After only a few days of helping the mining team, I improved their efficy signifitly, making me wish I'd spent a longer amount of time w with them previously. The tunnel only has orack, so the mining team was hauling one cart out at a time, which was resulting in a much slower extra rate than what they were capable of. How I improved it was fairly simple. I figured out how long it took for one miner with stone shape to run out of mana, and thehat time to figure out how long it takes to load a cart, and how far it be pushed in that time. After that, it's just a matter of having a number of carts in the cave that meet at differehs, where they move the load in one cart to the one. It's not as effit as having two cart nes, but it's much faster than before.

  All in all, I helped them mine for 22 days before I decided to iigate the i point underground. With more teise points to judge from, I got the general sehat one of the things I detected was the edge of a dome shaped intrusion in the yer ge underground. The edge that I detected seemed to be about 80 feet wide, though based on the curvature, I'd estimate it's generally dome shaped and about twice that width. We're almost a mile into the mountain norobably around 1000 feet uhe surface.

  The pn now is to make a loading and unloading point attached to the tunnel over the deposit, and then dig down towards it. While the mining team works on that, I'm going to che with Zeb and see how things are going with his teams. Given that the st ore deposit like this took a couple of years to extract fully, I'd like to have one of the stru teams get the tunnel expao the full width to that point, to improve the extra speed. Though I suspect I'll have to wait for the team that's building the sed sea wall to finish their work before I borrow anyone.

  As I suspected, it seems like I won't be able to borrow any stru teams until year. Acc to Zeb, they're getting quite a few one shaping goblins thanks to making the terraces along the hillside. He wants the new oo spend at least half of a year on aing team before they're put on a newer ohough, which is why I'll have to wait. They're gaining quite a few levels though, sihey're having to clear cut the hillside as they do their work, which is why we're getting so many stone shaping goblins so quickly.

  The terraces are actually quite intricate, which is why we needed a build team dedicated to making them. After the dirt is hauled off the stone, regur goblins break the stoo an approximately level surface, then stone shaping goblins cut els into the yer, to facilitate water drainage down to the yer. Above that, fine gravel is yered ba, and then finally the dirt is put ba top. Anything rger than gravel is then hauled off to the other side of the isnd. With the sheer number of workers, Karsh has been quite busy repairing and making pickaxes.

  They're making great progress though. They're adding about six acres of farmable nd a month. Ultimately, that means we're adding about 15 demons worth of food a month in avaible farmnd. Given the majority of our isnd does require terrag to farm effectively, it actually is quite useful, even if it doesn't sound like that mubsp; It also helps prevent mudslides, which do happen occasionally here.

  So, depending oime of day, I guess I'll either help the mining team, or work on expanding the tunnel further. During the day, I hire sur goblins to help me haul stone I cut from the tunnel, and at night, I pile up stone in the loading area deep in the mine while everyone else sleeps.

  It took us 44 days before we finally made tact with the suspected deposit. It took a while because we o dig a horizontal shaft first, so that we were tered over the deposit itself before digging down. Though once we started digging down, it only took a few feet before we started seeing different materials. Teise also helped me to locate the actual trunk of the deposit, which was a little off ter from the dome, with a slight angle.

  First, we dug partially into that different yer of stohe yers we've been going through have been a very dark color, while this new yer is lighter in color, with more pockets, and also weighs quite a bit less than the previous yers. The dome material was a dark red color, b on bck, and was signifitly denser. I hadn't expected it to be an ive top was gypsum, but given how different this was, I figured it would be worth a test.

  It took a lot of heat to get it to break down, and there was a signifit amount of sg and impurities, but it seems to have made iron, which, given it's reddish color, I suspect it's hematite, though it's littered with impurities. If it is hematite, then it'd be worth setting up the power facility using the dam, because the easiest way to purify it should actually be to crush it and pick it up with a mag, leaving all the other rock behind.

  Since we hadn't po extract the whole dome, we actually weren't set up properly to harvest it. It'll take me some time to make a hydroelectrit though, so I told the minihat we'll eventually e back to extract it, but for now, they should keep digging down.

  After 21 more days, we'd made it through a few different kinds of materials. We found more quartz bearing rock, galena, sphalerite, and pyrite, though they're fairly intermixed this time, which makes it much harder to extract them. Uhe other deposit, where the crystal materials were rger, and yered more distinctly, here I find sphalerite and galena and pyrite in the same k of robsp; Thankfully, removing the zind lead from the pyrite should be fairly straight forward, so other than needing a few more personnel w on it, it shouldn't cause many issues.

  A new use of teise also gave me a better idea of the deposit's size. If I had to guess, it's probably between five aimes the volume of the st deposit, which would mean that the mining team will be w for decades before they extract everything. In practice though, within a few years I would like to have many more people w on mining, so it will probably st us signifitly less time than that.

  I also realized we needed a better system than manual handing off of stoerials to different carts, so we've started installing passing zones periodically iunnel. Since everyone has a torch of some kind, it's easy to see when someone is approag, and carts loaded with stone have the right of way. This way carts leaving the mine easily make it out quickly, ay carts go to the loading area where someone is filling them for the return trip.

  I ultimately decided that we should have a couple goblins doing manual s of the ores brought out first, to try to cssify them based ohey should go first for treatment. If the rock was majority galena, with it's silvery bck hue, then it should obviously go to lead melting first, to remove most of the lead. The tailings from that then be sorted for sphalerite or iron oxide tent if necessary.

  If the ore is more sphalerite, but still has a lot of lead, it has to gh a new lead furhat also has a zinc colle chamber, whie fourteen days to put together. Lastly, if the sphalerite tent is low in a pyrite sample, then it gh a lead furnace first to melt off the lead, thereated like normal pyrite.

  Ultimately, we could use pretty much all of our existing furnaces and roasting ovens to utilize our new deposit, but they do need extra maintenance due to the amount of cross ination. I brought on a total of 12 new goblins to handle s and assisting with maintenance as a result.

  Due to the extra s and maintehough, ores are processed a bit slower befiving us useful metals, which itself could be sidered a problem, but the shape of the deposit and its tents actually make that fine. Because the sed yer is rgely quartz den rock, I've instructed the minio spend some of their time mining that yer out ging deeper into the tral root of the deposit. The quartz yer, from what I tell with teise, is like a sedary domed yer, meaning there should be a sizeable amount of it.

  The whole deposit looks a bit like a melting ice cream e, with two different partially melted scoops, and a tral e of ore underh, but that tral e is siderably smaller than the partially melted ice cream on top. I think that spending all this time doing hard bor with days without sunlight has given me weird cravings for food that everyone else doesn't even ks, or at least, that's what I'm bming it on.

  Anyway, to get to the sedary yer, the best way forward is to also mi the top yer, meaning we'll start colleg a lot of hematite. Which also means I o see if we have enough avaible warehouse space, or if I o make room elsewhere.