One week and the salt evaporation pond and channel are done. Rather than show random goblins how to operate it, I show Zaka, and he can figure out who should know how to use it. Ultimately, salt can be used for a lot of things, but it can drastically increase the shelf life of smoked meat, and it improves the flavor of a lot of foods. I'm certain the goblins will put the pond to use. I did decide to make one additional change to my initial design. Namely, it has two gates for closing off water. The first is much closer to the ocean, and the second is at the pond itself. That way, in the future, if necessary, more ponds can be made to expand the salt production.
In the time it took me to finish that project, Zeb seems to have fully recovered, and he's back to testing plants as potential food sources. Apparently, some of the other goblins have started to think he's a little crazy because he's continuing to test plants. I don't fully disagree either, but sometimes you have to be a little crazy to make progress. Starting tomorrow, work begins in earnest on the path up the mountain.
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I've been working for almost ten days, and progress has actually been happening much faster than I thought. The reason for that has been assistance from goblins and Zaka. Zaka seems to have convinced some that this is a project worth working on, and we've had teams of ten working with me at any given point. I suppose if you are making the long trek up the mountain once a month, it'd probably be nice to have a more comfortable and safe walkway up and down. As such, I've been operating at mana capacity every day, and the others are hauling and placing the cut bricks in the way I've described, so I can just fuse them together, which takes very little mana.
At the current pace, we've been building about fifty feet a day, and as of today, we're about halfway between the reservoir and the village. In another ten days or so, we'll be able to run carts from the quarry down to the village. Then we'll head from the stop near the quarry up the mountain towards the next stop point. Thankfully, during winter, the reservoir is basically empty, so cutting new stone from it has been relatively easy. Each foot of length in the road is taking about sixteen cubic feet of stone to build, which means that after ten days here, we've actually only expanded the reservoir by about 2%. If we keep working at a decent pace though, we'll probably expand it by over 10% this winter, which may not seem like much, but it'd account for about 18 hours of the stream's non-flood flow rate, which really is quite a lot for one guy cutting stone.
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Three more days of work, and although there isn't anything new to report with the path, there has been a breakthrough in plants from Zeb's side of things. He found a different forest clearing where the ground was quite muddy despite the lack of recent rain. In that clearing, there were a lot of somewhat tall stalky plants. When he pulled some, he found that multiple in close proximity all shared the same larger bulb root. So he brought one full plant back, and it seems that not only is the root bulb edible, but the stalk seems to be as well.
I gave him some advice on how to make a floodable field, and told him to try to make one on the downstream side of the village within the city walls. I told him to make it pretty small, since this would be a testing field. If it turns out to be useful, then we can try to build a larger field outside the walls, but we need to have the goblins observe the plants for a longer period of time before we consider them to be useful for agriculture. Once he gets the field done, he'll transplant a handful of the plants into the garden for more observation.
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Only six more days, and the leg of the path between the village and the dam is completed. With this, we're probably about 1/15th of the way done with the entire path up the mountain. Which is a pretty slow pace, of course, it'd be even slower if I didn't have a bunch of the goblins from the village helping me. Another nice bonus of the current work is that we now have a path from the village up to the dam, which means the trip to start the work here each day is going to be even easier than it was before.
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Despite the easier trip to the dam and reservoir each day, over the past ten days, the pace of construction has slowed quite a bit, down to only thirty feet a day. The reason for this is that many of the goblins are working for less time than before, or have quit entirely. According to Zaka, it's because hauling the stone uphill is much harder than downhill. Zaka himself hauls a lot more stone than the other goblins, so the pace hasn't slowed that much, and having regular goblins still digging out the path down to the bedrock is still work that they easily do. Either way, we've only made it about 300 feet, and the next stop isn't for another 900 feet, so we'll see how everything shakes out for construction going forward.
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The past eight days have seen a few different improvements that I've been happy about. First, Zeb finished up the test field, and after I double checked it, he transplanted a handful of the new plants into it. Since then, he's started helping on the path construction. Another major improvement came from a few goblins that had been helping prestiging into improved endurance. As path construction has been continuing, they've had to cut some trees down, and a few maxed out their levels recently.
With their improved endurance, and Zeb helping me with fusing and cutting stone, construction is back up to fifty feet a day. Although that was incremental improvements, so we're only at about six-hundred feet completed right now, or about halfway to the next landing.
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Fifteen days, and we've gotten to, and completed, the next landing. As the distance got further away, the pace slowed down, because it took longer for the goblins to haul materials up the mountain. We've decided to take a short break for a few days now. That should give the goblins some time to rest, but also gives me some time to make a couple of carts. Since we now have a complete section of the path up the mountain, we may as well take advantage of the cart track on it to haul stone up the mountain. If possible, it'd help us even more if Kaga would contribute, since we know he can single handedly push two full carts up a track by himself. Of course, I'd also like to try the winch system for the carts, but we'd literally need thousands of feet of thick rope to attempt that right now.
I'm going to have to think on ideas for a mechanical braiding machine so that the goblins can actually complete that request. If I come up with one, I'll build a new workshop in town so that the goblins can make rope more effectively.
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After three days of rest, I've made a few carts for construction purposes, and I also made a small working model for mechanical braiding. It involves three bobbins, two horn gears, and a figure eight track such that the bobbins trace a path for braiding material. In a full sized one, I'll have carriers on the bobbins, and a pair of wood drums that hold the finished braid taut while pulling it out of the machine.
So, despite the fact that I could begin path construction again, I'm going to take a few days here to build a rope making shop instead. I'll probably make a few of these machines, and they'll each be designed for different size threads, so that the goblins can have some flexibility in what they work with. The largest one I have in mind will almost certainly require that I gear it down significantly to be able to operate it for any realistic amount of time.
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It took five days of work to get the machines made, the shop completed, and to show the goblins who were interested how to operate everything safely. The good news, is now the limit on rope is actually a problem of gathering raw materials, rather than manufacturing. The bad news is that they'll need a lot of raw materials.
Another problem on the horizon is that any day now, the mountain snow is going to start to melt, and we'll get the heavy spring rains again, which means I'll be limited in the areas I can cut stone from in the reservoir safely. In order to facilitate that, I actually need to build a bridge over the upper part of the stream now, so that when it's running full blast it doesn't halt work entirely.