Between the work area and the initial taratuses, it took us seven days. A rge part of which was actually rebuilding the apparatuses after doing some tests on them under vacuum. The apparatus chamber shape o be ged and thied because one cracked when I tried to stone shape a new tainer onto it, which would normally be part of the attempt at growing crystals.

  So we've reached the point of doing our first attempts at artificial crystal growth today. Ohing that hopefully will be beneficial is that the melted crystals actually do o cool somewhat before we attempt to pour the crystal material onto the existing crystal. This gives us a window where I think we actually heat up four of the crystal den vacuum tainers before we bring them down to the cave to use. The furnace fit two of the chambers at a time, so once we heat those ones up to temperature, we'll set them up on the higher rack I made for crucibles before, and we'll start heating a sed set to use.

  After heating the four chambers, Zeb and I carry two down into the cave to attempt the crystal growing experiment. We have to wait a short while for the first chambers to reach the approximate temperature of success we had from before. Then I use stone shaping te the tainer onto the top of the groaratus. The first tainer isn't going to be that likely to have any success if I had to guess. The reason being that I have yet to add any of the mysterious gas into the apparatus. In fact, I wouldn't expect much growth at all today from all four of these. The hope however is that over time, the tration of whatever the gas is will increase in the chamber, and allow better crystal growth.

  For the first tainer, I allow the material to quickly empty into the chamber. I seal the top back off, and remove the first tainer, and we swiftly move the sed tainer into position, and I stone shape it into position. This time however, I open a small hole to slowly drip the liquid material down onto the target crystal. By usionise, I check when the fluid is finally emptied as well. After it is, we wait a while for the third and fourth taio reach the appropriate temperature before repeating the process for them as well.

  As we're finishing the fourth tainer, I realize that there is a step that I actually should be doing at the end of each of these tainer pletion steps. I don't know the exact level of vacuum the chamber should be at, but in theory, if the crystal is iing the gas into its structure, then it actually shouldn't be too much of a problem to have the gas at a higher pressure, to a point. So I should be using stone shaping to make sure that I force all the gas from the initial tainers into the crystal groaratus. I'll probably just do this by stone shaping along in a piston like fashion, redug the volume of the tainer until there isn't any volume left, pushing the gas out. The only thing I'll o be careful of with this is not pressurizing the general apparatus, because we haven't tested it at all for positive pressure, and we don't know if the crystals have a pressure above which they won't grow.

  After we finish with the st tainer, I use teise to check the crystal in the apparatus. It has grown a bit. Not a lot by any means, and it will probably be a few days of this process before we o move the crystal to the size apparatus. For the current apparatus, a final crystal would be slightly smaller than the rgest crystals I have from my colle of natural crystals. After a while, the material itom colle tainer has solidified, and with teise, I tell that the tainer is a nearly two third full. I could remove it as is, and prepare it to re-melt, but I think instead, tomorrow we'll just melt two tainers of crystals, to fill the bottom colle tainer. Then, when it is full, we'll melt it the following day, and try to re-apply that material, to see if it will still grow the seed crystal.

  Today, we're attempting the application of re-melted crystal material. Yesterday's two tainers went fine, and almost filled the re-use colle tainer. It took some extra caution to remove the tainer while maintaining the airtight seal of the crystal groaratus, but I think I ma fine. Then I put a y tainer where it used to be for colle.

  This tainer is a det bit heavier than the previous tainers we were using, owing to the fact it is almost pletely filled with material, rather than only partially filled. Which also means it is taking almost as long to heat as the four taiook together to heat. O reached the desired temperature though, we moved down to the apparatus for today's application of material. After giving it a little while to cool, I apply it to the top of the apparatus and open a small hole to drip material onto the growing seed crystal.

  After the entire taiied, it appears that around 10% of the re-melted material formed crystal on this pass. For the few days, I want to just try re-applying this material over and over, to see just how much of it we use, and maybe gain some insight into the crystal formation process.

  After four days of repeating the process, two things became apparent. First, the amount of material that would form crystal was decreasing non-linearly each time. Now whether that was because of some unknown problem with heating and cooling the material each time, or redu in gas pressure due to it being mixed into the crystal is unknown at this time. Sed, the amount of charcoal we are going through is signifit, and we'll o keep logging and making charcoal occasionally. I've decided that we'll cut half the wood from the nearby area, expanding the trolled enviro around the cave entrance, and the other half will be cut and hauled from the path down to the goblin vilge. This will obviously slow down progress of the crystal project, but I think ing infrastructure development is more likely to slow us down long-term.

  As it stands, the crystal in the current apparatus is nearly rge enough to move to the chamber, so for today, we're going to melt down two new tainers of small crystals to pour on, and then tomorrow, I'll begin the hard process of transferring the crystal and gasses in the current apparatus into the rger one. Those two new crystal melts will be enough to re-fill the re-use taio full. This time though, I'm just going to seal it off, a aside. On the nearatus, I want to add even more raw crystal material, to increase the gas tration in the rger chamber again. Thankfully, as ht now, we don't seem to have a she of the very small crystals. Moving forward though, I might want to sider spending some time usionise to try to find more buried bubbles of crystals. I haven't yet checked a lot of the side tunnels, nor have I tried using my rger mana pool to do even rger pings.

  Moving the seed crystal to the new, rger apparatus and then moving the gas over to the new chamber was quite the painstaking process, but I pleted it without too many issues. First, I stone shaped the crystal slowly out the bottom of the chamber encased in stone. On iion, I could barely tell that the crystal was only growing oop facets that were getting dripped on by the liquid material. For the nearatus, I ied the crystal upside down from its previous orientation, to grow the other four facets, in case there was any artificial instability caused by growing the crystal from only four of its eight facets.

  The gas movement just required I fashion a thick tube from one apparatus to the other, then push the remaining gas from the old apparatus to a new one using stone shaping to piston it over through the tube. Once all this was dohere was less than half a day left, so I decided to get more lightstone prepped for tainers so that we'll be ready for further applications of the process. sidering it is only 13 days until Zaka es back, I'd like to be able to be far enough along to show him an artificially rge crystal. ime he es back, he isn't expected to be summoning more imps uhey've had more losses in the vilge, so hopefully it just be a tour of the facilities.