Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

One of the problems with picking a springtime resting point for the crystal in the other valley is a lack of options.  Sure, there are a few places it can go, but none of them have nearly the same impact on productivity.  Though I also didn't expect the now-submerged crystal just downstream of the dam to have as big of an impact as it did.  Though I suppose if I did have a place where it would be as productive, I'd probably end up making another crystal to permanently reside in the new spot.  

So, with that in mind, I shouldn't really be too picky with where I put it.  I should probably just expand the bathhouse in the city some to hold another crystal, and that will be good enough.  Our current bathhouse could do with some remodeling anyway.  Given the current city size, it's a bit small.  The old design relied heavily on pumping water and swapping it out every so often, while utilizing tree-steeped water as a better mana conduit than regular water.

As a consequence of that, many people in the city smell like, well, trees.  I didn't really notice it until I came back from visiting Kao's island.  So, considering that the stream has it's own crystal near the dam which is infusing the water with some amount of mana, I'm thinking that a new bathhouse will have two sections.  A mana recharging section, which will essentially be the current bathhouse with it's tree-steeped water and current fee, and a larger cleaning section, which will be free to use.  That section will divert some amount of water from the stream through long and wide pools, which will slowly drain down into the sewers.  I'll also build an area between the stream and where it enters the cleaning pools where the new crystal can temporarily be kept.

This whole idea as a project is getting a little bigger than I initially intended, but if I get help from one of Zeb's construction teams, we can probably get it built before spring.

I was able to borrow a construction team for this project, so we were able to get it completed in a reasonable amount of time, though it took a little longer than I hoped, and we didn't finish it until 27 days into the new year.  We did get the temporary crystal's spot finished before spring began though, so that wasn't an issue.  The difficulty actually came from needing to hook the water drainage into the sewer system, and getting the flow rate from the stream right.

Ultimately, I spent a few days designing a float control valve.  Thanks to lightstone being lighter than metal, making the actual float, along with a bunch of spares, was relatively easy.  Unfortunately, fine tuning the float valve took some time before I got it work right.  This particular float valve uses two floats.  One regulates how open a gate is, and regulates the flow into the bath.  As the bath gets lower, the gate opens up more.  On the other side of the gate, another float actually regulates the height the base of the gate sits at, and is designed to raise and lower the gate alongside the stream's average level, so that seasonal changes don't break the system.

In the past, this might not work very well due to the daily shifts that would occur in the stream due to heavy rainfall.  Thanks to all the rock dams and the large dam though, the flow of the stream is fairly constant, though extremely heavy downpours can still cause some rapid increases due to all the water joining the stream after the dam.

I'll leave the new bathhouse to operate while I go up the mountain to start work on the crystal to give to Kao.  Before I leave though, I'm going to ask Karsh if he can build me another crusher machine like the ones we made before.  I'll pick it up in a few weeks to take up the mountain to start dealing with all the pyrite that they've been mining out.  I'll also need to hire a few helpers to speed up the crystal process again.

I, once again, decided that the goblins who assist me with crystal making will follow the same schedule as the miners, but I'll stay for an extra cycle each time.  While they help me during the day with melting crystal material and bringing it to me down in the lab, at night I'm busy expanding the exploratory tunnels, and finding new crystal deposits to package for them to use.  So, in the handful of days where they are gone, but I'm still working, I started digging out a new storage area up on the surface, where the pyrite ore will eventually go.

I did learn a new fact about the pyrite crystals from the miners though.  Apparently, stone shaping doesn't work on pyrite crystals themselves.  Though initially I didn't think much of it, it's probably worth waiting to crush the pyrite as a result.  I'll still crush some, for my own tests, but a lot of the pyrite is embedded in other rock material.  Rock material that I can use stone shaping on.  So, rather than crush it all together, it may end up being necessary to concentrate the ore first using stone shaping as part of the recovery process.

All that needs to wait though.  I have priorities that I need to handle first.  If the pyrite is uncrushed, it can still move into the new storage area, I'll just need to keep things organized in bins in there so we don't mix crushed and non-crushed materials.  Having the storage for it is important though, so it doesn't just pile up everywhere.

I'm currently a little over a third of the way finished with Kao's crystal, and we're already about half-way through the fourth month of the year.  I'd be further along, but I decided that I'll make this crystal about a foot taller than the one at the sale, so it's taking extra time. Pretty soon the crystal at the bathhouse can be moved back to the shoreline, and more rapid excavation and construction can resume there.  After I finish this project, I'll have a few months where I can experiment with the pyrite before winter.

We finally finished the crystal for Kao.  It's a bit over seven feet tall, so I hope he appreciates that.  I moved the temporary crystal back to the other valley in early spring, and since then, they've continued to work at a significantly fast pace building the sea wall and digging out the artificial tidepool in that valley.  I'd expect that by next fall, our valley's sea wall will probably be complete.  Then they can begin working on the next valley's sea wall.  

It's early fall now, the second day of the ninth month, so I have about a month and a half of experimenting with pyrite before I need to get all the things ready for trade this year.  I have quite a few things I'd like to trade for, like some of the previously mentioned crystals with effects like causing heat, so I'm looking forward to winter.

Outside of pyrite, there are a few other things to handle with the mine.  It's been producing less and less quartz over the past few months, and the vein has been narrowing somewhat.  Though what we lost in quartz, we've made up for in possibly two other occasional ore types, though I won't know for sure until I smelt them.  I suspect one is galena, and the other is sphalerite, ores for lead and zinc respectively, but until I tinker with them, I won't know for sure.  Which probably means that I need to make even more storage sections in the mountain for the different types of ore that are coming out of the deposit.

According to the notes that Konkur left me, when veins like this go through these sorts of transitions, it's not long until it narrows off even more, and the amount of material that is valuable dwindles.  He even put a note that says he included pyrite in what is considered valuable, despite it not normally being considered as such by the dwarves.  That narrow deposit continues for some time, but it's generally smaller crystals embedded in more rock than we've been seeing.

Which means I'll have to make a choice at that point.  Do we abandon this deposit in search of another one, or do I have the mining team keep extracting despite the lowered yield?  I'll have to look through Konkur's notes more thoroughly and see if he has any insight.  He left me quite a few pages, and while I skimmed it with my limited dwarven reading ability, I've had to bring pages that I thought were important to the goblins who have been handling our records to translate.  It's probably worth taking a few days and having one of those goblins translate all of them for me, so I can make a more educated decision moving forward.