Unfortunately, any facility that is designed to process bulk lightstone would also produce a large amount of very nasty liquid pollution. Pollution that would very likely damage the ecosystem around our island if released into the ocean. There is at least one way to mitigate it somewhat, though it's not that much better. If we evaporated off all the liquid, we could then remove the remaining solid waste, and bury it in underground areas that have been mostly sealed off from water. It's close to 80% of the original reddish-rock that gets eaten away by the acid baths, so there is a lot of solid waste left over after it precipitates out.

Considering I still have a few months until the first construction team shows up to help with the new mana crystal growth area, I may as well take the time to design out such a facility. After all, if I'm needing to give Zeb more of a heads up, actually having a rough idea of what I need done would let me ask him far in advance of when I actually would want the facility worked on.

So, between doing work on the pylon areas and going up the mountain to use our argon that we stored up over winter, I also worked on a design for a facility for mass producing lightstone from good precursor rocks until summer finally came. I can see how doing this in advance actually is quite helpful to Zeb and his teams, since I made multiple revisions and changes to the various designs, adding on new buildings as I went. If I'd done this spur-of-the-moment, I'd have probably needed to get the construction teams back over at least two additional times. Honestly, good planning saves a lot of work over time, even for myself.

In the past, however, most of the projects were straight forward enough, with only a few stages, or a single piece of complicated equipment. Even our cryogenics facility is technically a bunch of batch processes, rather than a continuous one, so adding things in piecemeal wasn't as big of a deal. However, with this facility, I initially thought I'd just pull water out of the stream to use. Between the acid water, copper fluorite, water demand, and physical pollutants though, I thought it'd probably be best to locate this facility further away from our food and population areas.

Unfortunately, that meant relocating it to somewhere without as much of a constant fresh water supply. Salt water could work, but it also has quite a bit of dissolved salts already which interact with the free protons and rock in their own way accelerating certain dissolution while simultaneously making it harder to dissolve more material into the water. Ultimately, that meant I needed a way to make fresh water, which was something we actually already built, at least to some degree.

We have the greenhouses that collect the freshwater from salt formation, though I don't want to haul that freshwater all the way to my planned site. What I'm thinking of doing instead is building a facility along the craggy coastline in one of the thin valleys. We'll build a seawall to protect it, just like the other valleys have, but it'll be serviced by one of the new roads that we're building along the coasts around our island.

There, we'll pump in seawater into large smoothed rock boiler chambers that have heat fluorite plates installed just under the surface periodically. There, the water will be brought to a boil to evaporate away, and condensed into freshwater for the facility. I want the boiler chambers supported by stone pillars, with a mechanical system that can lower the heat plates down away from the boiler and into a well-ventilated tunnel. That way, the plates are exposed to a large quantity of moving air even while they're working, providing extra mana. Then when the heat plates are lowered and the boiler is cooled to a satisfactory amount, the large amount of salt buildup can be harvested.

That lets us produce the freshwater we'd need for our acid baths, while also collecting valuable salt for potential trade in the future, or, failing that, replacing our need for salt from our old evaporation ponds opening that land up for farming. This would also give us a good use for our plentiful heat fluorite plates that we've been making. I decided to do some measurements of the volume of salt that is leftover from evaporating our ocean water, and what I came out to is about a 1% by volume yield of solid salt. So, for every 100 gallons of seawater, I'd get about a gallon of solid salt.

The collected freshwater can then be used for the acid baths made with the copper fluorite to process lightstone. Thankfully, this unique hydronium acid that we get from the fluorite can dissolve about 10 times the amount of rock material as compared to the amount of salt that was initially in the seawater. Though it also loses some of the water alongside the bubbling hydrogen gas coming out of the solution. That means that we ultimately get about 2 times as much high-quality lightstone as we make salt from the process, before considering water recycling.

