Elvenar Woodelves – Day 20 [61%]

So, we’re in day 20 of Elvenar Woodelves chapter (see previous day at Elvenar Woodelves – Day 19). We keep squeaking by as mana storage is permanently empty. But refined goods supply is ramping up and we are able to continue with our Forest Fabrications upgrade program. Have we finally turned the corner? No, not really, not yet. But we might soon, right? Perhaps. Or perhaps not…

City changes

The Woodelves settlement continues to expand and evolve – it is now 10Lx/6/6/4 vs yesterday’s 11Lx/3/4/3. We’ve dropped one of the L1 Forest Fabrications, but we more than made up for that with upgrades. Now all target FFs except one are upgraded to L2. This is excellent news! So tomorrow we will finish all L2 upgrades for FFs, and start with the L3 upgrades. And as you may recall, this is where we will stop with our 8L3/9/9/6 target. We’re getting close!

On Grafting Sites we have also had a good progress, and now we’re two-thirds there at 6/6/4. We already have quite decent production of refined goods, and will ramp it up by another 50%. And once we have enough mana tears for the last of the GS, then we can switch to ghosts/chimes/sprouts production in the FFs, and our mana crunch will abate.

Mana crunch continues

Speaking of mana crunch – it is real. Today was not pretty at all, we were constantly running mana down to nothing and idling a few fabrications in the meantime. Luckily, we had to do upgrades anyway (and had resources to do so), so most of the FFs that would be idle were, in fact, busy upgrading. So it worked mostly fine. I take full credit for perfectly planning it that way (/sarcasm 😉 )

And it seems that we’re passing through the tightest spot in the chapter. There is about 1 day worth of mana tears production left, and construction/upgrades are already getting constrained by builders availability rather than mana tears availability. Well, doing mostly FF upgrades, that is, but those need to be done as well.

Also, as much as I didn’t want to spend 20K of mana, I activated one of the research expansions, and moved one of the Willows there. Now, there is not much blocking final settlement build until the last moment!

In a day or two we should finish mana tears production, and it should be smooth sailing from there on. We just need to hold on…

Elvenar Woodelves progress

Still managed to hold keep KP inflow low today, so we’ve down to 62 KP a day average. This is almost exactly as our original projection! But more KP is coming soon, and we’re running out of KP sinks in the research tree. In fact, only about 40KP buffer left on City Expansion 38, that’s it:

Well, there is also 20KP that KP bar can hold with Inspired Meditation spell. So about 60KP total. That’s 1-1.5 days of very low KP acquisition. Not a lot of leeway…

Bottom line, tomorrow I will need to activate Dryad Promotion research. That’s 32.5K worth of mana, but I have to do it to open 70+55 = 125KP sinks. That should be enough to wrap up mana tears production and finally put our mana production back into surplus territory. And we need to get there ASAP as subsequent research is expensive in mana costs. Even if we use some portal profits to smooth lack of settlement goods, we need mana to proceed.

So the timing might be just right for that. It will be really close, but we should be able to pull it off. One or two more days and we should be cruising until the end of the chapter! Or not 😉 ETAs still look pretty good, let’s see if we can manage to squeeze by this tight spot. Stay tuned!

Crystal Tournament – recovery and preparation

Recovery mode is still on from the tournament perspective. Not much to report here except that I snatched another Unleashed Unit Upgrade from the Magic Academy! Really happy about that, the UUU turns out to be the crucial resource for tournaments, and I need to get then at least once a week on average.

Apart from that we dropped somewhat in terms of supplies due to research activation and upgrades, but still have loads. Coins dropped a lot due to research expansion placement at 8.5mm, but we don’t really need those for tournament. And I just collected all the stale coins from my residences to get a sizable boost – before that I was getting by with just collecting neighborhood help.

About 80 Elder Treants are in the inventory, overall things are going smoothly.