I had mined plenty of fluorite in the eight days that I had spent that I wasn't concerned about running out for a little while, so I turned my focus on planning out this research base's layout. I only had a few days until the first construction crew would show up to start building the residences, so I quickly started planning where some of the buildings should go. There are a few design constraints that I needed to work around in the design.

First, I wanted the residences to be clustered in one place, and have them in the safest location possible. Even if the industries here are usually safe, I think it's a good idea to plan for the eventualities that some future expansions might end up being less so. Ultimately, that led me to wanting to place the residences on an edge, away from the hillside. Ultimately, I actually want there to be two entrances into this fort, one that goes directly to the residences, and one that avoids them. It's a fairly common practice, and should limit accidental exposure to materials being transported to and from the facility as a whole.

As for other buildings that we plan on having, I'm concerned about a few of them. The cryogenics facility could be dangerous if kept too close to the residences, but there are mitigations we can take to prevent failures from spreading very far, so it's not that dangerous. However, the facility where I plan on having hydrogen produced, and where we'll make stirling engines, is a bit higher risk, since the hydrogen has the potential to explode.

So, the way I'm currently thinking of designing things, we'll build a small raised reservoir for water between the residences and the cryogenics facility. The cryogenics separations and storage will go on the side of that building that is furthest from the residences as well. Should any liquid gas happen to be released, it should interact with the reservoir first, and safely evaporate, rather than freezing any potential bystanders.

Over closer to the lab, we'll build the stirling engine facility where they'll be manufactured. Since the crystal plating has to be installed deep underground anyway, that should help lower the amount of hauling the large metal pieces need to go through. We'll also need our own food supply area, and we should probably have a general storage for tools or other non-hazardous supplies near the residences.

I think I want there to be between 60 and 100 residences here, to help accommodate any future buildings for a while. By building the residences on the edge of the facility, it should also make expanding the number of people relatively simple in the future. Ultimately, for what I have planned out, this area will take up about 25% more space than our innermost walled section of our city, which was the original goblin village's area.

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I just barely finished marking off all the areas as the construction team arrived four days later. I ultimately decided on mostly goblin sized apartments, with a single building dedicated to potentially larger demons. This work doesn't cause any accelerated leveling, so most of the demons who work here will be goblins for decades if they choose to prestige only.

There is still quite a few days left until the next large fluorite crystal is potentially ready. We do have a few 12-inch crystals that we've grown of the pure iron doped fluorite, and those crystals should be big enough to power the casting facility that I want to make for various parts of stirling engines.

While many steel items are created via regular blacksmithing methods, on many occasions, we've created molds using stoneshaping to create the desired final shape. While that has performed relatively well, especially when using specially heated lightstone to remove any water that might be in the mold, I think we'd be better served by using a wet sand mold process. Which means they'll need fine sands, and a decent source of water.

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For the sand, I'd still like to use lightstone as the source material. The lightstone will be crushed then ground to a fine size, then tumbled to round out some of the jagged edges. Once the sand is made, it can be shaped using pre-designed pieces that match most of the design specs for specific stirling engines.

The cast pieces will then need to be filed and smoothed in order to be completed, and then the engines will need to be assembled from those parts. Thankfully, there aren't that many parts that go into a stirling engine. Though some parts, like the steel wool, will need to be drawn through dies rather than cast.

As far as sizing the facility goes, we currently grow a 36-inch crystal in 20 days, and a 12-inch crystal every 5 days. From the 12-inch crystal, I currently have us make two slightly different stirling engines, and I haven't yet determined how many engines of what shape I want to make from the 36-inch crystal.

I think that moving forward, the idea of making the components into replaceable parts is probably wise. So I'll be changing the design of the two 12-inch crystal plate stirling engines to be a single engine type that has two different crystal plate carriers. Since I'd rather have the larger engine be the most efficient one, I'm going to make the four plate carrier engine suffer the efficiency loss of fitting into the other form factor.

However, when it comes to the 36-inch crystal, with replaceable parts in mind, I want to make three different engines that use up the crystal. An extra large engine that uses a 2-inch thick cut from the very center of the crystal. Then, we'll cut three 1-inch thick plates from either side of the crystal. Giving us six large plates to use for another engine design. Next, we'll cut more plates down until we're at 14-inches to a side. Those plates can be cut into quarters, and used in the previous smaller engine size that we're already designing. Then we'll cut another handful of plates out, making a third engine size. Finally, a handful of plates can again be cut to the 12-inch crystal size, providing us with dozens of those stirling engines per 36-inch crystal.

Which means that to keep up with even the current crystal growth rates, we need to be producing multiple small stirling engines a day, as well as at least one large engine per day. Nevermind the fact I also want to have space to do other casting projects, like making more cryocoolers here.

We already have a problem when we're making molten iron in other locations. In essence, the temperatures involved are hot enough that they damage our furnaces over time. So every few cycles, we have to have a stoneshaping goblin repair them. Likewise here, we'll probably need multiple furnaces for melting iron in, and a full time stoneshaping goblin to repair the inactive furnaces.

This facility will also get very hot. So, similar to the fluorite facility, I plan on installing many large fans in the facility walls to keep air flowing and temperatures bearable inside. The floor plan is going to end up quite large, so I'll probably be quite busy for a while. I'll once again be hiring a handful of goblins to help haul materials for me, so that I can focus on building out this manufacturing facility.

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After another fifteen days, I went to check on the new 36-inch crystal. This time, it came out as a fully functional single crystal. Even with the low mana underground, it was incredibly hot initially. However, over the course of an hour, the temperature fell to a much more manageable level. The ambient mana level also fell quite a lot in the main room. Which I discovered while trying to figure out why the crystal was getting cooler.

It seems to be large enough that it converts more mana to heat than the room gains in new mana. After consuming most of the ambient mana, it fell to the level of replacement, which was still very hot. Since I'm nowhere near ready to design the next stirling engines to use this crystal, but I at least know what sort of plates I want to use, I took a day cutting the crystal down to the shapes and sizes that I want, while also showing the goblins who work down here how I want not only these heat crystals cut, but also the 12-inch crystals.

Since the excess heat is starting to be a concern down here, I've decided to dig out a new storage room down here for all the crystal plating before I resume construction on the stirling engine facility, which I've only just finished getting the flooring built in. Hopefully, by having the crystal plates all be in a single room which is closed off via a hallway with two doors, the ambient mana in that room will be low enough that heat shouldn't be a problem. If it is, we could always try installing copper heat sinks to hold the crystal plating, and drive the heat into the ground, rather than the air.