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Already happened story > Rebuilding Science in a Magic World > [Vol.6] Ch.50 Low Yield

[Vol.6] Ch.50 Low Yield

  The trend tinued for the newly summoned goblins into the month, so I discussed shifting our summoning efforts to this yle of summoning with Zaka and Zeb. Using it, we could expand our summoning capacity to triple the current values, but we'd also o triple our housing produ to aodate that many new demons. Zeb reviously the one pushing for us to summon as many new individuals as possible, but this time he was actually advog for slowing down our summoning.

  His reasons for slowing down made a lot of sense. We had basically frontloaded a lot of the infrastructure necessary to support a growing popution. Now though, our artificial tide pools are getting closer to reag capacity, and we haven't been expanding the fields much because we no longer have easy relocatable mana crystals for rapid stru ie locations. As such, more of our stru bor is actually going to o be dedicated to building up our food infrastructure to support a rger popution.

  Zeb showed us a ne with his various pnned stru projects. Among them, I noticed a pn for three new vilges. Two in the neighb valley, and one on the far side of the isnd. His pns were alsanized by approximate payoff time for the amount of bor needed. The two vilges he has pnned for the neighb valley are pretty high up the list, and lie oing roads, making them fairly high payoff projects with minimal startup time.

  We ended up following a sedary discussion of the purpose of expanding our popution. We'd previously discussed the o expand for both productivity and defensive purposes, but both Zeb and Zaka have hat a lot of our popution is idle now-a-days. Back when we had mana crystals all over the pce, a rge amount of the popution would be busy assisting with stru or other tasks done by demons using magibsp; Now, with a much more limited mana supply, there just isn't as much bor necessary.

  Labor that uses mana is still incredibly useful, but having spare work that demons do to actually gain access to magics that use mana effectively is an issue. Even simple tasks like mining end up needing demons with stone shaping to do some amount of up after, limiting the amount of trainable popution. While the general popution is slowly gaining levels passively, most of those who end up prestiging aren't getting very useful traits. That problem pounds on itself wheually only have a handful of sources for levels, and we're already using quite a few of them to maximum capacity to ehat uards and military are as strong as possible.

  After some amount of bad forth, we decided to slow down the amount of leveling that our military soldiers would be doing by a modest amount. Currently, a lot of the fish killed in both artificial tide pools are killed by soldiers each day to help keep the soldiers ahead of the levelling curve iy. Now, the soldiers will only do that in one of the two tide pools. The other tide pool will be used by the stru teams. Zeb will be in charge of determining what teams go there and when to gain levels, with the idea being a more rapid expansion of the number of demons capable of doing stru work.

  Since levels have bee such a valuable resource, we decided to also take the time to determine what our upper limit for most individuals should be. It seemingly gets expoially harder to level up to max every time you prestige or evolve, so expending valuable levels on individuals who might take years to prestige for miniscule improvements seems like a waste. For the military, we determihat reag hobgoblin status with at least two bat helpful traits and one bat oriented magic would be the upper limit. Beyond that, only military leaders would be allowed to tiive levelling for the sake of making themselves hardeargets.

  Likewise, for the stru teams improved stone shaping will be set as the upper limit. Though for both the military and stru teams, exceptions be made iher dire at either Zaka or Zeb's discretion. If someone shows particur promise for a new ability that could be beneficial, they could tinue levelling, and likewise, if someone is already a high tier demon but shows no promise, they be cut off. It'll require more bureaucracy to keep track of these things, but with limited resources avaible, dedig work to their effective use is better than what we've been doing.

  We had all those discussions only to essentially e to the clusion that for the few years, we don't he new summonihod that I've developed. We'll still use it due to it's lower time itment on Zaka's part, but we won't be using it at full capacity. Having it avaible for the future should still be useful, however.

  After our meeting, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to work o. It'll still be a bit of time until the lightstone produ facility begins stru proper, sihey're still building out a sea wall at the bottom of that craggy valley. Looking towards things we'd like to have iure, a more ready supply of metal would be ideal, particurly iron.

  Our needs for it aren't quite as high as a typical industrializing try would expect, thanks to multiple different magical processes, but there are still a lot of items that be from the ductility of metal over stone as well as the thermal ductivity of it. We do actually have a potentially rge source of iron sitting right under our feet, it's just difficult to recover. A lot of the voliaking up the isnd seems to be basaltibsp; As such at least 1%, if not more, of the rock is probably posed of iron oxides.

  The difficulty es in separating that iron oxide from other materials. Thankfully, we actually already have a process to hahat in the magic separator at the dam, though we might actually o scale that up to make it effective enough. We'll also need a much rger pulverizer to actually process a rge enough volume of robsp; In addition to the pulverizer being rger, we'll also to make finer particles than what we've been making, sihe minerals are more finely distributed in rock, as pared to ore.

  So, what I'm thinking of making is a series of crushers desigo first break the rock down to pebbles, then twe ball mills to produce a very fine powder from the robsp; After the rock is powdered, it be run past a magic separator to pull out any magic impurities that exist in small amounts. I 't say for certain that the only magic material will be iron oxide, but we do batch vibrational bed separations to striate the different magic materials if there are multiple kinds, and then figure out what each is.

  The remaining non-magic material should tain a number of minerals, but exactly what each mineral is I'm unsure of. I either analyze it for useful properties ter, or ply a small amount of it to our crop fields each year as a volic fertilizer. The remainder will just build up as a waste product that we'll either o flush into the o, or find other uses for. If we worked with crete it could be used as a filler material, but as it stands, the majority of it will just be waste.

  I wao do a proof of cept first, to make sure that what I po do could actually work at a rger scale. Thankfully, a lot of the work was already doo do small scale testing since we already have rock crushers and the magic separator, so the only thing I o make was a medium sized ball mill capable of p enough basalt for doing trials.

  I took seven days to make a ball mill, and then it took a few days of trail and error to make a batch of steel balls capable of grinding down the rock to a fine powder, and I did end up grinding it in back to back batches using a rger and small ball size. Normally, I'd be a little ed that the steel balls might break dowime, but sihe primary fun of this mill is to make iron, we'll be rec any shards of iron from any balls that break anyway.

  For the purposes of my test, I powdered about 50 cubic feet of basalt over the course of five days to ehat I'd be able to actually tell if I was rec any magic material. I wao make sure that it wasn't just shards of metal that may have e from either the crushers or the ball mill if they got damaged and I didn't notice.

  I quickly found that due to the small amount of magic material in the basalt, I had to run the powder past the magic drum multiple times before I actually extracted all of it. By the end though, I had just over 3 cubic feet of magic powder, which holy was more than I expected. sidering how much storacted from the reservoir over the years, we'd have produced many tons of iron. Of course, I'll actually o determine what exactly ic powder is, and whether further processing needs done first before we proceed.