Setting Up The Mines

May 8th, 0001:

The majority of the orange seeds had already sprouted and were beginning to grow above the soil, with some avocado seeds following suit; as for the coconut seeds, they had yet to sprout above land.

In the Suri farm, the larva had begun to grow to the point that they were easy to spot when not looking for them, causing everyone else in the original settlement to notice them and wonder where they had come from and what they were since they did not yet resemble the Suri bug.

The progress on the new settlement had actually gone pretty well. The settlement was practically already complete, only needing to finish the area for soccer and two beds to be completely made and on par with the original.

There had also been a wall set up around both settlements as planned, and it had actually managed to kill a small critter that was probably trying to run to the original settlement and was just a couple of centimeters off when it jumped. It hadn't been tested against predators though, as none had actually been near either settlement recently.

Plus, when it came to the relation between the people of both settlements, although there was certainly awkwardness whenever they interacted, it was less than before as the people in the new settlement had slowly begun to grow accustomed to their current situation.

Regarding the Mines, The progress on the smoke guiding contraption was halted by a day because that's how long it took me to figure out how high up from the fireplace the wooden contraption would have to be not to catch fire.

I had to go through multiple designs for a big and wide wooden dog cone until all of the smoke was taken into it and then released through the small hole at the top. Due to its pretty big size, it was made out of two pieces connected through wood joinery.

This, of course, did mean that there were very tiny gaps that the smoke could escape through, but it appeared that the smoke, for some reason, was more likely to move diagonally into the top hole of the cone than through the tiny openings.

I knew this because even by putting my hand right above and even directly on the areas between the two pieces, I could not feel any change in the air, and just as a final precaution, I basically only breathed in the air from there for an hour before giving up because I began to get dizzy.

It didn't matter to me much though, as it was pretty easy to figure out that we wouldn't need to have people stay in the mine for more than an hour, at least not for the amount of tin that we actually needed at the moment.

Wooden rectangular tubes were also made from two pieces of wood connected by wood joinery with a surface area of 3ft by 3ft. With a right triangular prism connected directly to the top of the cone, the wooden rectangular tubes could be installed in a diagonal position by being connected to the hypotenuse.

The wooden rectangular tubes were connected diagonally and leading to the exit of the cave, having to sometimes switch to just being entirely horizontal since the cave didn't just go down in a diagonal direction and was, in fact, mostly just horizontal with small drops now and then.

Regardless everything seemed to work well enough until we reached the point where there was a very slim opening because I, and another three people, had to constantly tear it apart with some extra pickaxes I made for an entire day to open up space for the wooden rectangular tube to go through.

Why it took so long? Mainly because trying to destroy rock, using rocks while possible is still an arduous and tiring process. Plus, we had to leave the cave every 40-50-ish minutes since I hadn't considered that people breathe a lot more and require more oxygen when doing physical activity, making my original estimates off.

Finally, setting up the final cone and connecting all of it to the smoke guiding tube had been pretty successful and took a lot less time than making lamp oil out of olive, or at least enough to light up the entire cave.

That didn't mean that I wouldn't have to set up an olive farm eventually. Not only would I eventually need to begin using lamp oil to light up homes at nighttime, but olives were actually really easy to grow and only took 40-ish days to germinate.

Going back to the cave situation. Once everything was set up, I began to make six new rock pickaxes and then brought two people from the new settlement, Jose, Daniel, and Gabriel, to the cave, taking them to the small Tin reserve I had found.

From there, I got them to help me break off some of it and carry it out of the cave, getting a 15-minute break every half an hour to make sure that their lungs were able to get back to normal by smelling the clean air outside to try a minimize permanent damage as much as possible.

Still, once the day came to an end, we had collected enough tin to basically cover more area than the Suri farm, which was impressive considering that we only had six people working on it, constantly taking breaks.

Regardless, now that I had finally gotten my hand on tin and copper, all that was left was to bring it back to the new settlement before producing charcoal and asking the system for information on making bellows.

Mainly because although it was probably possible to get copper and tin to their melting points without bellows, all the other methods were pretty inhumane, with the most effective ones being the most inhumane ones like creating wooden tubes and making people blow into the fire with all their strength for hours on end, which I was honestly, not comfortable doing knowing that there was an easier way.