Another eleven days of hard work, and I've got the remaining houses finished, as well as Kaga's storage shed behind his workshop. Now that I've finished up all the outstanding works that needed finished in the village, I need to tinker with making a stone plug valve. Until I get plug valves figured out, I don't want to start working on the dam for the reservoir.
To test plug valve designs, I'm going to build a mini-dam in the stream and embed the test valves in it. I won't be able to fully test the pressure capacity of these though, so I'm going to have to build them extra thick. Right now, as much as I'd like to say I have enough lightstone to make plenty of valves, I actually probably only have enough here to build the two lowest valves for the dam. As preparation for designing these valves, I've done some napkin math on the flow rate through the valves at various heights.
Based on the math, I actually should be able to build the whole dam with just the bottom valve initially. When that valve is open, even if the entire reservoir is filled, it won't be releasing too much water and flood the village. So we can build the dam with just the bottom two valves for now, and the whole system will help smooth out any heavy rains or snow melt, and hopefully prevent any flash floods. Now, for the reservoir to also provide a more useful function of steady, regular flow, it'll need the various heights of valves, so the height inside can be easily regulated. Either way, the first step to this is to design the largest plug valve first.
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Six days of experimenting and I think I've come up with a design that I'm comfortable with for the largest valve. Getting the valve to be relatively watertight was the hardest part, followed by the gears necessary to actually open the thing, since it's so large. The next issue is actually going to be hauling it up to the dam site. I know Kaga is pretty strong, so I might trade him some new lightstone tools in exchange for helping me haul this up to the dam, after I dismantle the small test dam in the levee. Then, the next step of work is going to be actually building the dam, which is going to take quite a while.
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Well, after taking a half day to make the tools to trade to Kaga in exchange for him helping us haul this valve up to the dam, I spent the next three weeks just working on the dam most of the day. Mana really is the limiting factor in the work so far. Both Zeb and I run out, then haul the blocks we cut over to the area for the dam, then re-fuse them into the dam shape once we're re-charged. This leaves us with multiple break times each day, which I've taken to using the time to start cutting trees down along the path we've decided to mark for construction of the future path up the mountain. I've felled quite a few of the trees, which I've since handed off to Kaga "In exchange for a future favor."
Another thing I've instructed the goblins to do is store all their wood ash from their cooking fires. I don't know yet if the wood is exactly the same as back on earth, but if it is at least similar, then it makes a caustic solution in water, which is a necessary step to making leather. I used a bit of mana one evening to make a shovel for them, and then a few bins down in their storage area to store the ash.
As for Zeb, he's been spending his break times in the village talking with various goblins and working with them. According to him, the goblins that have the hide and basket shops showed some aptitude, and then Zaka approached them with things he described that he remembered from his home country. They basically had to rediscover the methods for them though, since he didn't know how they were made, only that they existed. In the evenings he's been helping some of the goblins by making things from stone for them. He doesn't have nearly as large of a mana pool as I do, but he's been making some small things each night for them.
As for the dam itself, we're almost at 5' tall across the length of it, so it's time for me to start designing the next valve. This time, it should be a much faster process since I have a working idea of what I need to do. The bottom of the dam is by far the thickest part as well, so construction should actually speed up a little as we get higher on the dam. The first valve is already installed, and set to open. The reservoir doesn't yet have the stream redirected into it, but water that rains on part of its side of the valley collects into it, and then runs out through the valve, so I've at least gotten to see that the valve seems to be functioning in the open state without clogging. After the dam is complete, I'll have to also redirect the stream into the reservoir, which will take a little work, but I don't want to do that until I've got the second valve installed at least, so I won't have to worry about topping of the dam happening while I'm working on it.
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Another 18 days of working on the dam, and we're now up to 12 feet high in total. The second valve is installed, and I've put a temporary block in where the next valve will go, and I'll keep putting blocks in the rest of the way up to the top of the dam. I've started digging the dirt out of the way for the new path of the stream to eventually flow into the reservoir so we can redirect it when the time comes. Soon I'll have cut all the stone I want to from the bottom of the reservoir, so I'll redirect the stream at that point.
I've cut quite a few more trees now, and its actually becoming too many for the goblins to handle all of them. Its well beyond what Kaga himself can use for anything. So he's getting his pick of the best wood, and the rest is just being piled up outside of the village. If I get the time, I'll make a charcoal kiln down here, but if I don't get the chance, well, then I guess at some point it can all just be burned. Before that happens though, I'd like to strip the bark off and store it separate. There are a few more uses for the bark than the wood itself, so having extra would be nice. Between the water for crystal energy transfer, and eventual leather production, bark is pretty useful.
I doubt I'm going to build all the stairs this year anyway, so I suppose I can focus my downtime activities on processing all this wood from this point on.
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Three more weeks, and we're now up to 20 feet on the dam. I've redirected the stream to now flow down into the dam. It took a little bit more effort than I thought it would, because I ended up needing to use stone to reinforce the embankment that redirects the stream. A somewhat heavy rainstorm revealed that the dirt I'd packed down to functionally redirect it wasn't enough. Now the whole thing is redirected the couple hundred yards through a reinforced embankment into the reservoir. For now, the bottom of the reservoir barely has any water in it, since it runs out through the bottom valve, which makes cleaning it out easy when any debris washes down into the dam.
I've also stripped the bark from most of the hundred or so trees that we had cut down that Kaga didn't want. That itself was a lot of work, and I've stored as much of it as I can in the storehouse. The storehouse is actually starting to get kind of full, so I can't store much of the bark down there. As much as I'd like to just build more storage space for things like this, right now it's counterproductive. Maybe at some point I'll dig out another big storage building, but right now, it just isn't worth it. The best thing I could do is just build a covered area outside the walls to pile up things like the trees and bark under. That'll eat a few more days off dam work, but it's better than the month or more an entire building and underground storage area would take, and will extend the life of the wood and bark piled up out there significantly.
Its also only a few weeks until the snow melts again, and Zeb and I can return back up to our workshop up on the mountain. While we could return after the snow melts, I think we'll wait a little bit just like last year, and give the plants that we eat up on the mountain some time to grow before we start picking them to eat. Thankfully, we haven't had any goblins die in the last few months, so Zaka doesn't feel the need to return immediately to summon more imps either. After we talked to him about it, he said he might summon some at some point this year, since the village has the space for them, although he probably won't summon many more, because they can only hunt so much food at once.
I hadn't thought much about it, but they really don't do any farming, or fishing. Maybe when the dam is done, I might look into either of those processes. I'm not pleased with the idea of Zaka summoning imps all the time, but if the goblins keep expanding out their industries, I'm sure they'll be even more useful. Hypothetically, I can already get wood crafts from them, hide clothing, and baskets. I also get food while I'm here from Zaka for working on the things I'm doing, plus he brings excess up while we're working on the mountain, which has been a big help.