W with the stru team to get the new mana crystal growth b structed has actually been somewhat difficult. Basically, because I wao keep the mana crystal growth process retively secret, I could only have them help with the general yout of the room, while I would end up needing to wait to build the actual apparatuses myself, though it still saved me signifit time over trying to make the whole b myself due to the sheer size of the project.

  Long term, I want to relocate all parts of the mana crystal growth process down to this area, meaning I need quite a lot of space cleared out. Specifically, I need a multi-yered room where I house all the crystal groaratuses that I want. Some of the smaller ones are easy enough to fit on one floor in a er, but others, like the apparatuses for the 8-foot, and the pnned 12 and 16-foot crystal, take a signifit amount of space, and have to breach between floors.

  Add on to that the fact that I need a pce to store the excess crystal sg, and we had our work cut out for us. Over time, we'll deplete our crystal sg supplies, but if we find a rge deposit of mana crystals and were using all our apparatuses at the same time, we'd be produg far m than argon to e it, so we still o have the extra ste.

  I also settled on how we'd get a 16-foot tall octahedral crystal out of here. I've made a request to Zeb for a stru team in a year or two to e bad dig a vertical shaft 20 feet in diameter from the surface down to the ter of the room, near where I'll situate the rgest growth chamber. We're exceptionally far underground here, and that's on purpose to limit mana flow. Digging this shaft will interfere with the reason we built so deep, but I have a pn for it.

  I want to dig two dder shafts oher side of the main shaft opening to periphery floors. Every 15 feet, we'll pce a 5 feet thick floor prised of two halves and a meical system to retract the floor into the walls, opening a yer of the pit. We're pretty much out of quartz crystals, and haven't yet found a new supply of them so we 't use them to ihe pit, but what we do instead is surround each se of the pit with our Zinc fluorite lighting to attempt to use up as much of the mana as we , simir to the heat fluorite being used for the air supply underground. After all, even in the cave I still had some mana regen, so it probably doesn't o be perfect.

  Ultimately, we'll put a e above the pit, and that'll be how we lift the massive crystal out from underground when it's done. We'll need some kind of meical system to even move such a rge crystal away from this facility and to it's final location, so I'm going to start pnning that out now, so that I let Zeb know in advance.

  For now though, I'll wait until wio start building the nearatuses. The stru team just barely finished before fall with excavating the b space, and I o turn my attention to our cableway stru , since I'll have two teams to direct for that project.

  At the end of fall, the cableway still wasn't up and running, so I had to ask Zeb for another round of stru on it, which he'll send duri spring, but it will dey the lightstone facility's stru as a result. Basically, the problem came down to the logistics of recharging mana. The further we got to the middle of the path up the mountain, the longer we'd have to wait to recharge our mana to resume stru, sier a while the time it would take to passively recharge mana was faster thaime it would take to walk all the way back to a recharging area at either the b or the cave.

  So, ultimately, we only finished about two-thirds of the pylons, with the remaining third being in the ter. It will probably take as long to finish the st third as the first two-thirds took, if not longer. At this point, I'm starting to get a bit nervous about having the cableway done before the mana crystal in the cave is ready for transport down to the new area. I estimate that we'll have it grown to 8 feet in size by sometime fall.

  At that point, I pn oing it up temporarily to get the rest of the dwarves that are marooned here home over the winter befrowing it again. e springtime I'll let them know that is my pn, so they get a ship ready. I won't force them to leave, but I will let them know that they'll only have one season to get back, otherwise they'll o wait another 6 or 7 years before they'll be able to return.

  Over winter, I started work on the 12-foot crystal growth chamber, and while I didn't quite finish it, I'm getting close to pletion. Uhe previous chambers, this one is desigo be opened from the side for both adding and removing the crystal. However, to maintain structural iy, that essentially means I have to stone shape the side off.

  The ge in design was rgely the reason it took me so long to work on, as I had to stantly retest how well it held up to the eventual vacuum in the chamber. As for moving the crystal around, given he it'll be, I'm thankful I've started doing so much work with the cableway so I should be able to make temporary hoists for moving it usial cables.

  As spring approached, I went back to the city to take a little bit of time expl to see how things are ing along before I let the dwarves know that they'll be able to return home. It's actually quite iing expl the city properly. On a fairly regur basis, I would visit and go to the tral ring to handle administrative tasks, but I hadn't really explored around all that much, other than cheg on particur portions of the city, like the dwarven refugee area.

  Holy though, walking around the city, it all really seems the same, like block housing in suburbs. There is the same general blueprint stamped over and over of apartment style buildings fag a tral road. Periodically, there will be some other building, whether it's a public outhouse ected to a sewer, or a workshop for clothing. There are now three markets around the city as well, which I found to be quite iing.

  I wasn't sure what to expect, but it seems like the inal market fag the o has pletely bee a fish market. One of the markets has finished goods stalls, ranging from tools and cooking implements to clothing and accessories. The st market has non-raw fish food products. That includes, iingly enough, fish oil f, but also breads, grains, and even Bargas meat. They also have a handful of stalls selling fried-on-demand dishes, which I thought retty .

  Holy, I'm not sure if it's because the markets were just desiger, or if it's because they were likely influenced somewhat by the dwarves, but they are far more fun and iing than the drab yout of the rest of the city. That said, the drab yout of the rest of the city allows us to build out housing much faster than if we tried to make each building unique. Even with design touchups going on by the architecture team, it doesn't fully suppress the feeling that you're walking through cookie-cutter areas.

  I chatted with Zaka on one of the evenings to get a feel for our total popution now, and he said that, including our two outlying vilges and my facility, we just crossed over having 5,000 residents. After some discussion, it became quite clear that we're ultimately rate limited in growth due to Zaka being the only demon we have who summon imps. Given my prior theories on that, I decided to take a day to check around at the two other vilges, to see if any of the demons there had gaihe ability to summon imps, and none of them had the ability.

  If we pnned on growing our popution faster, we'll either o start experimenting with the process that Zaka's been doing to summon imps, to see if we establish a more effit system, or we'll o start experimenting with existing goblins to try and ihem to develop the ability to summon imps. Holy, we should probably do both, since having a single point of failure for summoning new popution is one of our most gring weaknesses right now.

  However, I won't be able to work oher of those projects for a little while, since I have a backlog of higher priority projects to work on first. While having a higher popution is nice for a variety of reasons, it's also less necessary now than it was five years ago, before I figured out the magically powered stirling engines. Magical maes substitute for some amount of raw workforce power for a rge amount of daily tasks. When demand for bor outstrips popution growth, this is the result though, maes are made to repce people.