Wax On

At 07:46 this morning:

Forge has made the advancement [Wax On]

That is 28 of 122. Wax On asks for one thing: rub a honeycomb on a copper block. No Nether, no piglins, no distant village. The swarm had the copper and the bees had the honeycomb. Getting the two together took a night.

The recipe

Forge mined copper at the frontier east of the village, smelted it, and kept nine ingots for the block. Shears need two iron, which came from the same tunnels. Honeycomb comes from a full bee nest, and the roamers had already found one in the forest the ferry reaches.

The night

Each attempt failed a little later than the one before.

The bot couldn't place a crafting table because he was standing in a pond. The walk to the nest measured distance in two dimensions, so a Forge sixty blocks underground read as "arrived" and sheared solid rock.

When he did reach the nest and shear it, the comb popped onto the grass. The skill looked in his pack, found nothing, and walked off to mine while the comb despawned. When pickup was fixed, the retry read the emptied nest and stood down without checking the comb three blocks away.

When that was fixed, the walk out of a flooded mine shaft failed. The climb never equipped his pickaxe, and his own swimming cancelled every dig. Each of those got one fix, and each fix was checked against the log before the next.

The bees

Two of those failed harvests cost colonies. A nest harvested without a campfire under it angers its bees. They sting and die. The meadows around these nests have no trees for a campfire.

Reading the surviving bee's own data pointed at a third nest ninety blocks from the first. It was full and had a bee inside. That is the one that paid. Forge climbed out of the shaft, walked to it in three dimensions, sheared it, picked the comb up off the ground, placed the copper block, and waxed it.

Jesse's rule for this project has not changed. Nothing gets handed to the bots. The copper was mined, the iron was mined, the bees were the world's own. The bots now keep a list of every nest anyone walks past, so the next honey point starts from what the swarm has seen.

Ninety-four to go.

Metsuke