16 Boiling Eggs

"Alright. I heard a cluck. Where are all the swimming chickens?" Technobalde asked.

After building the multi-storey animal farm, Technoblade decided to procrastinate luring four-legged animals. Sure, beef, mutton and pork were more delicious and fulfilling to eat. However, there was one staple that could not be ignored when eating sandwiches.

He needed the eggs. Only one animal in Minecraft laid edible eggs. Technoblade refused to experiment with cooking an Ender Dragons' egg. He wasn't prepared enough for the end. Hence, his best bet was to smack some grass to get seeds and lure those cluckers into his simple one-block egg harvester.

Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!

There it was to his left!

Thankfully, the chickens he found were not that far from his mountain base camp. He had to travel a little out into the distance, but he could still see the mountain behind him. Thankfully, he wasn't lost in his quest for chickens.

"Come on," he talked to the blocky cluckers and hissed as a feather-brained friend strayed off the path and into the water.

Crossing this river was becoming a challenge. Technoblade wondered if he should have made a better bridge.

"Nah!" he brushed it off as he nudged the chicken onto the one-block plank bridge he made in haste. Speed bridging was the only bridge he built.

After half a morning, they were finally back at base camp. The cluckers tried to flee, but Technoblade was faster.

Using the power of switching seeds to his other hand, he opened the trap door above his egg coop and shoved them into the cage they would be forced to produce unhatched children for his consumption forever.

"Annnd in!" the Potato Lord cackled madly and admired his new prisoners from their pretty glass prison. Yes, he made the front using glass blocks because he felt fanciful.

Although using a barrel at the bottom of that hopper instead of a double chest worked the same for an egg farm, Technoblade still wasted resources on aesthetics. Perhaps the joy of seeing their miserable beady eyes every morning when he woke up from the terrible wooden bed inspired his madness. Either way, the egg farm was finally done. It would not be long before he had the eggs he wanted.

"Now to check on my wheat."

The square patch of hoes but untreated soil looked wrong. Technoblade still found it difficult to get used to not seeing tilled ground with light brown and dried soil surrounding the radius of this single water block source beneath his trapdoor.

The seeds he planted were growing well, but none of them had become fully grown wheat yet. However, right behind this wheat field, the trees had grown, and that gave Technoblade an idea.

"Theoretically, leaf blocks are compostable. I have enough iron to get things started too. This should not be impossible."

Spending two precious iron ingots as an investment for a potentially genius solution to crash the bone meal market, Technoblade started working on his stonks.

The tree he wanted to shear was massive. It had too many leaf blocks covering the ground around its trunk like Cinderella's dress. Although this tree would yield almost half a stack of saplings, Technoblade calculated the returns for shearing every leaf block compared to saplings. It would make him enough bone meal for his hay bale quest. Even if he ran out of saplings, the surrounding forest is made of spruce. He could collect saplings anytime he ran out.

With shiny new shears in his dominant hand, Technoblade made quick work trimming the bottom rows of leaves and chucked them into the hopper above his composting bin so that they could do the work while he collected more of the good stuff above.

Who needs scaffolding when the spruce tree makes a convenient stairwell? Technoblade hacked away at a painfully slow pace and kept an eye on the sun. It was setting fast, and spending a night out with mobs was something the Blood God wanted to avoid. He wasn't paid enough to murder brainless mobs.

The race against time started, and Technoblade finally reached the top of the tree with just enough time to trim the tree down. The sky turned orange, and Technoblade picked up speed.

The number of leaf blocks rapidly increased, and the tree he was chopping gradually became smaller. Technoblade stabbed four fresh saplings into the podzol as the last log broke and sprinted towards his composting bin.

Emptying all the leaf blocks he had, the Potato Lord threw down his bed and hopped right in.

"One clucker, two cluckers…" he counted, and soon, it was morning again.

The first thing Technoblade did in his Aftercraft morning was to check for hunger. Sleeping helped to skip some of the processes. He spotted a single piece of wheat fully grown but left it where it was. There was something else more important to tackle.

"What's it going to be?" he looked at the two sad cluckers in the glass coop. "How many eggs are you going to lay for me?"

Cluck! Cluck!

The chickens blinked emotionlessly as Technoblade checked the chest beneath for his haul. Of the two egg producers, only one laid an egg.

Technoblade inhaled and checked the feathered friends in his coop. One of them was a scammer, but he had no idea who it was. Feeling slightly cheated, Technoblade reasoned that maybe chickens had genders in Aftercraft. If he fed them and multiplied their population, he might be able to get more eggs tomorrow.

"I'll let you guys off for now," he told them. "However, if you don't start making babies and laying more children, we will be having a very different conversation tomorrow."

Collecting his single egg and feeding the chickens, Technoblade collected that precious experience orb and thanked the Aftercraft Gods for not changing this ridiculous chicken-duck confusion that Minecraft had. The logic of egg spawning and seed-feeding to make chicks spawn was flawed, but nobody questioned it in the game. Technoblade loved exploiting gaming logic.

After collecting his precious egg, Technoblade decided to harvest wheat. Thankfully, he was well prepared. The leaf blocks from last evening turned into bone meals in his time-skip sleep. He had ample to spare even after using it for his pay-to-complete-quest strategy.

