Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

It's been a little less than forty days.  Zaka didn't arrive last month because we left the village so recently, but he did visit yesterday.  There wasn't much to report on, other than he hasn't particularly enjoyed cleaning out the branches that had settled into the reservoir once the stream had let up.

Progress has been steady for growing the extra large crystal, and I've started expanding the exploratory tunnel again.  After the first ten days, I'd cleaned out all fourteen of the crystal bubbles I'd found during the initial tunnel dig, so I went back to expanding it.  I try to haul a cart's worth of stone from the tunnel each evening.  Zeb's built up quite a charcoal stockpile as well, and even more than that, has a massive wood stockpile to use for making charcoal.  He seems comfortable enough with starting work on the path again now that he's gained a few levels, which means he'll start needing stone again for construction.  I might end up doing a lot more stone cutting when Zaka returns next time just to have someone there who can actually haul more of the stone out.

Another month, and we've made pretty average progress.  Zeb restarted construction on the path down this month, and at the end of the month, Zaka returned and helped haul stone alongside two other goblins.  Zeb's pace was a little faster than I expected last month, thanks to him using the already constructed section of path with a cart.  He himself can use the carts to bring rock down the mountain, and he can push an empty cart up the incline, so he's actually been able to move the rock he needs a lot faster than I anticipated.  He's made it about a hundred feet on his own now.  Which, considering his smaller mana pool is pretty impressive.  Part of that has been sending standardized blocks to him.  I've been attempting to make sure everything I cut is roughly a brick so that it's easy to fuse to each other.  I'm hopeful that his pace next month will be slightly faster since the goblins helped haul stone to periodic points along the path while they were here.

Well, during the last month, I finally regrew the crystal to four feet, and moved it into the new apparatus for growing.  If this doesn't work, I have no idea what I'm going to do.  That said, it'll take a long time to grow the crystal to the size I want, so I'll just keep at it.  As for the path, Zeb made it another 120 feet.  Which I'd say is pretty impressive.  The soil where he's working is more shallow than it was down by the village, so he doesn't have to dig as deep, or place as much stone to build it up to the right height, speeding up his work.  I have a feeling it's going to be quite the boring rest of the year as we work on these large projects.

It was, in fact, a boring year.  These last four months have been a lot of routine work.  The crystal is a little more than a third of the way through this apparatus's growth.  If I keep this rate up, it'll be done by the end of next year.  In the last four months, Zeb's also built the path out quite significantly for working mostly alone.  He's gotten this section to 800 feet, to which I've decided to help build a platform where he's at right now before we head back down to the goblin village for winter.  

I was right to say I'd be lucky if I reached prestige by this next winter.  I've been so holed up inside working that in the months I've been in the cave, I gained as many levels as I did during the winter occasionally cutting trees in the village last year, which is to say, barely any.

<RARE LESSER EARTH DEMON>
Level: 74
HP: 2084/2084
MP: 943/943
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Earth Spike

Zeb, on the other hand, gained a decent amount thanks to his tree cutting for the path construction, and earlier cutting to make charcoal.

<LEGENDARY GOBLIN>
Level: 38
HP: 682/682
MP: 157/157
Traits: Mimicry, Mana Affinity
Magic: Stone Shaping

Based on Zeb's growth, I think my hypothesis on Mana Affinity is correct, which means I can, for now at least, lay that mystery to rest.  Zeb's mana is already almost back up to where he was when he was level 100 as an Epic Goblin, so that's been very helpful for construction.

When we returned to the village today, Zaka had a surprise for us.  One of the goblins in the village has gained stone shaping.  Apparently, the individual in question was going to the reservoir, and manually breaking stone to use for the road, and after a month or so of doing that, they prestiged and got stone shaping, which meant they were able to cut nice, neat bricks, instead of poorly shaped ones after that point.

Zeb wasn't too happy to hear this news.  He seems to be a little conflicted about another goblin having the ability.  My guess is he felt special being the only one who also had that ability with me.  I assured him that I didn't intend to take on another assistant.  I will, however, gladly leave a bunch of the stone shaping tasks I'd normally do to this new goblin.  Heck, I'll even work with them to build them a workshop in the now bustling industrial district.  Mostly so that I never have to worry about making stone buckets for the goblins here, or fixing random broken stone objects.  They can make all the random tools and spearheads, and I'll be free from that responsibility!

As a result of them gaining stone shaping, the goblins in the village also extended the path up the mountain by another five hundred feet over the course of the year.  After hearing that, Zeb seemed more confident, since he'd made more path alone than the other goblin had with help.

As for other developments in the village, all the goblins are wearing clothes now, except Zeb and I.  When Zaka visited, all the goblins had clothes, but I didn't know if they were wearing them specifically for travel or not.  Now I know, they're always clothed.  Well, I don't mind not wearing clothes myself, but we should make sure Zeb has some I suppose.  The only new shop in town is seemingly a paint store.  I guess the goblins have finally figured out a few dyes that they can use to paint with, although it all seems to be finger paints at this point.  Since I'm already making one workshop, I'll make one for the paint shop as well.

