As the dwarves set out the next day, the merchant said he hoped to return this winter with our goods if he can, but that we shouldn't hold our breath in case he has difficulty trading for all the materials we wanted. After he said that, I asked him to consider procuring parchment for us for next year, in case he can't return before then. We'll likely need a lot of it for handling formal documentation between the dwarf kingdom and here, so getting a source of it now seems like a good idea.
After the dwarves set out, we went through the process of loading the new crystal into the bathhouse. By the evening, we'd gotten it loaded in and properly positioned. I couldn't say for certain, but the water feels even warmer than it did with the old crystal. As I soaked in the bathhouse in the evening, I thought about a few projects that are going to need to be completed at some point in the near future.
One of the looming problems is fresh water. The stream here was never very large, and with nearly five hundred goblins and other demons drinking from the stream, along with using the water for cleaning and growing crops, we've basically outstripped the available continuous freshwater here. A partial solution is to properly use the reservoir, and honestly, we should probably have been doing this already. The valves should be utilized and adjusted so that the winter snow melt is preserved to last longer into the year.
We might need to expand the stream system in the village as well. By that, I mean that if we keep expanding the village outwards, we should make new artificial channels for freshwater to flow through other sections of the village, so freshwater doesn't need to be gathered from as far away. Wells might also end up being a useful construction to attempt to build in some locations in the village to further help alleviate any water issues.
Another issue facing us as a nation is large scale infrastructure. The road up the mountain is useful for us, as is the road to the sea, but the best available harbor is on the opposite side of the island, and travelling through the forests around the outside of the island to get there takes seven days if you're traveling quickly, and longer if you're trying to haul things. A few roads should probably be constructed to the harbor on that side of the island to facilitate trade.
Another thing I wanted to make before but I can't actually do without a skilled smith is a windmill. Ideally, an English style mill that automatically faces the wind and adjusts its fans so it doesn't take extra operators to run multiple of them. There are a lot of locations on the island with pretty decent amounts of wind, and the ability to utilize that for mechanical work in various forms would catapult our economy forward.
Finally, and this is an issue I'm not actually sure how to solve easily, is the idea of building a port. The tides here are so extreme that the only way I can conceive of a port being made is by restricting access in and out to being during high tide at a wet dock, which we'd have to dig ourselves. It's not impossible, but I'd need a lot of info I don't currently have in order to complete that task. In fact, this is important enough that I think I'll try to make it over to the harbor on the other side of the island before the dwarves make it back, just so I can get a good look at their ship or ships to see what we're working with. Since they're a large group hauling supplies, I should be able to make it to that side of the island faster than them if I travel alone.
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The round trip to the bay and back again took twelve days in total. Thankfully, I reached the bay before the dwarves left and was able to get a good look at their ships. There were three ships anchored in the harbor. One ship was larger than the other two, with three large sails mounted on the deck and many wooden slats which likely had cannons behind them. That ship probably required well over a hundred individuals to crew it. The other two ships were slightly smaller, with one large main sail and two smaller sails. They looked like they also had cannons, but many fewer than the first ship. They each probably required a bit less than fifty individuals to fully crew.
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Even the smaller ships would be a real pain to make a single wet dock for, let alone enough to hold multiple ships. For now, I think that our best bet is to build a road to this side of the island, to facilitate the speed of travel around the island. I'd guess that with a good road, walking from one side of the island to the other via the periphery would take about two days at a leisurely pace, or just one if you push yourself. Right now it takes about eight at a leisurely pace due to the difficult terrain.
Thankfully, building this road should be much easier than building the road up the mountain for multiple reasons. First, we have a much larger goblin workforce and those goblins are more skilled than previously. Second, while the terrain is difficult, it isn't actually trying to ascend the mountain, so there is a lot less zig-zagging to do. Honestly, rather than go over some of the ridges, around the mountain, we might just tunnel through them, or cut a direct path up if necessary. The third reason is that this road won't have a cart system attached to it, since it won't have much of a height differential.
What I'll probably do is mark out a path, and then for the simple portions, let the goblins with stone shaping run that portion of the project. There will be a few sections that will require some more advanced decision making where I'll probably need to step in, but I expect most of the road should be fairly straightforward to build.
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I've decided to break the process of building the road up into multiple parts. The first part is the section from the village to the valley edge in the direction of the now-destroyed second village. Once I figure out the best place to build road to connect the two valleys, that will be the endpoint of the first section. The second section will cross the second valley and up to the next valley edge. Unfortunately, after that the terrain becomes quite craggy, and will probably require plotting and engineering to make the remaining roads functional. All the craggy sections will need to be individually lined up, then cuts and fills will have to occur to allow flat roads to be built.
Thanks to my scouting before in the area, I had a pretty good idea of where the best crossing from one valley to the next occurs, so I got the first road section marked out in only five days. The general path will include a slight incline towards the center mountain, to try to make the path as short as possible to the other side while maintaining a very shallow grade. Crossing into the second valley will require a tunnel to be dug between the two valleys.
There is a lot of peripheral work that needs to be completed before the road itself can be built. First, we'll need lots of stone, and since we're approaching spring, the reservoir area will soon be unavailable. We've only got about three weeks before the reservoir will be inundated with water, so we'll want to make the most of the time we have for that. Second, there are a lot of trees in the way of the road that will need cut down. This is always a bit of a blessing, since the extra levels are appreciated, but it does take time to actually accomplish. Third, all materials for construction need to be moved to where they'll actually be used, which for projects like this is no simple task.
Once the spring rains and snow melt makes the reservoir area unusable for cutting stone, we can resume digging our emergency escape tunnel, as well as the tunnel for the road to acquire some additional stone.
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With all hands on deck cutting stone for twenty days, we managed to excavate a significant amount of stone from the reservoir area. We even had a bunch of the goblins manually breaking stone so that we could hopefully get a few more stone shapers by the time we cut all the trees down for the new road. We ended up using a significant amount of regular laborers to keep up with the pace that we were cutting stone to haul it back to the village. The cart system was running full time to haul blocks down to the village, and even with that, the stockpile areas at the reservoir filled up throughout the day, and a night shift of goblins ended up being necessary just to have them emptied by the following morning. Increasing the reservoir's capacity is nice though, since it helps smooth out the stream's flow rate during the heavy rains and snow melt in spring.