Gathering thirty-odd pieces of bone meals, Technoblade marched overly to the rather barren-looking wheat field. He needed to fence this area and expand it if he never wanted to starve again.

In his excitement, Technoblade raised a fist and punched the wheat block. However, the system stopped him with an invisible force, prompting him with an error message.

"Oh right," he remembered. "Aftercraft mechanics dictated that harvesting shall be done with the hoe."

Although Technoblade had no idea if punching fully-grown wheat would result in him destroying it completely, he was thankful for the system's reminder. Hoes were generally useless after fields were tilled. Aftercraft improved on this little aspect by creating regular uses for the tool. It might be a hassle but being busy was good.

Harvesting the ripened wheat gave Technoblade a single piece of wheat. It wasn't much, but it was a start. It might not make a hay bale yet, but Technoblade could lure some unsuspecting animals into his three-storey crappy barngalow.

"Haha! Barn-galow, bungalow. Get it?" he asked the wheat and awkwardly cleared his throat when he received no reply from the wheat or the system. The admins of Aftercraft must be disappointed in him. Their silence hurt him more than punching a tree with his fist.

Spamming bone meal worked like a charm. Before he knew it, Technoblade gathered all the wheat and seeds he could possibly need. He spent the remaining bone meal on treating farmland and replanting the seeds he gained from his harvest. The farm was looking a little more green and less brown, which was a good start.

"Let's turn this in and get breakfast," he decided and winked at his player options.

[Quest: Hay Day

Requirements: Grow 9 wheat and craft a hay bale.

11/9 wheat

1/1 Haybale

Reward: Bucket

Note: This reward can only be claimed once. For Farming Tutorial, refer to the detailed guidebook.]

Claiming his second bucket, Technoblade put all the tools away and stared at his egg. Uncrafting his hay bale, the Potato Lord ordered the crafting workshop to make his very first loaf of bread. He was sick of eating Juicy Berries, and it was time to try a salmon and egg sandwich.

Speaking of eggs, Technoblade liked sunny-side-up eggs. However, Aftercraft did not specialise in cooking tools or recipes. It was rather basic, so Technoblade had to think of the easiest options. Will crafting a raw egg, cooked salmon, and a loaf of bread create his salmon sandwich?

"It's probably worth a try," he reasoned.

Technoblade tried to find the salmon sandwich recipe as soon as his loaf was ready, but it did not exist.

Saddened, he wondered if there was another way. The furnace and campfire did not accept the raw egg as a 'smeltable' material.

Although Technoblade was no chef, he knew how to make basic food. As an exemplary college dropout, he knew the easiest way to make food. Tossing food into a microwave was an idiot-proof way to get decent food for a pretty penny. Fortunately, the most versatile tool in Aftercraft for cooking had to be the bucket from his most recent quest reward.

"Let's see if I can fill it with water and start boiling my eggs in it."

Anything was worth a try. If cooking eggs and making a salmon sandwich in Aftercraft failed, he'd go back to eating high cholesterol and unhealthy things. Meat and potatoes would never go wrong.

Technoblade tried manually adding the egg to the filled bucket using the crafting slot in his inventory.

To his utter amazement, it worked.

"Bucket of eggs? Yes, please!"

Whoever the admin of Aftercraft was, Technoblade loved them already. It was a minor and ridiculous feature, but it made his day.

Technoblade could now put this over a campfire using the "smelt" option with the bucket of eggs that strangely reminded him of a bucket of axolotl. He did his best to ignore the semblance.

The eggs were boiled in no time, and Technoblade retrieved his bucket. It wasn't steaming even if the system boiled it over a campfire. The eggs were "half-cooked" and runny, so he re-smelted them for "hard-boiled" doneness.

After retrieving his bucket, Technoblade 'uncrafted' the bucket of eggs to get his hard-boiled eggs. Mysteriously, the water disappeared as soon as he removed the eggs.

"Whatever," Technoblade decided it was probably for the best. An egg-smelling MLG water bucket clutch would probably be a turn-off.

With his sandwich components, Technoblade scrolled through his crafting recipe. However, like the bucket of eggs, the recipe did not exist in the crafting workshop.

"I guess I'll have to do it myself."

Using the crafting slots in his inventory, Technoblade realised that the player crafting slots were powerful invention hacks.

"Bread, cooked salmon and hard-boiled eggs can make me… An egg-salmon sandwich! Yes!"

The sandwich was probably the second-best thing that happened to Technoblade in Aftercraft. It smelled delicious, much better than the life-saving Juicy Berries.

After inhaling a hearty breakfast that tasted just as good as it smelled, Technoblade took a minute to savour the moment. This was probably what it meant to feel alive, even if he was technically dead.

Yes, it wasn't a dream. No dream would be as realistic as this. When Alex first arrived in this world, he brushed it off as just another lucid dream and a fun place to be in. However, he was here for far too long and remembered far too many things for this to be another dream. If it was a dream, it was possibly done by a higher being to fulfil his last wish to live as Technoblade.

"Oh well," he shrugged it off now that the sandwich was digested in his mind. "No point in harping on things beyond my control. I believe they say you make lemonade out of lemons. Or, in this case, porkchop out of pigs."