The project started out at a pretty good pabsp; Although, sihe dam had ges to it, w in it's shadow through spring as the heavy rains and filling of the reservoir occurred made me a little nervous. If any po failed on the dam, it'd be a scramble to fix it, but thankfully everything worked as intended. I speime at the dam than the stru team though, so if anyone should have been actually worried about issues it was them. I ending a lot of time at the sand casting area at the research facility designing the various pos for the maes that will go in the facility.

  Since I had a pretty good idea of exactly what maes I needed, it made it retively easy to design the building first, then leave the stru teams to start leveling the earth and building the building before I actually had the maes fully designed. The way the facility is getting built, we're going to have three levels to the facility, but all will be on the ground, just casg down the hillside, to take advantage of gravity to transfer water.

  The highest floor will sist of the rock crushers that are driven by the dam's water. This floor will be built at the base of the dam, just like the old hydroelectric facility. Outside of this floor will be where the rock is kept that o be processed. After that, the floor will drop about four feet a slightly into the earth. That is where the twe ball mills will be located, along with the drying es for the final produbsp; Then, after another four foot drop is where the stirred mills aromagic separators sit. The bottom floor will also hold the small ste tank for powdered rock to be used for crop field enrit. After going through the stirred mill, the wet material will have to be veyed back up a level to the drying es to tiheir processing.

  Ultimately, at the end of the bottom floor I want to put a rge draihat runs underground to the o. That will be where our wastewater goes. That way, on any stage or floor where we o add water to the system, we create smaller drains that feed the rge pipe. I am a little worried about potential sediment buildup in the pipe, so I pn on having the pipe be six feet in diameter, with a small internal ledge for walking on, in case it needs ied or cleared at some point.

  Only four days into summer, the stru team had finished building the building, and I'd gotten casts for most of the pos made as well as having gotten many of the stirling engines assembled minus their crystal ptes. I've instructed the stru team to begin digging the slurry drain. I'm going to o take a few days to move the growing mana crystal to the 16-foot apparatus to tinue growing it. We're still a few years from pletion now, but the end is within sight.

  As I've been w oirling engines more and more, I've realized that I should probably rehem. Stirling was a st name of the person who ied them, and while I'm teically using a lot of his inal designs, these aren't desigo work on any source of heat, they're specifically optimized for using fluorite heat ptes that e mana. Sihere is no history of Stirling in this world, from now on I'm going to be referring to them as mana engines.

  This came up because an inquisitive goblin who was helping me move many of them to the milling facility asked me why I have such a weird name for them. We were speaking in demonic, but I was essentially just saying 'stirling engine' in English when I referred to them. Now, I'm using the demon word for mana while still using the English word engine. The demonic pronunciation of engine isn't too far off, so I feel like it will ie fine as a borrowed word.

  I transferred the mana crystal to the st apparatus at the start of summer, and sihen I've either been assembling or moving maes into the building at the dam. I've been holding off on two of the hardest parts, saving it for the end. The twe ball mills and the eleagic separator are both going to be the hard parts, given their sheer size. They'll still be brought over in parts, but those parts are going to be heavy to keep total part t down. Wheime es, we'll need a lot of bor to pull them up to the dam, even with carts.

  It's now the end of summer, and my curreimate is that we'll be able to start the facility up sometime in winter if we don't run into any issues. My biggest currently is that we won't have the slurry drain done in time, so I've already asked Zeb if he spare another stru team to help. Whether or not that help es will probably determihe exact start date.

  Zeb sent some help, and so we were able to get the facility up and running at the very start of the st month of the year. I hired on a few dozen demons to run the facility, and spent nearly a month training them before we started the facility up. Processing 650 cubic feet of rock a day isn't actually all that much depending on your perspective. In a year, the facility will process just under a quarter of a million cubic feet of robsp; The rock we excavated for the draiunnel was about that much, so we have enough rock currently to run the facility for a year. That puts the expected iron yield annually at about 4000 tons.

  As long as we stay on top of things, it shouldn't be a problem to keep a steady supply of rock for the facility to process. Whether that be by expanding the reservoir, or by hauling stone here from other excavation projects, the actual total processing power of this facility isn't nearly as rge as I initially envisioned. The reason being the sheer scale of maery necessary to actually process the robsp; The sheer amount of energy necessary to do this limits the size of the facility, given may issues for mana engines. Though now that we've do once, we could always build more facilities in other locations iure if we end up needing them. 4000 tons of iron a year will probably be enough to supply a lot of our industrial pns, so we probably won't need any new ones in the near future.

  I still o take a few weeks to design a hand ked device to spread the powder on fields. I'd expect it will increase the quality of our crops, and we should only o do it on any field once every few years, so we shouldn't oo many of the devices. The full stru of the tuhrough the mountain will be done soon as well, and it seems like the sewage drain for the tunnel is also going to be done in the near future. With that being the case, Zeb has informed me that he'll probably have stru begin on the lightstone processing facility soon, since he'll have more stru teams avaible again, so I'll have that project to work on soon.

  I'm going to have another discussion with Zeb about doing exploratory mining. While I've somewhat solved our iron issue, what I'm ied in finding now are either quartz crystals or mana crystals. Either of those would accelerate us forward in different areas. Finding mana crystals would let us finish the rge mana crystal far ahead of schedule, and quartz would allow us to resume fluorite research, which could yield very eologies.

  My new discussion with Zeb went a little better than befiven our discussion with Zaka about stagnating our popution growth for a while. We're still about 4 years from pleting the new rge mana crystal, and potentially redug that time by a year would actually speed up the other stru projects that he has pnned. Rather than bring out both of the mining teams w on the sewer iunnel when it is plete, we'll keep one iunnel digging the exploratory mining shafts out from the ter.

  He had one mairi though. For the time being, the tuself is the only thing being dug. Any deposits of materials we find, other than specifically mana crystals, will not be mi the current time. We mark them off in some way to make them easy to find, and potentially divert the tuo go around them if we o, but we won't be mining them. Finding new mana crystals is the main .

  I agreed to those terms, sihat seemed to be a reasonable requirement. We aren't hurting for aals currently, and while I'd like to stop to mine quartz, finding a lot of mana crystals could easily accelerate all of our projects, so it's reasoo focus in on only what we currently need.