After another six days on the mountain, we found something, that in some ways was a disappoi, but in other ways was a good find. We struck a vein of material, though I wouldn't call it ore. It seems to be gypsum, at least from what I tell from Konkur's description. We have little use fypsum here on the isnd thanks to stone shaping, but it be useful for some agricultural practices, or perhaps allowing non-stone shaping goblins the ability to make castings of things via pster.

  Unfortunately, gypsum is pretty on throughout the world acc to Konkur. It's used by many tries for stru, but unlike earth where struaterials were retively expensive, gypsum seems to be much less valuable tha wood. I think the reason for this is probably magihanced mining teiques. Oh, prior to mae powered mining, materials like gypsum were fairly expensive because they were bor intensive. With many of the races having access to some form of cutting stone via magic though, mining is much easier, which is probably why it isn't as expensive, if I had to guess.

  Either way, the gypsum basically goes for twice the value of a nicely made wooden barrel that it would fill. Which isn't nothing, but it's not that valuable. That said, fish only goes for about double that rate, so I won't be too picky, and will gdly ship excess gypsum off in exge for things that we actually need.

  I initially thought we might just ighis vein of material, and keep searg for some other deposit, but Konkur told me that mining out this vein would be a good idea, as there is a det ce we'll find other, more valuable, ores within the vein of gypsum. Which is why I sidered what to do with the excess we'd mine. He said that while gypsum itself may not be that valuable, it's frequently found aroual ores of copper and lead, so it wasn't a plete loss. It also indicates that this yer of rock does have at least one hydrothermal deposit, so it could hold more.

  Unfortunately, the gypsum isn't really valuable enough for me to try to recruit aire sed goblin minio increase our rate of extra, so for the time being Konkur and his team tinue mining the gypsum in an attempt to find more valuable ores. We still have some of the native copper deposit I found before, so I'm really hoping that if they find an ore deposit, it's not a copper ore, as we already have easier accessed reserves of that which we aren't utilizing.

  If we find lead, that opens up a few new avenues of materials and processes that we could utilize. Lead would be invaluable for making sulfuric acid, which would open up chemically processed paper, rather than meically processed. The gypsum would also be useful as an additive to said paper, verting it to a much more valuable produbsp; Chemically processed paper is quite involved, and would be somewhat hazardous to make, but the quality of paper produced is signifitly higher than its meically processed alternative. I'd imagi would fetch a much better price as a luxury good.

  After talking with Konkur, I realized that I o start w on a way to recover all the iron sunk off our coast. All the onballs and ons on the ships we sank are a det source, and there are literal tons of iron sunk out there, in addition to any other valuables that might have sunk on those ships. The reason being that the kind of ores that are found in those hydrothermal veins generally don't include viable iron ores.

  It sounds like they frequently include pyrite though, so if push came to shove, we could potentially process the pyrite into iron, but it generally isn't very high yield, and requires a lot of work to make viable iron. That said, rec items from those sunken ships is also going to be resourtensive, so it would probably be worth it to process pyrite if we find it.

  What I've been doing for the past seven days is w on a design for a barge with stabilizers. If we make a barge with winches on a e, we might be able to use that to pull up metal materials from our bays. I'm thankful that we still have a lot of leftover roofing materials since we stopped making windmills whehreat of war came about which we could now use for making this ship. If things go well with this ship, then we might sider attempting to make a fishing trawler or simir fishing vessel for catg fish further out from the isnd.

  Right now I'm just using scale models in a tank to approximate the stability of the potential vessel when hauling up rge ons or bundles of onballs. If I get everything w well here, the step will be hiring some of the fishergoblins who have gained water resistao actually do the diving to attach the cables. We'll also need an individual who has the ability to use a heavy tool and magiash opeerlogged hulls of the ships to expose their innards, allowing us to actually recover the iron from them.

  I'm hoping that the magic for throwing things with high force works uer, and we just have a hobgoblin hurl a rge piece of darksto the ship will break some of the hull. Ultimately, if that doesn't work, a handsaw might o be used, and careful cutting would need doo avoid reinforced ses. If there are metal reinforts that they 't hahen the hope would be that by attag cable around the reinforced bit, we break the part off of the ship.

  The actual process of ship-making isn't well known to me, though I hope that the harbormaster we acquired has some idea of the process, and we fill in the gaps for the rest of the process. Since wood is a surplus for us, I pn on having the stabilizers not be roofed, and just made of bound wood. They'll need repg every so often, but that's currently much cheaper for us thaerproofing materials are.

  I'm calling it a barge, but it's teically a self-propelled barge, and I io have a dual paddle wheel design powered by a steam engine. We've had the teology to build steam engines for some time now, but we haven't had a great use for them. The isnd has a bit too much slope for viable surface powered steam engines. We could, in theory, use it for industrial purposes, but our only source of fuel for them is wood and charcoal, which seems like a waste pared to wind power. This, oher hand, is actually a viable use for a steam engine. We he barge to be maneuverable around our coastline.

  I spent een days w with the harbormaster, I was able to get the gist of ship roofing, and started the process of assembling the barge. I needed a lot of help from Karsh with metal w for things like nails as we built the ship in two yers of overpping wood, with some roofing spread between them. Theside will again have roofing spread over it. I hired a goblin carpenter and two oblins to help in the assembly process. We basically used as rge of pieces of wood as we could, sliced from the ters of trees to reduce the ces of leaks.

  The entire barge is po be about 30 feet wide and 120 feet long, making it a monster of a ship, though the design is fairly simple. We'll have six potential locations for the stabilizing arms to be attached. Two off either side, and one on the front and babsp; Before I build the e though, I want to get the paddle wheels and steam engine designed and built. The reason being that I want to design the e to weigh approximately the same amount as the steam eo keep the barge's front and back weight simir.

  There is a lot of work that needs done for the ship though, so I'll be busy for some time w with Karsh to get the rest of the necessary pos ready. I've also identified a sunken ship not far from our inplete jetty which I pn to use for testing with some hobgoblins to see how easy recovery is actually going to be. I have my fingers crossed that we won't have too many issues.