Five days of experimenting with the metal, and I think I've finally got a half-decent product. I did multiple different mixes of various amounts of flux and metal until the brittleness of the metal disappeared. I've made a few different shaped casts using the successful mixture to test the properties of the metal.
The first cast is a simple sheet of the metal, about a tenth of an inch thick and five inches on either side. The second cast is a solid cube measuring three inches on each side. The third, and final cast is a thin wire about an eighth of an inch in diameter. For each cast, I have a few tests I want to perform to see how the metal behaves, to get a better idea of its usefulness.
While testing the sheet, a few interesting results were revealed. While the metal could be bent with a bit of leverage, it was heavily resistant to being shaped via hammering. Tests with the cube gave further evidence that whatever this metal is, it's highly resistant to cold working, and in fact, even resistant to working while glowing yellow from heat. The wire revealed another interesting property to the metal. While many metals would pinch off while being stretched, and then eventually snap, the wire never pinched, and instead the whole wire evenly elongated until it was about 30% longer before it eventually snapped.
My heat resistance trait was pretty beneficial through the whole process. I didn't feel nearly as uncomfortable as I used to while working in front of the fire all day. Ultimately, the mystery metal seems like it will be very useful, the only downside to it is the amount of effort and seashells that I need to make any decent amount of the stuff. For a lot of uses, I'll stick to stone, but for certain tools and for things that I'm worried about wear and tear for, the new metal will be very useful, as long as I can make a good cast for whatever I'm trying to make.
The biggest potential benefit is allowing goblins to make their own durable tools if I teach some how to make the metal. All of that would be quite a ways in the future, of course. Until I come up with tools or machines I want to make though, I don't have any uses for the metal right now. As such, I've decided to move on to my next project, the sea life filter in the bay.
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For the past fifteen days, I've been slowly building the stone grid at the edge of the bay where I made the stairs down previously. The area I'm attempting to cover is actually quite large, so progress is going somewhat slowly, mostly due to the fact it's a long trip from the bottom of the bay back to the village, so running out of mana is a bit of a problem, especially at my current level.
As such, today was the first day I've actually gotten any results. The mesh is only a little over a foot tall, extending across the bay, but I've got a few animals that are caught. It seems there are multiple different kinds of fish-like species. The one thing most of the these animals have in common is that their tail fin is horizontally oriented, instead of vertically. Other than that, they look like fish, although some are flatter than others. There are also a few of those cone shell squid shrimp hybrid creatures as well. I find it kind of odd that they've got two claws, but they're on the end of tentacles.
I've also figured out that the method I'm using will need some revision. Mostly because, well, all these have been dead for a little while. When the tide goes out from the bay, it still recedes further away for a while before returning, so it takes almost four hours before the water starts refilling the bay. Which means the creatures that get trapped die, and start rotting pretty quick.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
What I've decided to do as a solution is to fill in the mesh that I've already made, so that about 18 inches of water remains in the bottom of the bay. Thankfully, the area that is at this height is actually a relatively thin strip compared to the bay as a whole. I'll then level a walkway around the outside of this area in the bay, and the goblins or whoever can just spear fish out what's left, or use a net or something. Mostly, this should help keep the sea life from suffocating, and they can then leave again once the water level rises. Of course, I intend to raise the mesh considerably so that even more sea life is trapped at once.
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I've spent the last 25 days closing the filter, and making the path along the extent of the bottom of the bay walkable. I'm not quite done with the walkway yet, but the filter is completely closed, and now while I'm working I'll see different kinds of sea life swimming about in the shallow water. So I've basically made an artificial tide pool.
I've spotted a few new kinds of life in the water as well. There was something that kind of resembled a large isopod swimming with multiple legs, some more kinds of fish-like creatures, a weird shelled creature that resembled a clam, but walked along the water's floor on tentacles, and a kind of shelled lifeform that seemed akin to a snail. The snail creature made its way over the barrier as I was coming down to work, so I don't think I'll actually be catching any of them.
It'll probably still be quite a while before the area is complete, but I've come up with a faster way to work on the filter, so that should help. I was using local rock to shape into the filter while here, but I've decided that I can shape large chunks of filter at a time back in the village, and then carry a pile of them over in the morning or afternoon, which should about double the pace I was making it before.
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A whole month of work, and I've started bringing a few of the new goblins along when I come to work at low tide, so they can hunt some of the fish creatures. The path around the bottom is completed, and I've gotten the barrier to about four feet tall. In the time I've been working, snow started falling on the mountain again, so it looks like it'll be a few months until I'm able to go back up there. We've also collected quite a decent amount of Zaka's blood, and in my estimation it's probably enough to fire that steam cannon twice, although I'll only be able to activate it once before I need a mana recharge.
We also caught a few new, interesting sea creatures. One large eel like creature, that seemed to have had it's fill of the fish that were trapped before getting trapped itself. It had a diameter of about a foot, and was almost ten feet long, so it was quite the surprise to find it, considering most of the things we had caught before that point were fairly small. In retrospect, it was probably because anything that was larger could easily just hop the small barrier.
Another interesting creature was a larger fish, that had more fins than some of the others, and when a goblin tried to stab it with a spear, the spear broke against it's skin. I ended up earth spiking it, and that killed it, but it used a lot of my mana, which left me a little frustrated. There was also a third fish that was moderately sized that seemed to electrocute other fishes if they got too close. It only seemed able to do this a few times before being incapable of performing this feat any further.
We've also learned our lesson that not all the fishes are edible, as we sadly lost one of the goblins that ate a brightly colored fish that he caught. As such, all the goblins that try fish now have to be given the lessons on how to check for toxins in food. Thankfully that seems to be the only fish so far that has poisons in it. The fisher goblins seem to be getting pretty decent at identifying what they're looking for, and since they can only carry back so much food, they've gotten a little choosy about which creatures seem to taste the best, not that I'm complaining.
Moving forward, I'm aiming to get the filter up to six feet in height, and then I'll attempt to determine if it needs to go any higher, or if this seems to work well enough for catching fish that I can leave it as is for a while.