Leigh Kimmel says:

The Kitties’ technology makes it so easy to put together a settlement on a brand-new world that you can forget just how long it takes to truly tame the land and make it a home. Here’s your pre-fab buildings — just pull open the modules and assemble them into a house, a barn, a machine shed and all the ancillary outbuildings. Hook ’em up to utilities and you’ve got a farmstead. Another delivery brings livestock, seeds and machinery, and you’re ready to go.

But you haven’t been on your new homestead long before you realize just how bland those pre-fabs are. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a front porch with some rocking chairs, and a back porch with a mudroom? How about a doghouse for Daisy, who’s still adjusting to a new world where the light’s a little different and all the scents are strange? Maybe some flowers to plant in the front yard?

That’s going to be money out of your pocket, because your initial stake gives you the necessities of a farm operation, not extras. Maybe you can repurpose some of the miscellaneous supplies, or trade with neighbors who used their personal mass allowances to bring some bulbs from home. But most likely you’ll be waiting until you get some crops harvested, until your production stock reaches market weight and you’ve got some actual money. Of course part of those funds will go to amortizing your startup loans — the land’s free once it’s proven, but all those supplies and equipment are a long-term investment.

Around the second or third year out here, things start feeling really hard. The excitement of having traveled through space and claimed land on a new world is wearing off, and you’ve had to deal with some unpleasant problems. Maybe a local predator got some of your market livestock just as you were ready to take them in — or worse, some of your breeding stock, so you have to borrow to replace them, pushing your Freedom Day that much further in the future. But you count yourself lucky after you go to the funeral of a neighbor’s son, who died of an injury that would’ve been survivable back on Earth, where a fully-equipped hospital was only minutes away. All the Kitties’ spectacular technology can’t restore a life that slipped away while being airlifted to the multispecies medical center at the spaceport.

And then you finally get a better sense of the rhythms of this world’s seasons, of the habits of the native lifeforms and how they interact with the domesticates we’ve brought here, and success becomes more common than failure. You’re ahead on your loans, and you can think about that front porch where you can visit with the neighbors when they drop by, the back porch and mudroom — and time on the 3D printer for that cute little miniature windmill that looks so great right beside the pumphouse.

But there are still the downs here and there. Daisy’s getting old, and one day you have to bury her out by the copse of native not-quite-trees where your oldest daughter and the boy down the road used to slip off to. At least you were able to get a puppy from a neighbor’s litter a few years ago, and that dog’s grown up learning how the farm works from an experienced elder, so life goes on. Another year, an unexpected storm wreaks havoc and you’re left wishing you’d spent a little more money on crop insurance, so there’s some belt-tightening until you can get caught back up.

Now you realize that decades have gone by. You’re growing old, and the son and daughter-in-law who’ve been helping around the farm are doing more and more of the actual work, along with the passel of grandkids they’re bringing up. You consider the irony of how, just as you’re finally building the future you’d dreamed of when the Kitties made their offer, you’re getting too old for so many of the things you’d dreamed of when you first came out here.

On the other hand, you’ve got plenty of time to sit in one of those rocking chairs and chew the fat with the neighbors who originally homesteaded the farms all around you.