The trend continued for the newly summoned goblins into the next month, so I discussed shifting our summoning efforts to this new style of summoning with Zaka and Zeb.  Using it, we could expand our summoning capacity to triple the current values, but we''d also need to triple our housing production to accommodate that many new demons.  Zeb was previously the one pushing for us to summon as many new individuals as possible, but this time he was actually advocating for slowing down our summoning.


    His reasons for slowing down made a lot of sense.  We had basically frontloaded a lot of the infrastructure necessary to support a growing population.  Now though, our artificial tide pools are getting closer to reaching capacity, and we haven''t been expanding the fields much because we no longer have easy relocatable mana crystals for rapid construction in remote locations.  As such, more of our construction labor is actually going to need to be dedicated to building up our food infrastructure to support a larger population.


    Zeb showed us a new map with his various planned construction projects.  Among them, I noticed a plan for three new villages.  Two in the neighboring valley, and one on the far side of the island.  His plans were also organized by approximate payoff time for the amount of labor needed.  The two villages he has planned for the neighboring valley are pretty high up the list, and lie on existing roads, making them fairly high payoff projects with minimal startup time.


    We ended up following a secondary discussion of the purpose of expanding our population.  We''d previously discussed the need to expand for both productivity and defensive purposes, but both Zeb and Zaka have noted that a lot of our population is idle now-a-days.  Back when we had mana crystals all over the place, a large amount of the population would be busy assisting with construction or other tasks done by demons using magic.  Now, with a much more limited mana supply, there just isn''t as much labor necessary.


    Labor that uses mana is still incredibly useful, but having spare work that demons can do to actually gain access to magics that can use mana effectively is an issue.  Even simple tasks like mining end up needing demons with stone shaping to do some amount of cleanup after, limiting the amount of trainable population.  While the general population is slowly gaining levels passively, most of those who end up prestiging aren''t getting very useful traits.  That problem compounds on itself when we actually only have a handful of sources for levels, and we''re already using quite a few of them to maximum capacity to ensure that our guards and military are as strong as possible.


    After some amount of back and forth, we decided to slow down the amount of leveling that our military soldiers would be doing by a modest amount.  Currently, a lot of the fish killed in both artificial tide pools are killed by soldiers each day to help keep the soldiers ahead of the levelling curve in the city.  Now, the soldiers will only do that in one of the two tide pools.  The other tide pool will be used by the construction teams.  Zeb will be in charge of determining what teams go there and when to gain levels, with the idea being a more rapid expansion of the number of demons capable of doing construction work.


    Since levels have become such a valuable resource, we decided to also take the time to determine what our upper limit for most individuals should be.  It seemingly gets exponentially harder to level up to max every time you prestige or evolve, so expending valuable levels on individuals who might take years to prestige for miniscule improvements seems like a waste.  For the military, we determined that reaching hobgoblin status with at least two combat helpful traits and one combat oriented magic would be the upper limit.  Beyond that, only military leaders would be allowed to continue active levelling for the sake of making themselves hardened targets.


    Likewise, for the construction teams improved stone shaping will be set as the upper limit.  Though for both the military and construction teams, exceptions can be made in either direction at either Zaka or Zeb''s discretion.  If someone shows particular promise for a new ability that could be beneficial, they could continue levelling, and likewise, if someone is already a high tier demon but shows no promise, they can be cut off.  It''ll require more bureaucracy to keep track of these things, but with limited resources available, dedicating work to their effective use is better than what we''ve been doing.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    We had all those discussions only to essentially come to the conclusion that for the next few years, we don''t need the new summoning method that I''ve developed.  We''ll still use it due to it''s lower time commitment on Zaka''s part, but we won''t be using it at full capacity.  Having it available for the future should still be useful, however.


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    After our meeting, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to work on next.  It''ll still be a bit of time until the lightstone production facility begins construction proper, since they''re still building out a sea wall at the bottom of that craggy valley.  Looking towards things we''d like to have in the future, a more ready supply of metal would be ideal, particularly iron.


    Our needs for it aren''t quite as high as a typical industrializing country would expect, thanks to multiple different magical processes, but there are still a lot of items that benefit from the ductility of metal over stone as well as the thermal conductivity of it.  We do actually have a potentially large source of iron sitting right under our feet, it''s just difficult to recover.  A lot of the volcanic rock making up the island seems to be basaltic.  As such at least 1%, if not more, of the rock is probably composed of iron oxides.


    The difficulty comes in separating that iron oxide from other materials.  Thankfully, we actually already have a process to handle that in the magnetic separator at the dam, though we might actually need to scale that up to make it effective enough.  We''ll also need a much larger pulverizer to actually process a large enough volume of rock.  In addition to the pulverizer being larger, we''ll also need it to make finer particles than what we''ve been making, since the minerals are more finely distributed in rock, as compared to ore.


    So, what I''m thinking of making is a series of crushers designed to first break the rock down to pebbles, then two large ball mills to produce a very fine powder from the rock.  After the rock is powdered, it can be run past a magnetic separator to pull out any magnetic impurities that exist in small amounts.  I can''t say for certain that the only magnetic material will be iron oxide, but we can do batch vibrational bed separations to striate the different magnetic materials if there are multiple kinds, and then figure out what each is.


    The remaining non-magnetic material should contain a number of minerals, but exactly what each mineral is I''m unsure of.  I can either analyze it for useful properties later, or we can apply a small amount of it to our crop fields each year as a volcanic fertilizer.  The remainder will just build up as a waste product that we''ll either need to flush into the ocean, or find other uses for.  If we worked with concrete it could be used as a filler material, but as it stands, the majority of it will just be waste.


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    I wanted to do a proof of concept first, to make sure that what I planned to do could actually work at a larger scale.  Thankfully, a lot of the work was already done to do small scale testing since we already have rock crushers and the magnetic separator, so the only thing I needed to make was a medium sized ball mill capable of powdering enough basalt for doing trials.


    I took seven days to make a ball mill, and then it took a few days of trail and error to make a batch of steel balls capable of grinding down the rock to a fine powder, and I did end up grinding it in back to back batches using a larger and small ball size.  Normally, I''d be a little concerned that the steel balls might break down over time, but since the primary function of this mill is to make iron, we''ll be recovering any shards of iron from any balls that break anyway.


    For the purposes of my test, I powdered about 50 cubic feet of basalt over the course of five days to ensure that I''d be able to actually tell if I was recovering any magnetic material.  I wanted to make sure that it wasn''t just shards of metal that may have come from either the crushers or the ball mill if they got damaged and I didn''t notice.


    I quickly found that due to the small amount of magnetic material in the basalt, I had to run the powder past the magnetic drum multiple times before I actually extracted all of it.  By the end though, I had just over 3 cubic feet of magnetic powder, which honestly was more than I expected.  Considering how much stone we extracted from the reservoir over the years, we''d have produced many tons of iron.  Of course, I''ll actually need to determine what exactly our magnetic powder is, and whether further processing needs done first before we proceed.