Doors and Traps

The workshop is a small, circular room, about eight foot across. The walls are lined with three distinct crafting areas. Directly across from you, a workbench comprising of a tiny forge, intricate tools and a small magical array informs your perception that it's an Item Workbench. To your left, a much flatter bench with larger tools, boxes of nails and some clamps is a Furnishings Workbench. To your right, finer tools and a small drawer with shelves labelled “Sprokets”, “Doohicks”, “Things” and “Miscellaneous” apparently come together to create the Traps Workbench.

You move to the Furnishings bench first and, sure enough, you find a menu which lets you place an order for the seven iron bar doors you will need for your pit and jail. It's expensive in terms of Scrap Ore, but you have enough for now. One of your goblins seems to materialise at your side and silently takes up tools at the table.

You then cross the room to the traps table. Opening the menu, you wince at the costs of some of the traps. Plenty of them need a combination of stone, which you just spent; scrap, which you just spent; or wood, which you don't have. Plenty others need things you haven't a clue how you'd make, like 'Poison Element'. Still, you have enough materials to request a pitfall trap, albeit not one with anything at the bottom and not one that's very deep. Unlike your furnishings, you're also prompted to choose a location for your trap. After some deliberation, you opt to place it just inside your entranceway, hopefully just far enough in to catch a hero expecting a trapped entrance to let their guard down. As you place it, you get another popup.

Use Soul Crystal, 33 as Trap Control?

Well, you don't know what that means, but it's the first you've seen mention of the Soul Crystal since you got it from the incompetent beastmaster, so you tap accept. While this doesn't trigger a popup, it does trigger a floating message to briefly appear.

Soul Crystal, 33 partially used. Now Soul Crystal, 28

Well I still don't know what that does, but apparently I can do it repeatedly? That's good to know, I guess.

You now take a moment to catch your breath, your creative frenzy having quite overtaken you. Echoing from all around you is the sound of work – bangs and scrapes sound from down the corridor, and in the workshop the goblins move with a disconcerting level of competence. Something about your minions getting on with your plans feels very right, you decide.

You head out into the pool room, passing Feathers working on the tunnel to what will be your farm, and seeing the last goblin male hammering at the passage down to your prison. He and the kobold working on the arena are talking quietly to each other as you enter, and although they glance at you as you enter, they don't stop.

Unfortunately, you don't speak whatever language they do.

Maybe you should learn sometime?

You settle yourself in next to the kobold and begin to help. For now, it's all you can really do.

The repetitive motions are old hat to you by now, and although this progress bar is BIG, with so many people working on, effectively, one giant improvement, it passed quickly enough. It wouldn't be ready today, and likely not tomorrow. But hopefully, it would be ready in time.