Grotto

grotto      (standing on your grotto floor: open the Grotto window)

A crystal grotto is a cavern in the lowest cellar of your house, floor -5, where gems grow again and again. Build your house down to floor -5 first (see HOUSES), then open a grotto from the house window: the first costs 30,000 gold, a second beside it 60,000. A house has two at most, and selling the house gives the gold back like the rest. The floor is still a room you decorate as you like; a cutter's bench appears there, and its "tend" link (or typing "grotto") opens the Grotto window. With two grottos, the window has a tab for each.

Each grotto has sixteen geodes in four places, four geodes each: the vent ledge (hot), the drip pool (wet), the dark seam (lightless) and the ley vein (humming). Seed a gem you carry in an empty geode: it stays, and grows a cluster again and again. Seeding takes the Mining skill that gem's veins ask for. Gems turn up now and then while mining (see MINING).

A gem grows fastest in the place it likes, and half as long again anywhere else. It all grows by the clock, whether you are in the game or not.

The deep has a mood, the same for every grotto, which changes about once an hour; the window shows it beside its title.

Starheart grows only while the deep hums, about a fifth of the time, so even on the ley vein a cluster takes about a day and a half.

Harvest a grown cluster from the window: a moment's work, then one gem. Now and then harvesting teaches some Mining.

About every 45 minutes something goes wrong with a cluster in each grotto, and you are told if you are in the game: it crusts with scale, clouds over, goes dry (never in the drip pool) or cracks in a tremor. It grows at half speed until you fix it with a little task in the window: chip off the scale, polish it clear, top up the brine, hold the resonance. Each problem fixed gives one gem more at the next harvest, three at most. Nothing withers in a grotto: a cluster you leave alone just waits for you.

Each grotto can have fittings, bought one at a time from the window when no geode is picked. A fitting fixes its problem the moment it comes, without telling you, and that earns the same gem more as fixing it by hand (three at most for each harvest). So fittings save you the work; they never give more than fixing everything yourself would. Each takes Mining to fit, gold, and ore you carry, and the gold comes back with the house when you sell it.

You can move a cluster to another geode (swapping two), or pry it out to carry it away as one gem. Only your own account's characters can tend your grotto.