One large raw salmon is really not enough, especially when you consider that she has to waste any of the parts of the fish that she can't eat in one sitting. 

She doesn't know what wild wheat looks like, but she has been looking out for vaguely edible seeds and berries. She cautiously sniffs and eats one single wheat berry, and tucks another handful loose in her bag, noting a quick sketch of the plants she took them from. (Her bag! She can carry objects! Like mystery seeds! And take down sketches and notes!)

Time to wrestle a salmon. If the one wheat berry doesn't make her sick, she'll soak the rest in water and have them with the salmon for lunch.

The one wheat berry does not make her sick, no. This really isn't the area for anything other than dead bushes and wild grasses, though. There are no berries in evidence.

She could try punching out a sheep instead of a fish, but the fish is probably easier to wrangle. They really aren't getting any better at fisticuffs, so she can at least catch them pretty reliably.

Hurrah! Olivia is getting a good grade in salmon poaching, a thing that is, apparently, possible to achieve. 

Salmon with a little porridge, for lunch, is itself a pleasant variety over salmon without porridge. 

By the time she's done fishing and eating, it's afternoon (the sun is over the land, not sea), but she doesn't know by exactly how much.

Actually, you know what, she collected more than three sticks. She's going to try to jam one of the longest and straightest into the ground, to make a sundial. She scuffs the ground at approximately where the shadow lands; if she keeps doing that, eventually she'll have an arc for the whole day and should be able to make slightly better guesses about the time.

How far away is the forest? Guessing by the size of the trees she can see. If it's close enough, she might try to make it there and back in the rest of the afternoon; otherwise, she has a staff to make.

It's not that far away, perhaps a kilometer or so. Whether she wishes to walk two more kilometers today or attempt a "crafting pattern" is entirely up to her.

For maybe another food source she can walk another three kilometers (to the forest and back; and exploring inside it). Not happily, but Olivia's pretty sure her current tiredness is as much about lack of food as about lack of sleep. 

Maybe in another hour, after she's digested some fish and isn't feeling the lethargy of a large meal.

The time passes peacefully. The sun moves in the sky, the breeze blows over the sea.

The way up the coast to the forest is pretty much the same as the rest of the scrubland, although there is more wild wheat to be found in various states of growth if she pays attention to the grass. Upon getting to the forest, things become greener and lusher. The forest features towering oak trees and not much underbrush, but it does have enough to be worth searching.

Potentially edible things in the forest include: dandelions, brown mushrooms, red spotted mushrooms, cute little foxes, cute little rabbits, a beehive, and ... there, through the trees! A hint of red that turns out to be a small cluster of thorny wild berry bushes. The thorns are wickedly sharp, and it's a bit tedious to get the tiny undomesticated berries off of them, but they are real berries.

Berries! Sweet, sweet berries. It takes most of her willpower not to eat them all at once; but she should still do a poison check with a few and come back tomorrow for the rest.

Mushrooms are, uh. Olivia is not yet desperate enough to eat wild mushrooms she cannot identify. She is sort of keenly aware of that looming yet, though.

She knows dandelion greens are edible, and has several; if she sees any nettles she's going to go for those as well. It's nothing like a filling meal, but does wonders to cure her despair at the prospect of Eternal Fish.

Olivia is, thusly, in a much better mood as she heads back towards camp.

She drops her bag (it's not waterproof), pulls out the sticks, and swims her way back under the hull of her ship. She's planning to make that staff and then punch another fish for dinner. Yawn ... she believes in herself ... yawn ...

She wakes up to moonlight streaming through the gaps in the hull. Not safe to go out now. Damn.

By moonlight, Olivia pries up the three interior planks she can find that are in the best condition. Three sticks she gathered already; one amethyst was in the TOMES barrel. The underside of the deck makes a flat-ish surface, where she's been sleeping.

If that's not enough to qualify as a "crafting table", Olivia is prepared to drag the whole assembly outside and build the world's worst table. She hopes she won't have to, though.

Now that she has the materials, what does the journal have to say about the crafting process?

The journal seems to expect the reader to already be broadly familiar with crafting as a process. All it really lists are the exact relative positions that each of the pieces need to be placed in on the crafting table.

... perhaps such tables normally come with rulers or grid marks on them, because without that she's going to have to get a bit creative to get everything measured and aligned correctly.

Drat. She actually has a six-inch ruler made to be a bookmark, but it's in her bag and she wasn't willing to subject the bag to the underwater entrance without a way to keep it dry.(She's aware that she's very lucky it hasn't rained.)

She uses the hem of her shirt to measure straight line distances, folds it for ratios, and eventually everything comes out correctly when she double checks it.

There's a moment of hesitation, and then the sticks, planks, and charged amethyst crystal all sort of slide into each other with a slightly unsettling pop. Her brand-new oak staff lies on the floor where she laid the components out. It is sized perfectly for her, and the amethyst crystal has gotten smaller and been mounted firmly in one end. There's a little red ribbon tied just below the crystal's attachment point.

