I got some interesting results testing the sulfide, oxide, and metal with each of the three strong acids we have over the course of six days. The sulfide seemed inert in all three, the oxide reacted with both sulfuric and nitric acid, but was inert in hydrochloric acid, and the metal itself was slightly reactive in sulfuric and hydrochloric, but was fairly reactive in nitric acid. Initially, I was thinking of trying to proceed by using acid to try to dissolve the metal out of potential minerals, but given it's low reactivity, it might be easier to attempt to dissolve away most of the rest of the mineral, and use other methods to try to recover any trace amounts found in the rock.

Thankfully, I did notice a very useful property in the sulfide. It's hydrophobic. Meaning if we first crush the mineral, then acid treat it, we might be able to use a froth separator to pull the remaining sulfide out of the remaining mineral slurry if it's present in it. Of course, all that is contingent on there being any of the sulfide trapped in the nearby rocks where we find mana crystals. Since I'm waiting for both mana crystal transport containers and nitroglycerin to be made anyway, now is as good of a time as any to go do that research.

I figured that the most recent deposit was as good of a place to start as any, and decided to start using a smaller volume of tectonic sense as I went through the smaller tunnels connecting the bubbles of mana crystals. When I use a smaller area, I'm able to get a more detailed picture of what I'm looking at, mostly because I'm not as overwhelmed. It's comparable to if someone held up four different colored rocks in front of me and asked me their colors, versus asking me what the four center rocks were colored in a large pile of rocks, when I've only gotten to look at both images for a second.

What I found was that, actually, there was a small amount of the sulfide in the rock between bubbles. Not a lot, but a little. The closer you get to a bubble, the less there is. It took quite some time to find evidence of it though. It's in tiny clusters embedded in the rock that I only got lucky that one of our tunnels had a small amount of it exposed. Since we weren't looking for it before, we went right by it, and just continued working.

Once I got a sense for what it responded like in tectonic sense, which felt something like an out of focus picture of the area around it, not really presenting an image of itself at all, I was able to find more tiny pockets of it, but only when I used the low volume tectonic sense. What I also found after 30 days of scoping out the tunnels was that the material basically disappears just beyond the furthest bubble in any direction within this deposit.

I also can't really put a hard number on how much crystal material is trapped in the nearby rocks that we haven't used. If it's only the visible deposits that I could find, then it's probably on the order of about half as much material as was contained within the crystals themselves. However, I'd expect that there is probably more of the material much smaller than I can see that we can recover, but the exact recoverable amount will require additional testing, and potentially a froth separator, which would again require additional oils, likely in the form of fish oil.

I found mixed results in the initial recovery of more of the sulfide mineral from rock samples between the crystal deposits. Without tectonic sense, it'd be very hard to locate the small pockets that are visibly valuable, and even with it it's a pain. One one hand, there is actually an interesting technique that can be utilized by stoneshapers to recover deposits that gave me a little insight into how stoneshaping is working.

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If I try to move rock with stoneshaping, for the most part, everything moves. However, if I focus down to smaller and smaller areas, some grains within the rock don't move with the rest of the bulk. For deposits of the sulfide an inch or so in size, it's fairly easy to just move the surrounding rock away. I didn't even have to try to get very close, I just included the edges of the sulfide in with what I was trying to stoneshape, and the other stone particles moved away, leaving the sulfide chunk.

As long as less than about half of a particular chunk of sulfide's surface was moving, it'd get left behind. So if you get very good at finely controlling your stoneshaping, you could remove the other material while leaving behind the valuables. Of course, that scale of manual separation would be an absolute nightmare to try to implement for real recovery of material. Some other particles would also be left behind during the process, which leads me to further think that only certain materials are actually considered stone for the purposes of stoneshaping, probably microcrystalline quartz, and potentially alumina, among others.

Powdering, acid treating, then froth separation basically seems like our only option if we want to recover a larger amount of the stuff. We currently have a large surplus of hydrochloric acid production which we've been dumping directly into the ocean to get rid of as we don't have many uses for most of it. My current plan is to have a few new ball mills made to begin testing this whole process out. I spent four days doing initial testing myself on the matter, and while I could use pulverize to break the rock down a small amount, it only goes down to about a sand consistency, and we really need powder for this to be as effective as I'd like.

Since most of the machining lines were already built, and many of the components were kept on hand as spares, getting a few new stirred ball mills built only took 9 days. From there, however, I had quite a long path ahead of me. First, I took a day figuring out how much acid to use to treat a given volume of rock powder. I purposefully added in an extra amount of our sulfide, just so that I knew there was some present for testing purposes.

After five days of tinkering with hydrochloric acid on this, I moved on to the next step, floatation separation. To start, I simply washed the remaining dust in water a few times, to try to remove leftover acid from the surface. Then, I tried out a few different designs for floatation separators. The idea is pretty straightforward, by blowing air bubbles up through the water, the hydrophobic materials will catch a ride on the air bubbles to the surface, while non-hydrophobic materials will fall down.

In practice, however, it's generally not enough that the material is hydrophobic, because it's also quite dense. So, oils of some kind are added to help act as a rising agent that collects those small particles along with the air, and drag them along with their higher viscosity. Then, you just skim the surface material to collect concentrated material. You might need to do this a few times before you really get a pure output, however.

What I found was that it's not even just enough that the material is hydrophobic, but you do actually need a good design for the floatation cell. Steady air bubbles and a somewhat narrow ratio of oil to sulfide were both conditions I found needed to be fine tuned to actually allow separation to occur. Thankfully, we had enough leather for me to make low pressure pistons to actually compress the air down to bubble through the floatation cell for testing.

All in all, the first floatation cell design that worked took me 49 days to reach, with another 13 days being used to fine tune it. While I'd like to move on to the next step right now in this process, we're now only a few days from the date I set for launching the explosive barge, so this project will have to go on hold for a bit. We're also nearing completion on the two mana-crystal related barrels I'd requested using zinc-fluorite, so I should be able to transport the 2-foot crystal shortly after testing the barge. Then I'll have the fluorite workers also start making the next size barrel for the five-foot crystal, while the new mana crystal begins growing. This research will slow down in the meantime while I only work in the free-time I can find intermediately.

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