Abyssal Lapidary is making the social media rounds and I can confirm cutting gemstones is just as satisfying as it looks

I have never really thought much about gemstones or minerals, which is weird considering one of my all-time favourite games is Minecraft, in which I spend a bulk of my time strip-mining. But Abyssal Lapidary has made me realise that there is so much more to the dirt than just coal.

In the demo for Abyssal Lapidary I got to begin my stint as a lapidarist, someone who cuts, shapes, grinds, and polishes minerals to make pretty gemstones. The only problem is, like I said before, I don't really know stones.

Abyssal Lapidary doesn't exactly drop you in the deep end but it does expect you to pick up with the art of making and selling gemstones rather quickly. My first step was searching around the rather large house I'd found myself in which was apparently part of a declining business but it seemed rather nice; it even had a balcony.

Most of the doors downstairs were locked, part of the later progression of the game, the few things I did have access to included a station for fixing tools, breaking rocks, and a booth to talk to customers.

Throughout the day people will turn up to my humble business either looking to buy some precious gemstones or selling minerals and rocks that I can mine into. There's also a guy looking for mysterious artefacts, someone trying to give me a loan (suspicious), and a nice lady selling tea. I'm not 100% sure about what the tea does yet but I buy it anyways.

The rest of my day was spent sitting at my desk carefully hammering rocks into smaller rocks, looking to see if they had anything precious inside. I found some ordinary apatite, fine apatite, and crude duskstone; yeah I'm pretty good at this rock thing.

After selling my wares I managed to earn enough renown to apply for my Silver License which allowed me to access the gem faceting table; this is what I'm here for.

Turning regular clumps of gemstones into cut gems not only adds quite a bit of monetary value to them, it's also quite a lot of fun. The faceting table is essentially a metal sanding machine that you press gems into to whittle them into a desired shape like an old single cut, table cut, or point cut; there are likely more but this is all I have access to right now, and as I'll reiterate I don't know jack about gems.

Grinding the gems down can be surprisingly hard as there's only a small window in which you can cut them perfectly, grind them for too long or not long enough and they'll lose a lot of value. And I cannot afford to lose money right now.

Abyssal Lapidary can be quite slow at times, it's helped by the fact that you can fast forward time to stop you from just milling around or staring out the window for six hours. I'm sure there'll be more ways to fill your day as rooms and work benches open up around the store, but I honestly don't mind its methodical, relaxing approach to procuring, mining, and fixing up gemstones. Who knows? Perhaps by the time the full game launches I'll be able to tell a garnet from a chrysoberyl.