Success! She cannot actually do a victory jig in here without banging into something but Olivia waves her hands enthusiastically in celebration.

Now for the second test. Can she cast the beginner spell.

Mind's Reflection.

Novice's Gambit.

With the journal open beside her to reference, it's not difficult. The staff is kind of ... snappy, for want of a better word. Its tip naturally moves along a hex grid, which makes it easy to draw the hex-grid-aligned glyphs.

When she completes the first glyph, a sort of shudder runs through her staff, and the completed glyph (which had previously been outlined in pale purple light) vanishes. Unsettlingly, it feels as though something just tapped against the other side of a wall that she's leaning against, despite the fact that she's not leaning against a wall at all.

The snappiness catches Olivia by surprise, and she's not a fan. Look, she's an artist, she knows perfectly well how to draw lines and corners. And this way she can't add any decorations to glyphs, like curls where she 'lifts' her 'pen' or heart-shaped dots. (This is, perhaps, for the best.)

So that didn't work. She doesn't think she 'perceived' an 'iota', and it didn't match any of the mishaps she can remember. She goes back to the journal to see if it has anything to say about spooky sourceless vibrations in the Mishaps section.

It's not technically in the mishaps section, but it is on one of the facing pages:

I should also be careful to make sure I actually have enough Amethyst on my person-- some old texts say that Nature is happy to use one's own mind as payment instead. They describe the feeling as awful but strangely euphoric, "[...] an effervescent dissolution into light and energy..." Perhaps that's why all the old practitioners of the art went mad. I can't imagine burning pieces of my mind for power is healthy.

 

Maybe something's changed, though. In my experiments, I've never managed to do it; if I run out of media, the spell will simply fail to cast, as if some barrier is blocking it from harming me.

It would be interesting to get to the bottom of that mystery, but for now I suppose it'll keep me safe.

Oh. Oh no. She just came very, very close to screwing up very, very badly.

If it weren't for the fact that she's pretty sure she needs magic to get past the peril of day to day survival, she'd put away the books for a good long while at this point.

As it is, well. She needs the magic. She also has only the one bag of amethyst, and flatly no idea if getting more is even possible, much less how to do so. 

Can she make a guess at how many spellcasts worth of amethyst she has in the bag? Unless it's a lot, she might actually be better off skipping past the novice spell so that she can get the most from every last grain.

The journal lists approximate costs per pattern in terms of grains. Some patterns use a single grain. Some glyphs, especially powerful spell-glyphs, use a large amount — so, to some extent, the answer will depend on what she uses the spells to do. There are spell-glyphs for mining, so she could potentially go caving or mining for amethyst crystals, if she were so inclined.

That said, the pouch is about the size of a fist, and full of amethyst powder, so she should have enough for a while. The beginning example spell would have cost her two grains of amethyst.

So - it's probably not a cost she'd really regret. But "probably" does not exactly cut it, not with margins this slim.

Olivia is not very good at the "measure twice cut once" approach to problems, but that doesn't make it bad advice, just advice she's bad at following.

Okay. What does she actually need? Time to peruse the spell-glyph section and price out a list of essential spells.

She is keenly feeling the need for:

- A water bottle, or some other way to carry fresh water long distances. Relatedly, a way to purify the water and render it safe to drink.

- A cooking fire.

- Cooking implements: a pot, spoon, and so on.

- Refrigeration. Its maybe not "essential" but ye gods does Olivia miss having a fridge with food she can eat whenever she wants.

- A knife, for both harvesting and cooking. A chisel or adze, for woodworking. (She has this great source of planks, if and when she doesn't need it for shelter.)

- A monster shelter that doesn't have its door underwater, and is weatherproof for when the season inevitably changes. This could mean "a cave with a trapdoor" or "a floating platform with a rope ladder" or something else entirely; she's hopeful the book has advice about trade-offs and approaches to both monsters and weather.

- A clock, so she has a better way of guessing time to nightfall. Something to make her less appealing to monsters, so if she is caught out after dark it isn't a complete disaster.

- A change of clothes. Maybe best approached as cloth and needle and thread? Worst comes to worst she can probably kill a mini-sheep and make some kind of felted monstrosity out of the wool.

- Mapping she can do herself if she needs to but a compass would make it a lot easier.

- A way to locate and then mine for more amethyst.

What catches her eye, perusing the spell glyphs with these goals in mind?

The journal doesn't distinguish fresh and salt water anywhere. It does have a spell-glyph for summoning up to a cubic meter of water at the cost of one pinch of amethyst dust, and it seems reasonably likely that it would come out fresh.

Likewise, there is a spell-glyph for setting things on fire (including both animate and inanimate objects). It doesn't mention any way to make cooking pots, spoons, etc., but there are other crafting patterns for some things, including a jeweler's hammer, so there might be a way to do it that isn't explained in this one wizard's journal. It might also be possible to just experiment, although the alignment of the constituent items has to be pretty precise.

