The salvage team is still busy pulling up all the sunken goods from Rathland's invasion, so using our single salvage ship for harvesting float vines would be wasting their time. So for the time being, we'll limit ourselves to the float vines that we can harvest close to our shores with reasonable road access. While we could build a second ship, I thought about it for a little while, and decided I'd rather have a safe harbor built before we make any more ships. Our current ship was pretty damaged in the last storm, and I'd like for us to not have that issue.
We could also build some smaller rowboats that can be dragged on land to assist in the endeavor. The issue with rowboats, for us at least, is that utilizing them around the craggy edges of the island would be fairly difficult. So, while they would improve the speed that we can harvest float vines, they wouldn't increase our harvestable area by that much, though it is better than nothing, so I'll probably go with that as the plan for the time being. We do have plenty of waterproofing supplies now, thanks to our trades during the previous two years.
After I build a few rowboats and teach some goblins to handle the float vine harvesting, I'll take the time to finally start investigating the crystals I requested from the merchant.
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I spent eighteen days working with the carpenters to teach them how to make these smaller rowboats, and then teaching some goblins how to use and safely store them. The rowboats aren't that large, and can be operated by one hobgoblin or two regular goblins. They can carry a handful of float vines, or potentially fish, if they want to use them for that. Though I'm a little concerned about using them for fishing, considering how dangerous some of the fish can be. On land, you can at least run away when you spot a dangerous fish on your line, in the boat, you have to hope it doesn't decide to attack you, even if you cut the line.
That said, I've got four goblins working full time on the float vine harvesting in two rowboats. Once the vines are collected, they're brought to shore and laid out to dry for a few days. Once they've dried, they're burned in containers for collecting the soda ash afterwards for use in the pyrite refining process.
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After I took a few more days to ensure that the goblins were harvesting float vines effectively, I started research on the crystals that the merchant had delivered. First, I made simple notes about each crystal based on their observable physical properties. The three crystals that I got at once have three slightly different shades of yellow/orange colors. All three have been artificially shaped, which made it much harder to determine their natural shape. They vary in size, one is a tube shape with a 3" radius and is 5" long, another is a plate shape 1" thick and 4" diameter, the last one is a square prism 6" long and 2" on the sides.
They're relatively soft materials as well, being scratched by many different rocks that I have. As advertised, when they absorb mana, they heat up, and the more mana I pour in, the hotter they get. Each crystal produced different amounts of heat from each other for the same amount of mana I infused in with tectonic sense as well. Ultimately, to try to get more information about the crystals, I broke them into smaller pieces and observed their fracture patterns. The crystals seem to want to break into octahedral crystals. A feature that is more common as a cleavage pattern than a growth pattern, so it's unlikely they grew in this shape, but not impossible I suppose, considering the mana crystals grow in octahedrons...
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Even after retesting tiny samples of similarly sized crystals, they still displayed different amounts of heat production with the same amount of mana. I tried another scratch test, and determined that all three crystals are very likely the same material, despite slightly different colors and heat production. It's likely that the crystals each have slightly different amounts of the same inclusion material, which is leading to the different properties. That's more evidence for my inclusion theory for crystal's producing mana effects.
The last crystal that was delivered just this last winter was quite a different color compared to the other three, a pale green, and the mana related effect was quite different from the other three. When this crystal has mana flowing through it, it slowly seeps a highly flammable gas. It seems that it needs to be given an exceptionally large amount of mana to actually produce a flame continuously though. Despite it's different color, it does seem to be the same base crystal again, with a different impurity.
I took a few days doing tests with the gas producing crystal, and considering it's flammable properties, it does seem to be producing hydrogen gas. I tried inflating a fish's bladder using the gas produced by the crystal, and the weight noticeably decreased. A few other tests all but confirmed that the gas being produced was hydrogen. I also found that the crystals were insoluble in water, and tried submerging the gas producing crystal under water that was close to one of the mana crystals, which caused it to start bubbling at a rate fast enough that if I forced all the bubbled gas out of a small opening, it could sustain a strong flame continuously, like a Bunsen burner.
If nothing else, this singular crystal could be useful in the lab for that purpose alone. Because of that, I decided not to damage this crystal for research purposes. If I get another like this, then I'll give it a go.
After that, I resumed testing on the heat producing crystals. From what testing I did with heating samples of water, it seems like the crystals become less effective if they're smaller than a half an inch in size, and continue decreasing in productivity the smaller they get. Above that size though, I couldn't determine if they were less effective or not, as I don't have a precision instrument to measure temperature with, and was operating off feel alone.
I'd expect though that it isn't a hard cutoff necessarily, but rather a gradual one. Interestingly, for specifically tectonic sense tests, smaller crystals get hotter for the same dose of mana, but it seems that the total amount of thermal energy is actually lower than the amount produced by larger crystals. I also got similar results from using external mana sources, like the sun or a mana crystal. My guess is that some of the mana fails to be utilized as it travels through the crystal, and as the crystal gets smaller, it's less likely that the mana interacts with any of the inclusions in it. Though that can't be the only factor, because I tested using a bunch of small crystals in a pile, and it also didn't produce as much as a single larger crystal of similar mass.
Ultimately, something else must also be contributing to the drop off of smaller crystal effects vs larger ones. One problem I've started having is that I don't actually know that much about the specifics of different crystals from earth, so determining the exact composition of these crystals is a bit difficult. I do know that it's not corundum or diamond though, since both of those are hard materials. I do miss having easy access to Konkur and his knowledge. I don't even know if these crystals are actually that rare, or if it's just that finding reputable ones that aren't dangerous is the difficult part.
While I could spend more time taking notes on the physical characteristics of the crystals, I think I'd like to make a new space in the underground lab area, where I can add in the crystal powered bunsen burner, and start doing some decomposition testing on the crystals. I'd like to see what sort of behaviors I can get from them, and if possible, try to melt some of it down to grow a new crystal. They aren't soluble in water, but they might be soluble in other materials potentially, so I'd also like to try that.