As the dwarves set out the day, the mert said he hoped to return this winter with oods if he , but that we shouldn't hold our breath in case he has difficulty trading for all the materials we wanted. After he said that, I asked him to sider pr part for us for year, in case he 't return before then. We'll likely need a lot of it for handling formal dotatioween the dwarf kingdom and here, so getting a source of it now seems like a good idea.

  After the dwarves set out, we went through the process of loading the new crystal into the bathhouse. By the evening, we'd gotten it loaded in and properly positioned. I couldn't say for certain, but the water feels even warmer than it did with the old crystal. As I soaked ihhouse in the evening, I thought about a few projects that are going to o be pleted at some point in the near future.

  One of the looming problems is fresh water. The stream here was never very rge, and with nearly five hundred goblins and other demons drinking from the stream, along with using the water for ing and growing crops, we've basically outstripped the avaible tinuous freshwater here. A partial solution is to properly use the reservoir, and holy, we should probably have been doing this already. The valves should be utilized and adjusted so that the winter snow melt is preserved to st longer into the year.

  We might o expand the stream system in the vilge as well. By that, I mean that if we keep expanding the vilge outwards, we should make new artificial els for freshwater to flow through other ses of the vilge, so freshwater doesn't o be gathered from as far away. Wells might also end up being a useful stru to attempt to build in some locations in the vilge to further help alleviate any water issues.

  Another issue fag us as a nation is rge scale infrastructure. The road up the mountain is useful for us, as is the road to the sea, but the best avaible harbor is on the opposite side of the isnd, and travelling through the forests around the outside of the isnd to get there takes seven days if you're traveling quickly, and longer if you're trying to haul things. A few roads should probably be structed to the harbor on that side of the isnd to facilitate trade.

  Ahing I wao make before but I 't actually do without a skilled smith is a windmill. Ideally, an English style mill that automatically faces the wind and adjusts its fans so it doesn't take extra operators to run multiple of them. There are a lot of locations on the isnd with pretty det amounts of wind, and the ability to utilize that for meical work in various forms would catapult our ey forward.

  Finally, and this is an issue I'm not actually sure how to solve easily, is the idea of building a port. The tides here are so extreme that the only way I ceive of a port being made is by restrig access in and out to being during high tide at a wet dock, which we'd have to dig ourselves. It's not impossible, but I'd need a lot of info I don't currently have in order to plete that task. In fact, this is important enough that I think I'll try to make it over to the harbor oher side of the isnd before the dwarves make it back, just so I get a good look at their ship or ships to see what we're w with. Sihey're a rge group hauling supplies, I should be able to make it to that side of the isnd faster than them if I travel alone.

  The round trip to the bay and back again took twelve days in total. Thankfully, I reached the bay before the dwarves left and was able to get a good look at their ships. There were three ships anchored in the harbor. One ship was rger thaher two, with three rge sails mounted on the ded many wooden sts which likely had ons behind them. That ship probably required well over a hundred individuals to crew it. The other two ships were slightly smaller, with e main sail and two smaller sails. They looked like they also had ons, but many fewer than the first ship. They each probably required a bit less than fifty individuals to fully crew.

  Even the smaller ships would be a real pain to make a si dock for, let alone enough to hold multiple ships. For now, I think that our best bet is to build a road to this side of the isnd, to facilitate the speed of travel around the isnd. I'd guess that with a good road, walking from one side of the isnd to the other via the periphery would take about two days at a leisurely pace, or just one if you push yourself. Right now it takes about eight at a leisurely pace due to the difficult terrain.

  Thankfully, building this road should be much easier than building the road up the mountain for multiple reasons. First, we have a much rger goblin workford those goblins are more skilled than previously. Sed, while the terrain is difficult, it isn't actually trying to asd the mountain, so there is a lot less zig-zagging to do. Holy, rather than go over some of the ridges, around the mountain, we might just tuhrough them, or cut a direct path up if necessary. The third reason is that this road won't have a cart system attached to it, si won't have much of a height differential.

  What I'll probably do is mark out a path, and then for the simple portions, let the goblins with stone shaping run that portion of the projebsp; There will be a few ses that will require some more advanced deaking where I'll probably o step in, but I expect most of the road should be fairly straightforward to build.

  I've decided to break the process of building the road up into multiple parts. The first part is the se from the vilge to the valley edge in the dire of the now-destroyed sed vilge. Once I figure out the best pce to build road to ect the two valleys, that will be the endpoint of the first se. The sed se will cross the sed valley and up to the valley edge. Unfortunately, after that the terrain bees quite craggy, and will probably require plotting and engineering to make the remaining roads funal. All the craggy ses will o be individually lined up, then cuts and fills will have to occur to allow ft roads to be built.

  Thanks to my scouting before in the area, I had a pretty good idea of where the best crossing from one valley to the occurs, so I got the first road searked out in only five days. The general path will include a slight ine towards the ter mountain, to try to make the path as short as possible to the other side while maintaining a very shallow grade. Crossing into the sed valley will require a tuo be dug betweewo valleys.

  There is a lot of peripheral work that o be pleted before the road itself be built. First, we'll need lots of stone, and since we're approag spring, the reservoir area will soon be unavaible. We've only got about three weeks before the reservoir will be inundated with water, so we'll want to make the most of the time we have for that. Sed, there are a lot of trees in the way of the road that will need cut down. This is always a bit of a blessing, sihe extra levels are appreciated, but it does take time to actually aplish. Third, all materials for stru o be moved to where they'll actually be used, which for projects like this is no simple task.

  Ohe spring rains and snow melt makes the reservoir area unusable for cutting stone, we resume digging our emergency escape tunnel, as well as the tunnel for the road to acquire some additional stone.

  With all hands on deck cutting stone for twenty days, we mao excavate a signifit amount of stone from the reservoir area. We even had a bunch of the goblins manually breaking stone so that we could hopefully get a few more stone shapers by the time we cut all the trees down for the new road. We ended up using a signifit amount ur borers to keep up with the pace that we were cutting stoo haul it back to the vilge. The cart system was running full time to haul blocks down to the vilge, and even with that, the stockpile areas at the reservoir filled up throughout the day, and a night shift of goblins ended up being necessary just to have them emptied by the following m. Increasing the reservoir's capacity is hough, si helps smooth out the stream's flow rate during the heavy rains and snow melt in spring.