Putting on the Green Thumb

                      When we last left off, we had just tamed a Quetzal and used it to do a few metal runs up and down the mountain. We now have lots and lots of metal. We had started building a pin for the dinos out of behemoth gates. The process of gathering materials for that was a long one, but we finally got it done and were able to move our dinos back across the river with us. It was nice having them all close to home again, and at least a little protected from any threats. With our last few trips up the mountain however, we haven't seen the giga. I'm still hoping he has disappeared and hes locked in an endless struggle with Vanilla Ice like Gandolf and that cave monster from LOTR.

                    My wife had decided to build me a greenhouse, she learned all the engrams for the building, but I was the big gardener at our old base. This time, we were going to do it right, with a greenhouse. We needed to make a crystal run though, since we were running a little short. So, we loaded with some tools and grabbed the quetz and scooped up Flynn (our ankylo) while my wife rode Dexter up the mountain. We were skipping the metal since we had more than we could melt at the moment. Basically, just obsidian and mainly crystal. With the quetz, we were going to be able to carry plenty back for the greenhouse and then some.

                    On the first mountain, there wasn't much crystal, so we flew to another one near by. On the way to that one, we saw the giga. So, he wasn't gone, but he was out of the way, which was good enough for me. Hopefully he wont fine his way back to us any time soon, but we will try and be prepared if he does. We were safe in the air for now. When we reached the other mountain, we found that there was loads of crystal there for us. We ended up filling each beast with as much as they could all carry before heading back home. I'm very happy with the quetz's utility. I can see now why the saddle is such a high level engram. With Flynn in tow and my wife and Dexter flying behind me on the quetz, we made our way home full of crystal after another successful supply trip. While we were unloading, I realized that we were very low on oil, so sometime soon, we would have to make a trip out to the ocean to gather some, if we wanted to keep our generator fed.

                   Once we unloaded everything, construction of the glass walls and roofs of the greenhouse began. My wife learned all the greenhouse structures, and I knew the crop plots and irrigation, so we both got to work building it from the ground up, starting with the metal foundations. It was 3x5, so nothing too big just yet. We may expand it later, but this would do for now. I ran the irrigation up from the near by river, and started placing all the large crop plots while my wife started placing the walls and ceiling. Soon we had a very professional looking greenhouse complete with seeded and irrigated crops and once we placed the last ceiling piece, they all picked up a 300% greenhouse effect. Very, very cool. I was excited to see them grow. Last time I did a little gardening, it seemed to take forever. This time, though, with the greenhouse in place. The plants were sprouting up very quickly. Building this greenhouse was definitely worth the time and effort of collecting all the crystal.

              Before long, our plants had started fruiting. We had planted 8 plots in total. Three were narcoberries, 2 Rockarrots, 1 long grass, 1 savorroot, and 1 citronal. Now that we had all those up and going, we just had to figure out how recipes worked. We'd been hanging on to them whenever we found them, but we've never actually tried to make one before. I know that you could use the cooking pot for them most of the time, but that was about it. It was time to experiment. We went and grabbed the recipe for 'enduro stew' and started putting it together in the pot. It said:

3 servings of cooked meat
5 Rockarrots
5 Savoroot
1 handful of mejoberries
1/2 dollop of stimulant

I took this to mean:

3 pieces of cooked meat
5 Rockarrots
5 Savoroots
1 stack(maybe?) of mejoberries
1 thing of stimulant (could be used to make two things of stew)

Well, needless to say, I was wrong, but am I the only one that was a little confused about the units of measuring in the recipe? Anyway, it wasn't working. Okay, time to use the wiki. As it turns out, three servings of cooked meat equals nine pieces of meat. Who knew? and half a dollop of stimulant is a stack of two (the picture of stimulant makes it seem like there is more there than a quarter of a dollop). Mercifully, a handful of mejoberries meant only 10 mejoberries, but the others were pretty self explanatory.

            We did eventually get the recipe made. We haven't tried it yet, but at least we know how to do it. It's suppose to buff melee damage for 15 minutes. I thought about giving some to one of our dinos for if we ever have to fight the giga, but that was looking less and less likely the further away it wandered from our home. After we finally finished getting the greenhouse up and going, and the recipes made, we decided to turn in for the night. It was getting late in real life, and work has us getting up early all the time.