Getting the storage area expanded has turned into quite the hassle because, compared to other projects, it's not nearly as fun. That said, some benefit of the past four days of expanding it have yielded good results between Zeb and I. We've felled a few of the trees we were cutting, and now we've begun chopping down trees along the path to the goblin village, with the intent to build out stairs with stone down that way. By no means will it be a fast process, but as I've realized, I'm going to always have way more stone than I know what to do with, so having a productive output for it seems like a good idea.
With the handful of trees we've felled I'll have enough wood to try making some charcoal after it dries out some. Until then, I've started cutting the wood into manageable sized pieces and laying it out to dry in the cave. In preparation for the charcoal, I think I'm also going to start making a large amount of buckets for both transport and storage.
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After a week, the wood is finally dry enough to try making charcoal from it. The storage area has been appropriately expanded as well, although some of the stone has only been hauled outside, and not yet placed into the pathway we're making. The reason for this mostly has to do with the work necessary in felling trees and clearing plants that are in the way of the path. The frequent rains are finally starting to lighten up, so opportunities to work on all that outside will become more frequent, and I'm hoping that we'll start making good progress on that soon.
I start loading the charcoal kiln up, piling it full of wood. After a few hours of hauling wood to and from the cave, the kiln is nearly full, so I close off the front area, and go light a fire in the top hole. If I remember correctly, whenever I see the fire through any of the air holes around the kiln, I'm supposed to plug them at that point, but not before. The whole process is probably going to take multiple hours given the size of the kiln, but once the holes are plugged, I can just leave it for a while, and open it at my convenience later.
I'm having Zeb watch the holes while I work on getting the rubble that I've been neglecting cleaned up somewhat. I'm just breaking it into pieces that are easy to carry, and bringing it up with all the stone from the storage area to be used for making stairs moving forward.
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Well, it's been almost two days since we closed all the holes in the kiln, so I figure it's as good a time as any to open the kiln to see how well it went.
Overall, it honestly went better than I thought it might for a first run. There is quite a lot of unburned wood left that can be saved to use in another trial run, and quite a bit seems to have been burned away, but we recovered a lot of charcoal from the process. Considering it started as multiple trees worth of wood, we've gotten a few hundred pounds of charcoal at least here. The boring part is now filling the buckets with charcoal and moving them into the storage area. Once we've done that I can try my hand at loading up the forge and do some basic testing with it.
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By the time we got the kiln all cleaned up, it was close enough to the end of the day that we decided to wait until today to actually start experimenting with the furnace. The first thing I need to do is make myself a crucible and set of stone tongs for handling the crucible. For now I'll just make it from some of the excess stone for testing. Then I break some of the pieces of stone with embedded native copper and fill the crucible. Finally I load up the smelting furnace with plenty of charcoal, and ignite it, and Zeb and I trade off on turning the crank to power the impeller forcing the temperature higher.
Initial results were... bad. The crucible cracked as it started to heat up, so I had to quickly attempt to remove it from the furnace, but it ended up breaking entirely, and the copper and stone inside spilled out. Good news, it's hot enough to melt the copper. Bad news, it ran into the impeller and jammed the whole system up. It's probably going to take at least a day to clean the whole thing up to try again.
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Cleaning and preparations for a second attempt ended up taking two days. Cleaning the forced air tubes and repairing the impeller took quite a while, and I wanted to try to make sure any future attempts wouldn't be as disastrous. I've decided to use some lightstone to make the crucible, and very carefully build the whole thing with stone shaping to hopefully eliminate any air or water within the stone that might cause cracking. I've also made new tongs from lightstone in the same way. While I've been working on this, Zeb has felled some new trees, so he's been prepping more wood for the charcoal process. His levels are getting up there, so it probably won't be that much longer until he prestiges again.
Level: 94
HP: 917/917
MP: 141/141
Traits: Mimicry
I've decided to leave all the tree cutting to him so that he can get his levels faster. However, everything else is on hold for now because we have another experiment with metal melting about to start. The charcoal is lit, and we've started driving the impeller.
I slowly load the crucible into the furnace, keeping a close eye on it this time to hopefully react quickly if it cracks to save us the issue of having to clean out the whole furnace again.
Thankfully, it doesn't crack, and after a while, it starts to glow with heat. Once the crucible is a warm yellow color, I remove it from the heat, and set it on a flat stone surface. Which turned out to be a mistake. The thermal shock of the cold stone against the crucible cracked it right in half, and liquid copper seeped out, and began sputtering as it did so. Zeb and I bolted for cover, and thankfully neither of us received any burns. However, it's obviously another learning experience that I'll need to think of a solution for.
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Thankfully cleanup this time only took a day. We're making good progress, and I've made what I hope is a solution to the problem we've experienced. I've extended the vertical area of the furnace, and put a thick stone layer with holes sized for a crucible to rest in it. The hope is that it is high enough up that it will be at a cooler temperature, and then when the furnace is off entirely, the crucible will cool at a reasonable rate and not crack. Of course, then I'll just have a solid piece of copper at the bottom of a crucible, with a bunch of slag on top of it, but we're trying to solve one problem at a time.
As an additional bit of testing I want to do, I'll need to refine a lot more lightstone. The reason being I want to make two new things. First, a stone scoop for removing slag from the crucibles as I melt metal. Second, an ingot cast. The ingot cast I'm not sure if it will work, since we've been having trouble with thermal shock, but if it is decently sized, and pre-heated in the furnace, I'm hoping it will work. The ingots won't be too big though, since I want to be able to re-melt them down.
Since Zaka will be back in only three days, I'm going to just focus on lightstone refining until he visits next, so I can make sure that he can be sent back with extra. Thanks to my new source of lightstone, I'm hoping that I have all the lightstone I'll need for everything by the time he arrives.
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When Zaka arrived today, I was just finishing up my experimental ingot mold. I was also surprised with a gift from Zaka. The goblins he came up with were all carrying lots of smoked meat. Apparently, shortly after they returned from their last trip up here, another goblin died to a lizard attack, so Zaka decided to wipe out all the nearby lizards he could. For almost the entire month, the most skilled hunters and him have been going around killing all the lizards in the nearby areas. He said they've killed eleven so far, and it's gotten to the point that the smokehouse was completely full, so they decided to bring us as much of the smoked lizard meat as they could, to make room for more in the smokehouse.
Well, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I gladly accept all this extra food. We spend a little time showing the new things we've been working on to the goblins. Similar to some other projects, Zaka actually has heard of copper smelting from his homeland, although he's never seen any of it directly. When I asked him about other metals, it seems like there are some, like gold and some dull gray metals, although Zeb had a hard time with the translation of this, so the most I can gather is that they do at least have concepts of metalworking.
By the end of the imp summoning process, Zaka heads back with two new goblins and his escort goblins, so he says he'll be back again next month, and I send him off with more lightstone.