Between the work area and the initial two apparatuses, it took us seven days. A large part of which was actually rebuilding the apparatuses after doing some tests on them under vacuum. The apparatus chamber shape needed to be changed and thickened because one cracked when I tried to stone shape a new container onto it, which would normally be part of the attempt at growing crystals.
So we've reached the point of doing our first attempts at artificial crystal growth today. One thing that hopefully will be beneficial is that the melted crystals actually do need to cool somewhat before we can attempt to pour the crystal material onto the existing crystal. This gives us a window where I think we can actually heat up four of the crystal laden vacuum containers before we bring them down to the cave to use. The furnace can fit two of the chambers at a time, so once we heat those ones up to temperature, we'll set them up on the higher rack I made for crucibles before, and we'll start heating a second set to use.
After heating the four chambers, Zeb and I carry two down into the cave to attempt the crystal growing experiment. We have to wait a short while for the first chambers to reach the approximate temperature of success we had from before. Then I use stone shaping to merge the container onto the top of the growth apparatus. The first container isn't going to be that likely to have any success if I had to guess. The reason being that I have yet to add any of the mysterious gas into the apparatus. In fact, I wouldn't expect much growth at all today from all four of these. The hope however is that over time, the concentration of whatever the gas is will increase in the chamber, and allow better crystal growth.
For the first container, I allow the material to quickly empty into the chamber. I seal the top back off, and remove the first container, and we swiftly move the second container into position, and I stone shape it into position. This time however, I open a small hole to slowly drip the liquid material down onto the target crystal. By using tectonic sense, I can check when the fluid is finally emptied as well. After it is, we wait a while for the third and fourth container to reach the appropriate temperature before repeating the process for them as well.
As we're finishing the fourth container, I realize that there is a step that I actually should be doing at the end of each of these container completion steps. I don't know the exact level of vacuum the chamber should be at, but in theory, if the crystal is integrating the gas into its structure, then it actually shouldn't be too much of a problem to have the gas at a higher pressure, to a point. So I should be using stone shaping to make sure that I force all the gas from the initial containers into the crystal growth apparatus. I'll probably just do this by stone shaping along in a piston like fashion, reducing the volume of the container until there isn't any volume left, pushing the gas out. The only thing I'll need to be careful of with this is not pressurizing the general apparatus, because we haven't tested it at all for positive pressure, and we don't know if the crystals have a pressure above which they won't grow.
After we finish with the last container, I use tectonic sense to check the crystal in the apparatus. It has grown a bit. Not a lot by any means, and it will probably be a few days of this process before we need to move the crystal to the next size apparatus. For the current apparatus, a final crystal would be slightly smaller than the largest crystals I have from my collection of natural crystals. After a while, the material in the bottom collection container has solidified, and with tectonic sense, I can tell that the container is a nearly two third full. I could remove it as is, and prepare it to re-melt, but I think instead, tomorrow we'll just melt two containers of crystals, to fill the bottom collection container. Then, when it is full, we'll melt it the following day, and try to re-apply that material, to see if it will still grow the seed crystal.
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Today, we're attempting the application of re-melted crystal material. Yesterday's two containers went fine, and almost filled the re-use collection container. It took some extra caution to remove the container while maintaining the airtight seal of the crystal growth apparatus, but I think I managed it fine. Then I put a new empty container where it used to be for collection.
This container is a decent bit heavier than the previous containers we were using, owing to the fact it is almost completely filled with material, rather than only partially filled. Which also means it is taking almost as long to heat as the four containers took together to heat. Once it reached the desired temperature though, we moved down to the apparatus for today's application of material. After giving it a little while to cool, I apply it to the top of the apparatus and open a small hole to drip material onto the growing seed crystal.
After the entire container emptied, it appears that around 10% of the re-melted material formed crystal on this pass. For the next few days, I want to just try re-applying this material over and over, to see just how much of it we can use, and maybe gain some insight into the crystal formation process.
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After four days of repeating the process, two things became apparent. First, the amount of material that would form crystal was decreasing non-linearly each time. Now whether that was because of some unknown problem with heating and cooling the material each time, or reduction in gas pressure due to it being mixed into the crystal is unknown at this time. Second, the amount of charcoal we are going through is significant, and we'll need to keep logging and making charcoal occasionally. I've decided that we'll cut half the wood from the nearby area, expanding the controlled environment around the cave entrance, and the other half will be cut and hauled from the path down to the goblin village. This will obviously slow down progress of the crystal project, but I think neglecting infrastructure development is more likely to slow us down long-term.
As it stands, the crystal in the current apparatus is nearly large enough to move to the next chamber, so for today, we're going to melt down two new containers of small crystals to pour on, and then tomorrow, I'll begin the hard process of transferring the crystal and gasses in the current apparatus into the larger one. Those two new crystal melts will be enough to re-fill the re-use container to full. This time though, I'm just going to seal it off, and set it aside. On the new apparatus, I want to add even more raw crystal material, to increase the gas concentration in the larger chamber again. Thankfully, as of right now, we don't seem to have a shortage of the very small crystals. Moving forward though, I might want to consider spending some time using tectonic sense to try to find more buried bubbles of crystals. I haven't yet checked a lot of the side tunnels, nor have I tried using my larger mana pool to do even larger pings.
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Moving the seed crystal to the new, larger apparatus and then moving the gas over to the new chamber was quite the painstaking process, but I completed it without too many issues. First, I stone shaped the crystal slowly out the bottom of the chamber encased in stone. On inspection, I could barely tell that the crystal was only growing on the top facets that were getting dripped on by the liquid material. For the new apparatus, I inserted the crystal upside down from its previous orientation, to grow the other four facets, in case there was any artificial instability caused by growing the crystal from only four of its eight facets.
The gas movement just required I fashion a thick tube from one apparatus to the other, then push the remaining gas from the old apparatus to a new one using stone shaping to piston it over through the tube. Once all this was done, there was less than half a day left, so I decided to get more lightstone prepped for containers so that we'll be ready for further applications of the process. Considering it is only 13 days until Zaka comes back, I'd like to be able to be far enough along to show him an artificially large crystal. Next time he comes back, he isn't expected to be summoning more imps unless they've had more losses in the village, so hopefully it can just be a tour of the facilities.