Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

Progress on expanding the village has been going relatively smooth.  It's been 23 days since we started all the construction, and we've gained two more stone shaping goblins in that time.  One is helping me, and the other is going to make the reservoir more orderly before winter, which is slowly approaching.  The sewers and roads aren't quite done yet, but they're getting close to finished.  Bridges still need to be put in, and then a new outer wall will have to be constructed after that, so they'll still be busy with construction for some time.  The bathhouse really helps with all this though, and many of us doing construction can be seen going in and out of it dozens of times a day to recharge mana.

The dwarven crops are also starting to get close to harvest, which I hope will be a big mood improver for Karsh's family.  Both he and his wife have picked up the demon language pretty well, but it seems like their children still struggle with it.  Since I really don't want them to leave, I'm planning on basically bribing them with trade goods to attempt to keep them here.  I'll also probably be more lenient with letting a few more dwarves immigrate here so that they can have more of their own kind live here.  Given their different cultural and biological requirements for housing, I'm thinking about zoning a section of the village around the outside to be for dwarves, so that they have their own neighborhood of similarly shaped houses.  They'll be free to live wherever, but given that they have families, I feel that their preference will be towards single family or generational homes, rather than the goblin communal apartments or tiny houses for one.

The population will remain stagnant for a little while as well, since I plan on announcing that most of the houses and apartments in the inner wall will be replaced soon.  Residents will be given the option to move into newer housing of the two apartment types in the new section of village, pay some money to have an individual home, or pay a decent chunk of money to have a custom house built.  I've already talked it over with Zaka, and he's fine with this.

There has already existed some disparity between the goblins who got individual homes in the past for free, and those living in the apartments, so this is basically rectifying that.  Of course, there will likely be complaints, but I haven't been keeping it a secret that there was a plan to do this for a while.  Ultimately, the goblins will still have months before this starts being implemented, so those who want at least the smaller individual houses should be fine.  Its very likely that the skilled laborers will all want custom houses, considering how much money they have.

Once we get the majority of the residents moved out of the central village area, we can expand the population and start planning out projects like the castle, a mill in the city, more workshops, and other high importance buildings.  After all, the reason the majority of residencies will be moved from the inner wall is for security reasons.  The buildings that will be most important in case of another war need to be protected the most.

I spent a week going around the village to inform all the residents of the approaching deadline for moving, and as I expected, letting them know they'll be moving in a few months to a year wasn't a very popular thing.  However, I did sweeten the deal for them somewhat.  I've started a tally of who wants to live in what kind of house and where, and let them know that they'll be compensated a certain amount of money since they'll be moving.  Ultimately, it comes out to about a month's living expenses, and I'm planning on setting the single house price at about 1.5 times that amount.  So they're essentially getting a discount if they want to move into one of those houses, or they're being compensated for moving.

Since they'll be moving to their new homes spread out over months of time, I don't think it should disrupt the economy too much to pay everyone for this.  Its very likely that a lot of the goblins are going to want work to do so they can save money to buy a new house, so I'm trying to be conscious of that fact and consider what relatively unskilled work to provide for goblins.

One option is to expand the workforce who are working on rock dams, and potentially expand the scope of the project out of our valley and into other parts of the island.  We may not need it in other parts of the island right now, but having it already complete would potentially make future projects run more smoothly.

A second option is to hire out some goblins to start teaching them forest management.  Essentially having them clear debris throughout the forest.  We really don't need every road to be these expensive stoneshaped paths, and we could easily have managed dirt paths that meander through the forest.  That would likely improve the gathering ability for the various goblins who use vines and other plants to make various products, as they would have an easier time navigating the forest.  Plus the fallen branches and other debris that is cleaned up can be used for fuel in the village, not that we currently need more.

A third option, and one I'd like to do in the next two months before it snows, is head back up the mountain to mine more ore.  While we currently still have plenty of metal ingots, I want to make sure we'll have plenty post-trading to keep Karsh happy through winter.  This time, I might bring a few other stone shaping goblins with me, so they can recharge directly with mana crystals in the cave to increase their chances of gaining the mana affinity trait.

For the next few months, I could have Karsh make a bunch of pickaxes and open up a bunch of jobs for expanding the reservoir, since we'll need a lot of stone for construction in the coming months.  Hopefully, by offering all of these jobs, there'll be enough money in circulation that anyone who wants to buy a house can.

The downside to all this is that I'm going to have to pause the city hall building construction temporarily to handle all the task management, which is exactly the opposite of what I want to do since handing off task management is why I'm building the city hall in the first place.

I spent four days advertising different jobs that I was paying to have done in order to give the goblins plenty of time to earn money.  While quite a few goblins were interested in doing work, I was surprised that there weren't more.  I ended up with only around forty individuals who wanted to work, and they were split up among the various options.  Five were interested in learning how to make rock dams, so I paired them up with the existing task force to learn how to make them.

Ten were interested in forest management and making trails.  I'll have to come up with a few rules for them to follow, and teach them some basics before I head up the mountain to go mining.  For mountain mining, I had twelve interested goblins, which means I'll probably bring along two stone shaping goblins so that we can keep a good flow of ore and keep all those goblins occupied with ore hauling and crushing.

Finally, for breaking rocks or hauling rocks from the reservoir area, I had another eleven.  There currently is one stoneshaping goblin doing some work in the quarry, so I'll probably have him stay there and keep an eye on the other workers while he uses stone shaping to make the process easier and more productive.

I spent a week giving the forest management goblins a crash course on what they'll be doing, and two decided that they weren't interested after a few days, given the amount of hiking and hauling they'll have to do.  Their beginning task is actually to aid the goblins making rock dams.  They'll be making a pathway through the forest following the stream and tributaries.  They won't do it directly along the stream, instead keeping around ten to twenty feet of distance between the path and the stream, so that plant life continues to grow along the banks of the waterways, to help prevent erosion.

For starters they'll be clearing debris along where they make the paths.  When I come back, I plan to make some trail markers using darkstone with some lightstone stripes on them that we can have a stoneshaping goblin secure into the bedrock to mark our trails.  I'm debating using a marking system based on the number of rows and maybe some symbols to indicate information about either the trail or distances to things for navigational purposes.  That would require a lot of extra work on my part, so I probably won't.  I might put up a request at city hall and maybe get the attention of an entrepreneurial stoneshaping goblin to retroactively modify the trail markers for that in the future.

Either way, once they've cleared those paths, I gave them a few other general directions to go from the village to make more paths through the forest near the village to provide extra benefit to the goblins who harvest wild plants.