Cooked Meat—Materials: Raw Meat ×1 *Not enough materials!
Pure Water—Materials: Water ×1 *Not enough materials!
Torch—Materials: Wood ×1 *Not enough materials!
✦ ✦ ✦
“Hmmm?!”
Suddenly this pop-up menu-looking thing appeared over the fire. I gaped at it. It looks like a crafting menu. Why? Is this really actually a dream? If it is, then I’d like to wake up already! I tried pinching my cheeks again—even lightly whacking myself with the stones I’d picked up earlier, but I still didn’t wake up. Naturally, it really hurt.
“I just need to accept that this is reality.”
For whatever reason, there was a crafting menu here. As you’d expect from a simple fire, I couldn’t make anything too fancy, but nevertheless, this was a huge discovery. I wasn’t sure if it had appeared because I was thinking about crafting menus or because I had imagined pressing the right key to bring it up, but this would be useful to me. I could survive out here so long as I had this.
For the time being, I started experimenting with closing the menu.
✦ ✦ ✦
After some inspection, I discovered that I could do all kinds of things by picturing keyboard shortcuts.
I could access the object in front of me with the F key. By imagining I was pressing the WASD keys, I could move in all directions regardless of my posture, movement speed, and inertia, and accelerate by holding the SHIFT key at the same time. Doing so made me incredibly tired, though. Lastly, by imagining hitting the space bar, I could jump about head-high. This also worked after I jumped of my own volition, meaning I had kind of a jury-rigged double jump.
I also discovered that I could make myself crouch with the C key and even lie flat if I held it down. I could move in some really weird ways by moving my body on its own and imagining pressing the keys at the same time.
“I bet the way I’m moving would freak someone out if they saw me right now,” I murmured as I did a running jump of my own accord, slammed the space bar, and slid diagonally midair. I could jump stupid high, so I could easily climb to the top of a tree too. Moving like this wasn’t that big of a deal, though. It was a huge asset toward my survival, sure, but I’d turned up something much more important.
“Tab brings up the inventory!” You heard me right. Just like in many survival games, I could bring up the inventory by pressing Tab in this world.
From the inventory menu, there was a lot of stuff I could access, such as my stat screen and a basic crafting screen for all the stuff I could assemble without more specialized tools.
“I’ve found the crafting menu!” I was super excited. My chances of survival increased exponentially. I now had the power to create modern conveniences by picking up whatever random stones and branches I found lying on the ground. There was nothing to fear now!
So long as I can use the crafting menu, there’s nothing for a survival sim completionist like me to fear!
How naive I was.