Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

In the past few years, I used to only spend the winters in the goblin village.  Given that we now have the path between my cave home and here however, the trip between the two locations can easily be done in a few hours, so I'm rethinking how I want to spend my time.  For the past two weeks, I've been working on finishing the new warehouse and making charcoal, which is starting to get a little boring.  Zaka did his first blood draining session yesterday, and from here on out, I've made containers that should be the right volume for the amount of blood he's giving.  It'll still take a while before we have enough blood to fire the steam cannon once, but having that available will be a big boon to the village's defensive capabilities.

Since I'm almost done with the new warehouse, I've decided to start work on some new projects.  First, I've offered up a trade to the seashell collector in exchange for a large amount of broken seashells.  I'll be building a basement storage area under their shop where they can store even more things.  After that, I want to build the furnace and smelter down here that I was thinking about from before.  Hopefully I can use crushed seashells as a flux material, and we can finally figure out if that mystery metal will have any usage or not.

Ultimately, there is another project looming on the horizon within the coming weeks, which is expanding the fields for swamp beets.  Zaka's been felling quite a few trees a day at this point, so it shouldn't be too long until that work will need started.  Of course, it'll still probably be next year before those fields are useful.  Zeb's been helpful with a lot of the projects I've been working on, and honestly, I might let him take care of the field project himself, since he was the one who found the plant to begin with.

After thirty days, I've dug the basement out for the shell shop goblin, and I've completed the new stand alone furnace and smeltery.  I've traded with the new carpenter goblin to have him build out a waterwheel for me, in exchange I'm going to build him a new basement as well.  As I've started working on digging basements, a lot of the other shop goblins have taken interest in it, but I'm holding off on doing the work until I have something that I want from them, since it's actually a bit of work to add a basement to an already completed building.

Zeb has started the work to make the new fields for the swamp beets as well.  The full area hasn't had all the trees cut down yet, but destroying the stumps and removing all the tree roots so that the swamp beets can grow is actually quite a lot of work, so he and some goblins have started that process.

Zaka is getting close to his level cap, so any day now he should either prestige or evolve, which we're happy to hear about.  We've also done a second blood harvest with him, which went much smoother than the first one we did.  He's been diligently summoning imps as well, so the village is almost back at population capacity.

The village also sent over someone to check on the other village, and see how they're doing.  That village seems to have prioritized building houses, and of the 17 goblins who live there, about half have a stone house for now.  Considering Gakus only has regular stone shaping, and they don't have a way to regenerate mana faster than normal, it's unfortunately going to be slow going for them for all their construction projects.  That said, I'm glad they should all have houses before winter sets in, not that it gets particularly cold down here at the lower elevations on the island.

Its been two weeks, and Zaka prestiged, so he is now a Rare Hobgoblin.  The result was a bit of a mixed bag.  I wasn't sure if he'd fully heal given he was missing a large portion of his lower leg, and I was disappointed to see that he didn't heal all the way.  He did heal quite a bit though.  Around three inches of leg seemed to recover, and heal over to form a much less gruesome wound than what he had before.  To fully heal, he'd probably need to prestige at least two more times, but probably more.  I think it's probably much more likely that he'll evolve, and that will likely fully heal him.

A bit of a bonus that happened however, was that he picked up the trait Improved Regeneration, which may actually help him heal without needing to prestige again.  Only time can say for sure, but the fact he should heal faster has me intrigued.  I also had that option after I was badly injured and spent a lot of time healing, so I'm interested to see what sort of effect it has moving forward.

The field work is coming along well, and Zaka should be done cutting trees down soon.  I've finished the carpenter's shop basement, and he's making good progress on the water wheel I need for my furnace.  Something is becoming apparent within the village as I work on things though.  We're running out of space within the walls.  When we put the walls in before, the village population was less than half what it is now, and we've added a lot of specialty buildings that didn't exist before.  For now, I don't want to really focus on growing the population, but moving forward, it may become useful if it helps the goblins further specialize.

After another 17 days, I've realized we've already almost reached winter again.  With the furnace and it's water wheel completed, and the new large field completed, I find myself ready to start some new projects again.  I'm going to get some of the new goblins to help me haul a bunch of things from the cave.

First, I want to haul the ore down here, to make an attempt at purifying the unknown metal from before, now that I have a substantial amount of  seashells to use as a flux material.  Second, I want to haul the excess stone from last winter down to the village.  There are a few projects that could use extra stone, and although building basements gives us some stone, I'd rather not have to do that precise of work if I can avoid it.  Third, I want to bring down some more lightstone, and extra copper.  The cannons used up quite a bit of my reserves of both materials, so I want to have some of what little is left in the village, so that I don't have to worry about not having access to it over the winter.

As for projects that use stone, I have an idea for something I want to try in the bay area, and it's going to require a large amount of stone and effort to build, but if it works out, it'll pay some very large dividends moving forward.  Since the bay is somewhat enclosed, making a c shape, I want to make a stone mesh with two inch gaps that covers where the water in the bay drains out.  Obviously, I don't want to cover it all the way to the high tide level, but instead only up to about a third of the max water level.

The hope is that moderately sized sea life will get trapped as the water slowly drains, and then the goblins can just go and pick up a bunch of free food.  Now, the area where they can actually pick it up is quite slick and dangerous to walk on, so if an initial test of the mesh works, I'll need to spend time trying to fix the area around the bay so that the goblins can somewhat safely walk once the water is drained.

In this time, we've also had the opportunity to get more blood from Zaka.  He does seem to be healing faster from the bleeding, at about twice the rate, so that should increase our supply moving forward.  I can't quite tell either, but it does look like his leg might be regenerating, albeit at a very slow rate.  If that is the case, in another year or so, he might be fully mobile again.

After another five days, we've gotten all the materials hauled down the mountain, and I'm getting everything set up to make a batch of the mystery metal.  The first step is going to be to make more of the brittle version of the metal that isn't very useful.  Then I'll grind that down into a powder alongside the seashells, and re-smelt that material down.  That should reduce the carbon content in the metal considerably, and hopefully yield a more pure metal that I can then do additional testing on.

I'm thankful that I've made a hand crank option for the furnace, because the stream right now isn't flowing with enough force to properly get the furnace up to the temperature I'll need.  However, once winter sets in, I intend to go to the reservoir and set the valves to slowly fill the reservoir up a little at a time.  That way I can just open a valve to let a bunch of water out over a day or so, and that'll give me enough water to really use the full potential of the furnace.