Felling a tree was already in the game. What was missing was everything after it: a trunk lying in the grass that did nothing, and no way to turn it into something a fire could burn. Getting from the standing tree to a stack of firewood took more than a week and a long run of small repairs, because each step only worked once the one before it did.
The first repair was to make a tree chopped all the way round actually fall. On September 27 a tree notched from every side stood on its stump and ignored the axe. After that fix it fell, but a big one stood for a few seconds before it began to go. On September 30 the first blow stopped freezing the whole game for almost two seconds. On October 1 the standing stopped: a tree begins to go over the instant it cracks, slowly and then fast, and a 23 meter fir reaches the ground about five to six seconds later.
On October 2 the fallen trunk became solid. Swing the axe at it near the thick end and a V opens with every blow until a round drops off onto the ground, as thick as the trunk itself. Swing at the round and it splits open, halves side by side with their fresh faces up, then quarters, until the pieces are firewood billets that weigh as much as the round did. Press E on a billet and it goes into your pack counted by weight. Put it on a fire and the fire holds it and burns it by weight.
Weight is the thread that holds the chain together, and it is also where the chain broke. A new white fir model arrived overnight, and the game weighed it as three times its wood. It fell slowly and hung on its neighbors. Fixing that, and making the round and the split pieces land beside the stump instead of inside it, took the first part of October 3.
Then came the look. Split pieces had flat sawn faces like planks. They now have torn, wavy faces along the grain and chopped ends, and each wears its own tree’s bark at the right size. On a fire, split wood had looked like thin sticks, then like kindling. Now one billet is one billet in the fire, a few lengths stay a few pieces, and four lengths stand as a small teepee with more leaning around them.
The world remembers at most 1,024 felled pieces at a time. One part was still unchecked in a capture on October 3: how split wood looks while it burns.