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The hydronium can then be drained into a well grounded tank to hold for a short while so that more of the hydrogen gas can be released and the acidity can drop somewhat in the liquid. In that tank, some of the materials will precipitate out as some of the protons form hydrogen gas and release more metal ions than the fluid can hold. After that, the liquid is again drained, this time to a boiler, where the rest of the liquid will be removed, and as it does so, more hydrogen gas is released.

The steam and hydrogen gas are then put through a condenser like the seawater was, but they're then vented to atmosphere with a fresh air fan, making sure that any trace amounts of volatile compounds and the large amount of hydrogen gas don't build up in the system. When all is said and done between multiple acid wash phases, about half the water can then be recovered and recycled, meaning we ultimately should get about 4 times as much high-quality lightstone as we get salt. That also means that we get about 20 times as much waste material as salt, so we'll be moving a lot of solids around. My guess is that we'll just store the waste material where we cut the rock for processing, though if a more convenient location arises, that can work as well.

By my calculations, we'll need about 50 cubic feet of feed water for every cubic foot of lightstone product. So, I plan on making four salt water boilers, and 20 byproduct boilers. The byproduct boilers are going to be quite a bit smaller than the seawater ones, but we need more of them since the acid washing happens in repeated smaller phases, rather than all at once. I'd like the feed boilers to be 20 feet by 30 feet, and filled with 6 feet deep of water, meaning every boil cycle in a single boiler would yield about 72 cubic feet of acid washed lightstone, alongside 36 cubic feet of salt. The byproduct boilers will only be 10 feet by 18 feet and have 3 feet of water in them.

After all the general building designs, mechanics, and devices were sketched out, I went to Zeb to discuss the idea. I opened the discussion by telling him that I wouldn't even want to start work on this project until mid-next year at the soonest, since I have so many other projects that I'm working on. Though I also espoused the usefulness of the acid washed lightstone as more pure hand-refined lightstone, being more acid resistant and a fairly strong construction material. Ultimately, it's useful in a lot of applications where metal isn't, especially because we have stoneshaping.

In fact, seeing how resistant it is, has made me rethink some of our previous inventions. For example, using thick resins for waterproofing wood. We could instead simply coat it in a thin layer of stoneshaped lightstone to achieve a similar result. Since it seems like humanoids can't actually shape stone at will, but rather cut the stone with magic, it makes sense that they wouldn't have developed this style of design. For us specifically though, we could coat the outer layer of large boats with an inch of the acid washed lightstone, waterproofing the whole thing while also preventing internal metals from corroding to a degree. Obviously, cracks could form along the hull, and we'd need to be smart about how we applied it.

Zeb, however, rightfully pointed out that to process the amount of lightstone I described, we'd need at least ten regular stoneshaping goblins working in the facility to keep up with lightstone production. This comes down to the repetitive nature of the acid washing, plus vacation time and work hours. All that is also assuming we average a single seawater boiler a day of production. If, however, there were a mana source nearby, that could be cut down to only four workers. The big issue comes down to the amount of mana spent on stoneshaping and waiting to recover the mana to continue. With our limited supply of mana crystals and ever growing population, I think six additional workers is probably cheaper long term than a mana source. Improved stoneshaping is 4 times as mana efficient as regular stoneshaping, but any demon that has access to that is far more valuable as a construction worker than as a lightstone producer, so they're out of the question as well.

Ultimately, we agreed that we'd start production of this facility two years from now, though they'll be starting with the sea wall as a project during off seasons, and only prioritizing building the rest of the facility once the sea wall is done. Once the facility as a whole is complete the saltwater boilers will run at full capacity, but we'll only have a limited lightstone supply until we have a surplus of stoneshaping goblins to fill all the necessary positions.

I'm quite content with this. Normally, I'd design a project like this over the course of a few months like it has been, but then I'd directly oversee all the construction and building of the facility, assisting with my much larger mana capacity and improved stoneshaping. If this goes relatively well without me, then I should be more free to design other projects, speeding up our overall production, rather than keeping me as a bottleneck for new things. In about two weeks time, I'm expecting the construction team to show up to help me get the mana crystal growth area dug out, so I'm more than ready to change gears and work on that.