As for the plant field, according to Zaka, during the summer, the stalks turned brown, and died off.  During fall, when it rained a bit, they regrew the stalks, and are now back to what they looked like when Zeb found them before.  The seeds that were floating also sank in the summer, and now there are a few short stalks poking up from that part of the flooded field.  Later this winter, I think we'll be able to come up with a good agricultural route to grow these plants as an actual stable food source for the goblins.  If that is the case, I think I should probably build another ten houses.  I'm sure if Zaka thinks he can support them, he'd like to have more goblins about.

The goblins that have the mechanical rope braider have stockpiled a ton of rope, which is good, because we'll need it soon enough.  I was worried about the local vine plant population when I saw just how much plant rope they'd made, but it seems that they've been responsibly harvesting it, leaving around half the vines.  Which has led to them having to travel quite far to harvest the vines, but the backpacks have made that a much more doable task.

One month has passed, I've gotten the workshops done, and the new houses.  Zeb and the other Stone Shaping goblin seem to be getting along fine.  Their personalities are quite different, so I think Zeb doesn't feel threatened anymore.  Zeb's quite inquisitive, and the other goblin, Gakus, is the kind of person who enjoys doing monotonous work, repeating the same task over and over.  I'm pretty sure if I told Gakus to just cut bricks from stone until he died, he'd spend the rest of his natural life happily cutting them.

They've both been working on road construction while I've been building in the village.  As such, they've actually made it to the next landing, which is just in time for me to get to work on it.  After we finish the next section, we'll be hitting a bit of a higher slope area, so I think that it'll go a bit faster, since I should be cutting the path out partially from the mountain, rather than building it up from the ground.

Another month down, and we spent it pretty much path building the whole time.  We made it to the next landing, and even finished two 600 foot stretches of zig-zag in addition to the 1100 feet of path before that.  I think if we keep up this pace, we'll actually make it a considerable distance over this winter.  One concern I have is that some of the middle sections are likely going to need extra stone, and those are going to be quite a distance from our normal stone cutting locations, which will certainly slow down production, unless we cut quarries out along the way, which I'm considering at this point.  We'll see when we get to that point I suppose.

One more month, and we've cut quite a lot of stone out from this section of the mountain for the zig-zag path up here.  While I've been cutting the main sections out, I've been having Zeb cut the stairs directly between the zig-zag, so that both are getting done at the same time.  This month, we've cut an additional five 600 foot stretches before we finally reached an area of lower slope, so we started building another longer path section, which we're only about 200 feet into so far.  For this section, we've been re-using stone we cut out to make the zig-zag, so we haven't had to designate a new quarry yet, but I think we'll probably need to dedicate a new quarry area soon. 

Gakus actually stopped working with us on the zig-zag section, and instead he was still cutting stone from the reservoir area, and started building a huge flat stockpile area outside the village walls, where they've started stockpiling all the extra trees that we've been cutting in our way.  Then they've transported them back along the path we've finished using carts and rope.  At this rate, I'm not even sure what they could possibly use all the wood for.  I might set them up with some charcoal kilns, so they can convert the wood to charcoal.  Wood's fine, but charcoal has a near indefinite shelf life, where as the wood can eventually rot, making it useless for things like cooking.

Well, it's been another month, and the spring thaw and rains have finally joined us.  We finished the remaining 1000 feet of construction on the current path section, and I set up a location for a quarry up the mountain, near where the next landing should approximately be, about 1100 feet up from the last landing.

On some of the particularly rainy days, I built a few large charcoal kilns outside the city walls near all the wood storage, and then showed Zaka and some goblins how to use them.  They'll have to use clay to close off the air holes, rather than stone like Zeb or I would, but even so, I hope they keep up with using them.  Gakus seems capable of building at least some basic structures for storage, so storage for charcoal shouldn't be an issue.  As long as he mimics my construction, then I'm not too worried.

I'm actually glad he's not the creative type, because without a basic understanding of architecture, if he got too creative with construction, there is a good chance someone might get crushed to death.  Since he's the type to just duplicate things though, I'm not as worried about that, but I am worried about coming back to a sea of identical covered buildings all filled with wood and charcoal.

The final month in the village has passed, and tomorrow Zeb and I will return up the mountain.  We built out the path to the current intermediate quarry, and I gave Gakus and Zaka instructions on how to pick out a location for these intermediate quarries, so that they can continue construction throughout the year.  If they make it 2000 feet or so, they'll reach another zig-zag section, and I told them to stop at that point if they make it there, since it'll be much harder for them to build at those sections compared to doing it myself.

I've also clear cut and designated a floodable field for the new plants to be grown.  I showed Zaka, and some interested goblins, how we've decided to harvest and use them for cooking.  They aren't really worth harvesting in their first year of growth, as the new seeds from before still have relatively small bulbs under them.  However, at the end of the season, you can cut a third of the stalks or so without too badly harming the plant.  We tried cutting more, but a few of those plants died, so we've set the limit at the safe point.

As for the bulbs, we don't know yet if they'll be worth harvesting at the second year or not yet either, since it's too early to tell, but I'm hoping they will be.  I explained the basics of selective breeding also, where you don't harvest the plants that would be best for eating, and instead let them grow, and plant their seeds.  All that information won't be useful this year though, and all the goblins need to do is keep an eye on all the seeds in the new flooded field.