11 A Real Meal

Waking up to fresh air, morning sun and a hungry stomach was good.

Waking up to the sight of a furnace in the inventory was better.

"Finally!" Technoblade jumped and immediately hit his head on the overly short roof. "Breakfast!"

With the first furnace since his arrival in Aftercraft, Technoblade refused to fill his hunger bar with Juicy Berries. This was a call for celebration!

Although Juicy Berries were a good food source and easily renewable, they didn't satisfy Technoblade's palate. He liked savoury things from time to time. Sweet was alright in moderation, but he needed variety, and the solution was in his chest storage.

However, he needed to settle something real quick.

"Time for more deforestation," he wielded his stone axe. "I hope you guys are ready."

The trees swayed with the wind as if shaking from their roots to their branches. However, it did not stop Technoblade from expanding his area of destruction. If nature were his mother, she would have disowned him for his repeated crimes.

The stone axe did not have much durability after the night, so it shattered into oblivion after chopping down three spruce trees. Grunting in response, Technoblade checked the number of logs he had. It wasn't much, but it was enough for now.

According to the crafting workshop, he did not physically need to place the furnace down to smelt anything. He simply needed to have it in his inventory as a 'tool' for them to register the smelting function. The charcoal item was finally available for 'crafting', and Technoblade wasted no time. He decided to turn all the logs he collected into charcoal while he created a bigger hole in the side of the mountain for cobblestone to replace his broken tools.

The only limitation of a system-regulated smelting and crafting method was the time it took to complete the task. Sure, it was automated. However, it was still slow. Technoblade watched his hunger and thirst meter. They were not critically low even if he mined slowly. However, he had priorities. Even if he liked charcoal, he needed to make torches first and shift his ridiculous chest fort into a more secure location. He wanted to test if there was a way to prevent zombies from entering his lair tonight using trapdoors or fence gates.

When Technoblade received his first piece of charcoal, many new options became available in his recipe book. Many forms of cooked food, ingots from ores and even blocks became available.

This was the moment he had been waiting for!

Technoblade ordered for his first torches to be made using that single piece of charcoal. It wasn't much, but it was enough to light up the little mountain cavern. With this, he could finally tear down the monstrosity of planks and chest he created last night.

Technoblade worked to shift his base with his newly crafted tools to shift his base while cooking a few salmon pieces using the furnace. However, his expectations quickly turned into disappointment when the system turned his freshly caught salmon into burnt and overcooked salmon.

"Cancel! Cancel! I swear this smelter needs to be cancelled. Stop ruining my breakfast!"

Why was this so difficult? All Technoblade wanted was some real food for a real meal and a good breakfast to start the day right. His poor salmon!

Not one to waste food, Technoblade tried to consume the overcooked salmon that looked like a piece of dried bark in his hands. It did not look appetising, and the taste was just as bad as the visuals. To make matters worse, the salmon did not recover many hunger points. If anything, it drained his thirst meter.

"Do I really want to eat a burnt salmon?" he asked himself, holding up the charcoal black salmon.

After a long debate, Technoblade's curiosity won against him. He had enough Juicy Berries if something went wrong. However, he wanted to know if he could consume poorly cooked food and the consequences of doing so.

The moment the charred skin of the salmon touched his tongue, Technoblade spat it out. At this point, it couldn't be called fish. It was so bitter that no amount of convincing would enable him to successfully chew it.

"It's such a waste," he bemoaned. "Perfectly good salmon ruined like this. I wonder if it is a furnace fault. I mean, that thing could cook up raw iron ores into ingots. It's actually a miracle the other salmon is merely overcooked."

In reality, furnaces had ridiculously temperatures used to melt metals and refine them. It wasn't very practical to use them for cooking. If Aftercraft worked on a better logic than Minecraft, the furnace took so many materials and time to craft because it was a primitive blast furnace and not a simple fireplace.

"Is there something else that could cook with a better success rate?" Technoblade wondered and checked the system shop.

For the next three minutes, he browsed through all the skills he could find, but to his dismay, there was nothing useful for the culinary department. Was he doomed?

Then, he remembered one item in Minecraft that was mostly used for decorative purposes but could serve a culinary function if it was in Aftercraft. Now that he had charcoal, it might be possible to craft it.

"Campfires! Do they exist?"

Scrolling through his recipe book, Technoblade groaned. He should probably spend time gaining levels to buy a search function from the system shop and a filter option for his recipe book. They were cheap one-time purchases that improved the user experience. It was going to be necessary without the ability to search it up on a wiki, but for now, Technoblade could do without it. He found what he needed on page six and ordered for a campfire to be crafted in his additional crafting slot.

"I hope it isn't a single-time use," he frowned. However, there was only one way to find out.

While the campfire was crafting, Technoblade finished tearing down his messy structure and cussed at the lack of inventory space. Quickly, he set up a small storage area in his man-made cave and dumped all the unnecessary items into it. At some point in this game, he would need to grind mobs and purchase every purchasable skill from the shop.

The campfire did not take long to craft, and Technoblade rejoiced when he saw it in his inventory. Like the furnace, the campfire had to be present in his inventory before he could use it for cooking up items.

"How do I select the campfire to cook my salmon?" he wondered. There was no tutorial for it.

Fortunately, the system admins designed an option for Technoblade to select his 'default smelting option' when there was a conflict for a smeltable item.

"Of course, there would be a default option for salmon," Technoblade laughed. "I see where this is going now. Does this mean they allow me to choose my default options whenever I want to smelt a new item? Can I change the default settings?"

It wasn't necessary to bother about such trivialities, but Technoblade was honestly bored. Hence, he ordered a single salmon to be cooked by the workshop and waited. Will the salmon be perfectly cooked this time?

While the workshop did its thing with the salmon and slabs that Technoblade ordered, he chopped more trees, but this time, he planted a few saplings on the barren-looking land. It wasn't enough to obstruct his view of the pond in the distance, but it was convenient enough so that he need not run too far to get wood.

After chopping one tree, Technoblade checked his inventory and rejoiced at the juicy-looking cooked salmon. Without waiting, he quickly ate the fish and marvelled at the rich flavour of omega-three in his mouth.

Yes! This was the kind of thing he missed. The campfire also gave the salmon a smoky flavour. The only regrettable thing was how many hunger points it recovered.

"I could eat this every day," he burped. "Four hunger points out of ten from just a single fish. That has to be the most satisfying thing I've seen since I woke up in Aftercraft."

Eating a well-cooked salmon did not drain his thirst, but it did not quench it either. Technoblade decided to take a stroll to the pond and drink from that instead of munching on berries. Technoblade harvested the berry bushes on his way and thought about what he wanted to do now that he had his first real meal.

The smelting system also did not prompt him for a second time asking how he wanted to cook his salmon, and Technoblade noticed that he could change the smelting option by toggling it with a right wink. How convenient that his eyes were now replicating left and right clicks.

Seeing how he no longer had any worries about food, Technoblade pushed for every single salmon to be cooked by the campfire. As for that burnt salmon, Tehnoblade threw it onto the ground, far away so that he wouldn't have to look at it. Then, he had the most wonderful idea.

Cooked salmon was nice on its own, but a salmon sandwich… that has to be something different, and he wanted to know if it was possible. Coincidentally, he had a farming quest to complete. Things were looking better, and Technoblade couldn't wait to make his first bread in Aftercraft.