down to the lifepod beneath the island. Inside, I picked up a PDA that helpfully informed me the Aurora meeting point was… the island I was just standing on.

Great. Glad we cleared that up.

I didn’t hang around. Back to base.

Titanium gathered. Indoor growbed fabricated. Crops planted immediately. No hesitation.

I stood there longer than I expected, watching them settle into place. It felt different. Less scrambling. More planning.

If this works, food stops being a daily chore. Water still needs attention, but solving one problem at a time is how this becomes manageable.

With farming underway, I checked my signals properly. Two lifepods stood out. One near the Aurora. Another roughly four hundred metres away and one hundred metres down.

I followed the first coordinate carefully. Adjusted for the compass. Reached it.

It was already looted.

I’ve clearly been there before. I don’t remember recording it. At some point in the past, I must have visited, taken what I could, saved, and moved on. Not ideal. From now on, cleared pods get marked properly.

On the way to the second lifepod, I found a wreck and went inside. I can’t help myself. Inside, I found a Battery Charger fragment and another Bioreactor fragment.

The charger is the real win. I’ve been rationing batteries like they’re rare artefacts. One more fragment and that changes completely.

The second lifepod was intact but empty. I had a small laugh at how it had all ended. The ocean has a sense of humour. I took what I could and left.

Back at base, I decided to expand. A tunnel. Another room. The fabricator and I had a brief disagreement about placement, but eventually it cooperated.

The base feels less like a crash shelter now and more like something intentional. At the same time, hull integrity keeps dropping with every addition. The bigger it gets, the weaker it becomes. Reinforcement is climbing the list quickly.

The crops are growing.

That alone changes the tone of everything.

I still need to head back to the Aurora and see what’s waiting in the Captain’s Quarters. That will be deliberate. Planned.

For now, though, survival feels… easier.

I don’t trust that feeling entirely.

But tonight, I’m not chasing fish.

I’m growing them out of the equation.

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