The project started out at a pretty good pace.  Although, since the dam had changes to it, working in it''s shadow through spring as the heavy rains and filling of the reservoir occurred made me a little nervous.  If any component failed on the dam, it''d be a scramble to fix it, but thankfully everything worked as intended.  I spent less time at the dam than the construction team though, so if anyone should have been actually worried about issues it was them.  I was spending a lot of time at the sand casting area at the research facility designing the various components for the machines that will go in the facility.


    Since I had a pretty good idea of exactly what machines I needed, it made it relatively easy to design the building first, then leave the construction teams to start leveling the earth and building the building before I actually had the machines fully designed.  The way the facility is getting built, we''re going to have three levels to the facility, but all will be on the ground, just cascading down the hillside, to take advantage of gravity to transfer water.


    The highest floor will consist of the rock crushers that are driven by the dam''s water.  This floor will be built at the base of the dam, just like the old hydroelectric facility.  Outside of this floor will be where the rock is kept that needs to be processed.  After that, the floor will drop about four feet and be cut slightly into the earth.  That is where the two large ball mills will be located, along with the drying cones for the final product.  Then, after another four foot drop is where the stirred mills and electromagnetic separators sit.  The bottom floor will also hold the small storage tank for powdered rock to be used for crop field enrichment.  After going through the stirred mill, the wet material will have to be conveyed back up a level to the drying cones to continue their processing.


    Ultimately, at the end of the bottom floor I want to put a large drainpipe that runs underground to the ocean.  That will be where our wastewater goes.  That way, on any stage or floor where we need to add water to the system, we can create smaller drains that feed the large pipe.  I am a little worried about potential sediment buildup in the pipe, so I plan on having the pipe be six feet in diameter, with a small internal ledge for walking on, in case it needs inspected or cleared at some point.


    Only four days into summer, the construction team had finished building the building, and I''d gotten casts for most of the components made as well as having gotten many of the stirling engines assembled minus their crystal plates. I''ve instructed the construction team to begin digging the slurry drain.  I''m going to need to take a few days to move the growing mana crystal to the 16-foot apparatus to continue growing it.  We''re still a few years from completion now, but the end is within sight.


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    As I''ve been working on the stirling engines more and more, I''ve realized that I should probably rename them.  Stirling was a last name of the person who invented them, and while I''m technically using a lot of his original designs, these aren''t designed to work on any source of heat, they''re specifically optimized for using fluorite heat plates that consume mana.  Since there is no history of Stirling in this world, from now on I''m going to be referring to them as mana engines.


    This came up because an inquisitive goblin who was helping me move many of them to the milling facility asked me why I have such a weird name for them.  We were speaking in demonic, but I was essentially just saying ''stirling engine'' in English when I referred to them.  Now, I''m using the demon word for mana while still using the English word engine.  The demonic pronunciation of engine isn''t too far off, so I feel like it will integrate fine as a borrowed word.


    I transferred the mana crystal to the last apparatus at the start of summer, and since then I''ve either been assembling or moving machines into the building at the dam.  I''ve been holding off on two of the hardest parts, saving it for the end.  The two large ball mills and the electromagnetic separator are both going to be the hard parts, given their sheer size.  They''ll still be brought over in parts, but those parts are going to be heavy to keep total part count down.  When the time comes, we''ll need a lot of labor to pull them up to the dam, even with carts.The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    It''s now the end of summer, and my current estimate is that we''ll be able to start the facility up sometime in winter if we don''t run into any issues.  My biggest concern currently is that we won''t have the slurry drain done in time, so I''ve already asked Zeb if he can spare another construction team to help.  Whether or not that help comes will probably determine the exact start date.


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    Zeb sent some help, and so we were able to get the facility up and running at the very start of the last month of the year.  I hired on a few dozen demons to run the facility, and spent nearly a month training them before we started the facility up.  Processing 650 cubic feet of rock a day isn''t actually all that much depending on your perspective.  In a year, the facility will process just under a quarter of a million cubic feet of rock.  The rock we excavated for the drainage tunnel was about that much, so we have enough rock currently to run the facility for a year.  That puts the expected iron yield annually at about 4000 tons.


    As long as we stay on top of things, it shouldn''t be a problem to keep a steady supply of rock for the facility to process.  Whether that be by expanding the reservoir, or by hauling stone here from other excavation projects, the actual total processing power of this facility isn''t nearly as large as I initially envisioned.  The reason being the sheer scale of machinery necessary to actually process the rock.  The sheer amount of energy necessary to do this limits the size of the facility, given mana density issues for mana engines.  Though now that we''ve done it once, we could always build more facilities in other locations in the future if we end up needing them.  4000 tons of iron a year will probably be enough to supply a lot of our industrial plans, so we probably won''t need any new ones in the near future.


    I still need to take a few weeks to design a hand cranked device to spread the powder on fields.  I''d expect it will increase the quality of our crops, and we should only need to do it on any field once every few years, so we shouldn''t need too many of the devices.  The full construction of the tunnel through the mountain will be done soon as well, and it seems like the sewage drain for the tunnel is also going to be done in the near future.  With that being the case, Zeb has informed me that he''ll probably have construction begin on the lightstone processing facility soon, since he''ll have more construction teams available again, so I''ll have that project to work on soon.


    I''m going to have another discussion with Zeb about doing exploratory mining.  While I''ve somewhat solved our iron issue, what I''m interested in finding now are either quartz crystals or mana crystals.  Either of those would accelerate us forward in different areas.  Finding mana crystals would let us finish the large mana crystal far ahead of schedule, and quartz would allow us to resume fluorite research, which could yield very new technologies.


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    My new discussion with Zeb went a little better than before, given our discussion with Zaka about stagnating our population growth for a while.  We''re still about 4 years from completing the new large mana crystal, and potentially reducing that time by a year would actually speed up the other construction projects that he has planned.  Rather than bring out both of the mining teams working on the sewer in the tunnel when it is complete, we''ll keep one in the tunnel digging the exploratory mining shafts out from the center.


    He had one main restriction though.  For the time being, the tunnel itself is the only thing being dug.  Any deposits of materials we find, other than specifically mana crystals, will not be mined at the current time.  We can mark them off in some way to make them easy to find, and potentially divert the tunnel to go around them if we need to, but we won''t be mining them.  Finding new mana crystals is the main concern.


    I agreed to those terms, since that seemed to be a reasonable requirement.  We aren''t hurting for any metals currently, and while I''d like to stop to mine quartz, finding a lot of mana crystals could easily accelerate all of our projects, so it''s reasonable to focus in on only what we currently need.