For the remaining eleven days until I start classes tomorrow, I decided to check in on all the various dwarves who have moved to the village and see how things are going with them, save for Boggs who I've been working with recently. It had been a while since I'd interacted with a few of them, so I figured it would be good to check how they've been settling in.
Karsh's family is doing well, and it seems like they've been getting along well with Konkur's family. Since they both have young kids, it seems that Karsh's wife, Rishi, and Konkur's wife, Canta, have been trading off childcare duties with each other alongside handling something resembling education for their children, which I'm glad to hear. I would have been worried if their childrens' future was in some way being sacrificed for their parents' work. If Arat and Maka decide to have children, I hope that those kids can also find a good education within our country.
Arat has obviously been busy helping with the bargas herds, and while we haven't quite had our next harvest yet to make flour for baked goods, Maka's bakery is completed. So despite the fact we don't have any leavening agent, I hope that she has a few treats to make. They seem pretty content with their life, and although they haven't quite paid back their new house, I suspect they will get it paid back before winter once Maka is working.
I had worked with Konkur earlier in the year, and left him to his own devices for a number of months. He had a bit of interesting information that he's figured out while he's been working on the various samples I gave him. First, he did a few different things with the steel ore that we had gathered to try to determine its composition. Between magnetic separation using some lodestone he brought along with him and some flux based tests, he says he's at least somewhat sure of the composition of our metal.
Unfortunately for me, the words he uses are useless by themselves, but they at least give me a pretty decent idea. He said that our steel is about 87% iron, based on the magnetic recovery of particles. The word for the second metal he recovered has no meaning to me in dwarvish or demon, but he refers to it as bonifus gok. For context, gok in dwarvish means iron. Konkur said that bonifus gok is frequently found near iron deposits, or in some amount mixed in with them, but usually in either much higher percentages or much lower percentages than what was within this ore.
The dwarves themselves apply a small amount of bonifus gok to iron when they're steel smelting because it seems to improve durability and corrosion resistance to their metals. Which leads me to my final conclusion based on the color of oxidation from before along with various properties of our steel alloy, bonifus gok is most likely manganese. We've managed to stumble upon an incredibly unlikely ore deposit which just so happens to have iron and manganese at a ratio within the range of mangalloy, or Hadfield steel.
As far as I'm aware, no deposits on earth were ever found with the two metals occurring at a close enough ratio to produce that particular alloy. It's incredibly unlikely, to the degree that I'd suspect any other ore deposits we find even on this island won't contain it in quite the right quantities to reproduce naturally. Thinking about it long term, I hope that other deposits that we find at least have close to the amount of manganese so that we're able to still produce the mangalloy in the amounts we'd like to. To do so, we'll also need to get our hands on some magnets. The issue with that is that magnetic properties outside of lodestone are actually a relatively advanced technology, and without electricity, we're pretty stuck on that front.
I'm also not confident that the manganese ore dust will actually have that different of a density compared to the iron dust, which means I can't just use the same process I want to for glass making. Ultimately, this is quite the problem. If I can at least come up with a way to generate a decent amount of electrical current, I could in theory make some permanent magnets, and that would be the end of the issue. I don't, however, have that, and it'd be a long process to make such a thing, especially given the fact we don't currently have magnets.
The issue being that the process of making somewhat powerful permanent magnets requires already strong magnetic currents and precise control of the cooling of the material that will become a magnet. While I don't doubt my ability to actually produce one given enough time, that same issue of time is actually the problem. Just trading for the right metals to make something like an AlNiCo magnet would be difficult. Aluminum is especially difficult, and I'd likely need to trade for the ore and make the whole aluminum refining process myself. This is ignoring the possibility of producing stronger 'rare earth' magnets, which would be even more impossible given the world's current technology.
Electricity generation would be quite the difficult process to start as well, although I do at least see a path towards making a basic amount of useful electricity. Something as complicated as making an entire electrical grid is far beyond my own abilities however, let alone our current technology. Well, that's something I'll just have to think on for some time, and hope that our existing ore supply sustains us long enough to solve the problem.
While I was thinking through this process, Konkur had been describing some of the intricacies of our island's minerals, which was lost on me. I did get at least some of the basics though. I was already aware that we were a volcanic island, but it seems like we're a bit unique compared to the volcanoes he's familiar with, but we do match the island that Kao Ostark controls within our island chain. The rock composition is quite unique, and doesn't seem to match with his current understanding of what volcanoes produce, but I think I understand why.
It's very likely that our island chain is formed by a mantle hotspot. Considering our distance from the mainland and the fact that the island closest to the mainland is much flatter than our own island leads me to believe that tectonics weren't the cause for our vulcanism. That means the reason our rocks would seem so out of place is that they're likely basaltic, or some other similar dense oceanic rock. Not all the rocks on the island are basalt obviously, and in fact, it seems like only a slim majority of them are based on Konkur's estimates.
That also explains why I need to refine rocks to produce lightstone and glass. If lightstone is lighter in weight and tougher than the darkstone component, it's likely silicon dioxide. Further evidence of this is that it can be used to make glass. Darkstone then, by further deduction is probably the remaining other metal oxides in extremely fine grains. I'd be hard pressed to make lightstone from just any rock on the island though. Much of the rock is so uniform in color that I couldn't just produce lightstone from it with magic. Silicon dioxide occurs in higher concentrations in continental rock rather than oceanic rock, providing me further evidence to reinforce the hotspot theory.
The rocks which I can't easily separate are probably the true basaltic rocks. The two rocks that I've been using, rocks from inside the cave, which seem to have a larger grain size, and the reddish rock with a higher percentage of white grains have been my lightstone source. Those rocks are clearly rarer, and likely involved some unique eruptions in the past to produce them. Unfortunately, the combination of so many metal oxides in a single material makes it hard for us to extract any of the individual metals. Under modern earth conditions, it wouldn't even be worth it to extract the metals, as better metal sources would be available elsewhere on the planet.
We, however, do not quite have that privilege. If we need metals and can't find more metal ore deposits, we'd be stuck trading other lower value goods for them, and while salt and fish are plentiful on our island, the idea of having a permanently agrarian society that trades for what little metal we can get doesn't quite sit right with me. If Taiwan can have a thriving first world economy despite it's lack of natural resources, there should be no reason that we can't also have this. How, exactly, we actually achieve this is something I'll have to think on for some time though.