There is no spell that creates a ready-made monster shelter, but there is a spell-glyph that can be used to conjure transparent purple walls and floors in whatever layout seems likely to shelter one from monsters. A variant glyph conjures heatless, smokeless lights and a scrawled comment in the margin remarks that it is "much better for keeping the dead out of my pantry than torches are".

There are pattern glyphs that will determine her position, speed, and time; from that she may be able to build a clock, map, or compass. Monsters might be avoidant of her if she could reliably make them explode and/or catch fire.

There doesn't appear to be a good way to locate amethyst. There are no reflections that determine what substance something is made of, without which it's hard to locate amethyst specifically. Once she does find some, she could easily mine it with a spell-glyph, or perhaps make herself the aforementioned jeweler's hammer.

The journal does not contain any knitting patterns, or other ruminations on the subject of clothing.

Other crafting patterns?

Olivia likes the idea of crafting patterns; what-all does the book have that it looks like she could make out of materials that she has or could gather in places she's already been? Anything she can make without drawing on her precious store of amethyst, she should at least strongly consider doing that way; and she can do crafting of objects that would be too speculative to design and make out of spells.

It sounds like Olivia will be living in a transparent purple house for the foreseeable future! Nifty. She will hold off on detailed plans until she can draw out architecture ideas. She assumes the purple transparent material is permanent? Does it have a known cost per unit area, and if so can she work out what the units are or will she have to experiment?

If her best way to make safe freshwater is a cubic meter at a time, she might actually be best off constructing cisterns of it in places she goes often; certainly she can include one such in her house. Then she can top up the cistern only when she needs to, and not every time she wants a glass of water.

One pinch of amethyst dust will get her thirty two square cubits of permanent transparent purple wall and/or roof. Whether she will need to experiment depends on whether she knows the definition of a cubit.

If she's willing to use some of her amethyst dust in a crafting recipe along with a source of dye, she can also apparently dye her own magic, and then she can make the walls different colors, if she prefers. Other items that the journal details how to make include:

Staves made with different woods; a lens that lets her see hidden properties of objects and pack more detail into her spells, if she can figure out how to make sand into glass; a type of knotwork that can store iotas, if she can coerce silk out of a spider; an abacus; decorative wall hangings with glyphs drawn on them, if she can make paper; the same, but for decorative stone tiles if she can dig up some slate; empty artifacts that can be enchanted to cast a spell, if she can mine for and refine various metallic ores; glass phials to contain amethyst dust in; magic dyes, if she can find a source of mundane dye; various decorative items made out of an extinct kind of tree that can be recreated with magic; decorative paper and paper lanterns; and, if she can find and smelt some copper, little magical sconces that emit light and make occasional chiming noises.

Olivia doesn't remember the precise definition of a cubit but she has a vague recollection that's it's fairly large. Is it possible to get less than 32 square cubits in a casting (spending less amethyst dust)? Less than one square cubit? Is there a (simpler, less costly) spell she can use to measure some object in terms of cubits?

Hmm. She doesn't have a way to make paper but she does have paper, from her sketchbook. She'd be willing to sacrifice a single sheet to make a hanging with a glyph on it, she thinks. (Though, of course, her sketchbook is on land right now, so that too will have to wait until morning.)

The abacus could have potential? It sounds like most of the rest of what she could make will require some kind of mining or at least rock-finding: is there any kind of general advice for that?

Wait wait wait - an artifact that can cast a spell. That opens up whole new vistas of options. What does she need for that, exactly? Does the artifact still need her to, like, push a button, or can it cast a spell every hour or if there's a nearby monster? Does the artifact need a source of amethyst, and if so how does that work?

In the section on the Stadiometer's Purification, which measures a living thing's height, there is a note that magic seems to deal in a "natural unit" that is very slightly over two cubits. There's a long digression about how convenient it would be if the scholastic world would convert over to using the same units that nature itself uses, but of course nobody can agree on anything. One academic rival wants to switch to using eighths of a cubit as a base unit, on the basis that this is the smallest distance that can be reliably distinguished by a certain class of physical experiments.

She could measure her own height with Mind's Reflection, Stadiometer's Purification, Novice's Gambit for a cost of 3 grains and work it out that way. The floor-and-wall-making glyph bottoms out at an area of four square cubits. You can make areas smaller than that, it just doesn't cost less.

The journal declines to comment on matters of mining, except a note that spell-glyphs can be used to mine through material of pretty much any hardness.

Spell-casting artifacts come in three flavors, but all three flavors have to be charged with amethyst during creation, and can eventually run out. The cheapest kind, made with four copper ingots and a pinch of amethyst dust, cannot be recharged. A kind made with four iron ingots and an intact amethyst crystal can be recharged. The best kind, made with three pieces of gold, a glowing amethyst crystal such as the one in her staff, and a vinyl record, can cast using amethyst that is sufficiently nearby once its internal battery runs out.

All of the spell-casting artifacts work sort of like her staff. Has she noticed that her staff only leaves glowing purple lines in the air when she wants it to? She can move it around without doing that. The same thing applies to spell-casting artifacts: they trigger when someone holds them and intends to. Maybe there's a different way to do it that could work on a timer, though.