Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

While Shasta made the eight day round trip to Kao's island to pick up the immigrants, Karsh and I worked on getting all the metal smithed into the various metal items to send to Elora in exchange for their fungal crops.  Unfortunately, we hadn't quite filled the order by the time Shasta returned.  With the road on our island, her trip is much shorter than it was when Karsh first moved here, which overall is nice, but means we had less time than we needed to fill the order.  I'll probably ask her to stay for two or three days until we fill the order before she returns.  

That said, I had my hands full in the evening when she arrived introducing myself to the new dwarves.  I decided to bring Karsh along to the meeting as well, considering he's become quite skilled in both the demon language and dwarvish.  Just like with Karsh's family, these immigrants will also be staying in the inn until their houses are built.  Thinking about it, I should probably request the construction team make some form of new temporary housing for immigrants.  The inn is nice, but it's not really supposed to be used for long term living.

After introductions, I gave the immigrants the same instructions about how things run here that I gave to Karsh.  They'll get an initial stipend, and I'll let them go into debt to have a house built, however, they'll be working with one of the construction teams, rather than myself for house designs.  Since Shasta is staying for a few days now, she'll be able to work as an in between for communication as needed.

Since each of them also has some form of skill they're useful for, I also talked to them individually about what sort of buildings might be useful to them for their craft.  Arat is content to handle our existing fields of bargas, but his wife Maka will eventually need a bakery, which I'm excited to have constructed in the village. 

Boggs said he doesn't need any particular workshop for fishing, but he'd like to wait on a house until he scopes out the island for fishing spots.  He said he'll likely just have a simple house here in town, but he'd like permission to make a few shelters on the island in any interesting fishing spots he finds, which sounds fair to me.  Although he did say he might want some specialty cookware at some point in the future, after he's gotten a taste for the fish and plants we have around.  

As for Konkur, his demon language is pretty broken, but honestly, the fact he can handle it at all is already a blessing.  He'll probably settle into it pretty well in a month or two of being immersed here.  For his work, he wants a small building which he'll use for research.  It'll have a few small rooms for different activities and studies, and he'll also need multiple tools and some other equipment, so there will be a bit of a process to getting him settled in.

After three more days of work, we gathered up all the trade goods to send to the Elloetta territory through Elora and sent them back with Shasta.  The construction teams have already gotten to work on building the new dwarven homes, and honestly, they'll be done with the first two pretty soon.  Boggs's home is being left until after some workshops are done, as he's already ventured off into the wilderness with the fishing equipment he brought with him.  He had four fishing poles that were all attached to a large backpack when I saw him leaving town, so it'll probably be a while before he returns.

I at least showed him to the market and how we're currently fishing before he left.  He seemed disappointed that there wasn't much sport involved in how we caught fish when he saw the tidepools, so we quickly returned to town.  He tried a few of the different fish in the market, but seemed adamant that he wanted to go off to find fishing points around the island, so I let him go.

Since we still have quite some time until the snow melts on the mountain, I can't actually get any of our current ore to give to Konkur as a sample, but there are still other rocks around the island that he can start analyzing once a construction crew gets his research lab made.  I myself am planning on spending a good chunk of winter trying to make efficiency improvements around the city.  Like I mentioned before, the carts that the goblin came up with were basically just replicas of the track carts, and there are better ways to make carts for use on a road.  I'm sure there are other inefficiencies that have built up which won't take too much time to correct as well.

This is all intermittent with running the academy, as it seems like in a month or two we're going to have all the goblins moved to the new part of the city, and one of the construction crews will start building new housing.  After talking with Zeb a little bit, it sounds like some of the central walled area is going to be repurposed for summoning more imps at a time.  Right now, Zaka has one area underground where he can currently summon imps, and most days he does so, a new goblin results after a day or so.  However, the full capacity that Zaka could actually handle is about four times as much.  Rather than making it all in one area, it seems better to have a whole specialty area for summoning them, with less need for doing all this as a guarded function.

The whole thing sounds intricate, but I told Zeb I'd let him have full reign of construction, so I'm leaving it to him.  We do still want to get a final keep built in the village at some point, but that's being pushed back for now, as it'll require a lot of construction plans.  It seems like the current plan is to move the smokehouse that is adjacent to the first pavilion, and then build the keep over where the pavilion is.  After all, currently the pavilion has multiple basement levels and our emergency escape tunnel entrances.  So building out over that would probably be the most effective.  Plus the pavilion is close to the stream, so building a moat to surround it should be easy as well.

Through the remaining winter months, I worked on a few different projects around the village.  We've already reached the eleventh of the new year, and the snow has started to melt. 

I did a few things over the winter.  First, I worked with Karsh and the cart goblin to get better wagons made, with proper axles and bushings, and wooden wheels, which has made them much more effective overall on roads.  Once Konkur's research lab was built, I worked with him some on gathering rock samples for him to research on occasion as well.

We added four new tools to the village's repertoire.  Two are useful for handling swamp beets, which were already somewhat easy to manage by hand, but we added in a tool that helps cut the stalks, and a second one that helps uproot the whole thing when it's harvest time.  I won't know exactly how much it'll improve the farmers lives, but I expect it'll speed them up somewhat.  Then we added hatchets and machetes, which are useful for the goblins who are handling forest management.

They've done a good job so far of really making the forests around the village manageable, but they've been spending a lot of time coming back to the village to get either an axe or a stone blade for handling thick underbrush in places where they've made dirt paths, so these tools should make it so they don't need to return to the village as often, as they're small enough to be carried around with them.

I also checked in on the paper mill to make sure everything was still running smoothly, and honestly, they're churning out way more paper than I expected.  I've made a small warehouse next to the paper mill where they store their excess.  It's made to be fairly closed off, and has a few windows for light.  I've also made another desiccant dehumidifier that sits in that warehouse.  Ultimately, I'd like to get a stone shaping goblin to make crates that we close up with paper while in that warehouse, so that the humidity is low in the crate.  Then we could actually ship the extra paper out.  Even without that, once the paper is in a crate, it can be stored anywhere, since the crates are airtight, so we'll see how that goes over.

Three weeks ago, Zaka started summoning again as the construction teams had started building out new housing in the new portion of the city, so in another five weeks, I'll start the first training at the academy.  The lecture hall should be able to handle about 80 individuals, so I'm hoping that they don't get too zealous about expanding the population.  Ultimately, they'll have to slow down to expand food and industry, so this should be fine for some time.

I also started talking with the various craftsgoblins about doing a career day at the academy every so often where they'll come in to talk with the new goblins about their jobs.  What I plan on doing for the academy for now is take two weeks every two months, and educate all the new goblins at that point.  Some will be more knowledgeable than others already due to having lived in the village for some time, but that should overall be fine, as most of what I plan on teaching is the basics of our various industries, evolution, levels, and societal functions like our marketplace and currency.