The tunnel digging has been proceeding at a good pace, and as you proceed deeper and deeper uhe mountain, the slope of the grain of the rocks has slowly beeing steeper. While I haven't detected anything new directly with teise, I have a feeling that, at the very least, it shouldn't be long until we get a yer transition.

  Extra and refining of ores has generally been going well, and we're building up quite the stockpile of materials. Unfortunately, most of said materials are lead and zinbsp; Though the lead has been processed to produce silver. We've gathered a couple of approximately 10 lb ingots of the stuff.

  The two vilges are also doing well, and the added niter from both of their excrement fields has allowed us to build up a much rger arsenal of artillery shells for defense. Soon, we might actually have enough to sider attempting to make personal firearms. I'm sure that Tiberius won't be fond of that idea, however.

  Speaking of Tiberius, I've settled on what my project will be. A simple refrigerator/freezer for preserving the extracts that he's making. Disc refrigeration was quite plicated, but once you know about it, it's actually not that hard to make simple refrigerators. In fact, for the design I pn to go with, I'm going to be using a stirling engine. By forcibly driving the engine, I turn the work into a temperature differential, rather than using that differential to produce work. Though when using a stirling engine in this way, it needs a rger regeor than a normal stirling eo be useful.

  Stirling engines are fairly simple devices pared to things we've been making, so getting the first one made was retively easy and took only two days time. I utilized the b's well windmill to power the engine for testing purposes. However, I ran into issues as I attempted to use it for refrigeration. As the cold end reduced in temperature, the water ihe air of the engine froze and caused the eo jam.

  So, I built a sed engine in a day's time, this time the air it was charged with was taken from one of our dry rooms filled with desit. While this sed engine worked better, I could still hear the ice crystals g internally. However, it worked well enough that I came up with a way to make a third ehout this issue.

  I made a rge box to fun as a freezer out of stone in one of the desit areas, and used the sed eo drop the temperature to below freezing. The box had a high internal surface area, with grooves to ence deposition of water ibsp; After a few hours, the sed engine was starting tle, with the ice crystals internally jamming things.

  At that point, without opening the freezer, I stone shaped a tainer ihe freezer to trap the air. Hypothetically, this air should be almost water free. Then, sihe first two engines had likely been scratched and damaged by the ice crystals, I made a third engine, and i with the dry air.

  This engine worked much better thaher two. I had also made a few minor improvements in design in pces where I noticed leverage issues, improving it further. I left this eo run while attached to the windmill for three days, and it seemed to be running just as well as it did when I first made it.

  I had attached it to a rudimentary freezer made of stone, and unfortunately, that had cracked and lost it's seal, so the inside area wasn't much cooler thaside temperature. I thought that the remedy for that would be straightforward, and that I could just add a yer of metal io keep it airtight.

  While the metal yer did remain airtight, the stone g I made around it broke again after a day's time. I tried repg it with lightstone, but that broke too. Finally, I tried p the lightstohen roasting it at high temperature before ref it around the freezer, thus driving out the water tent from the stone. This seemed to work, and after four days, the freezer remained intact.

  This freezer is retively small, being only about 3 cubic feet of internal spabsp; This one, however, is just to assist Tiberius in his testing. Ultimately, it's there to see how much it improves the shelf life of the extracts he's making. If some of the more useful ones are drastically improved, then I'll sider building a facility dedicated to making some of the extracts, and building a rger freezer for st them.

  As for how his extract experiments have been going so far, some of the extracts have a much better shelf life than others. He's been diligently colleg aing samples for the st few years, and has found some iis. There are some external factors at py in how loracts will st.

  Some samples seemed fairly shelf stable, losing about fifty pert efficacy over the course of aire year whe on a regur shelf on the surfabsp; Others went pletely bad in ten days in the same enviro. That lead to Tiberius st samples in multiple locations to test different enviros for ste.

  During the mana storm, most of the extracts went bad, except for a handful that he'd had a goblin store in the old mountain mine away from mana sources. The more mana they're exposed to, the faster all the samples decayed. Depending on the sample, they decayed in different ways during the mana storm. The electric extracts crackled with static, while aract from the bone shard throwing fish scattered itself around.

  However, heat also seemed to cause some to decay faster than others, as did humidity. Though across the board, it was sistent that a low mana, low heat, and low humidity enviro aided in how long the extracts would st. Some apparently produce varied effects while partially decayed, usually reted to their inal fun, but occasionally not. A on partially decayed effect was be heat produ when exposed to mana.

  Ultimately, that informatioo me making a final ge to the freezer. While light stone seems to be mostly sili dioxide, whiprises quartz, smaller quartz crystals have less of a mana insutive effect as pared ter ones. So, I decided to make an additional tainer around the freezer, which we filled with quartz crystals. We started with rge crystals, then added in medium, and finally smaller crystals and sand to pack the area pletely, as to reduce the amount of mana leaking into the area. Unfortunately, this did require the addition of a sedary door prised of simirly designed quartz pag material.

  In order to figure out if this actually helps, I made a sed tainer, without the freezer portion, which we'll keep o the freezer and store a feles of each of the extracts inside. I made a sed freezer without the quartz pag as well, just to keep the study even. This way we record whiviro is best for st different samples. For some samples, the regur freezer might be enough, and knowing that could save us extra work down the line for st particur types of extracts.

  With about a month left before winter, I lead a few of the forestry goblins up the mountain to once again harvest the mana poison pnt, a the seeds. This time, however, we're bringing the samples back to Tiberius, so he try colleg aract from them. We spent aen days systematically colleg and pnting to try to make the most of this year. I'm holy hoping Tiberius's resear this topid in particur this pnt, yields more positive results, as it could be quite revolutionary.

  Tiberius's focus is, and always has been, magical onry. As such, most of the extracts he's focused on have been focused in that area, things that shock, burn, explode, or are just generally a hazard to be around. However, I could easily see the usefulness of extending his research to other areas. Defensively, making aract from tree bark might be very useful for a transformative material. We already used water infused with tree bark to make leather armor that hardens when infused with mana, the applications by using a trate could be even more extreme.

  Most of our tree bark currently just gets turned into charcoal, so if that extract turned out to be particurly useful, that would be a boon to our ey and prosperity.