She can, but it will go slower. Standard construction ha a workshop total of 6, superior construction has a workshop total of 9. Add three for the finesse requirements, and the however much time value of work you are trying to do per casting.
The craft magi helping you are recently out of apprenticeship with effective finesse scores from 4 to 7.
A mystic tower is 80 feet high, this one was initially for early housing of the work crews so it has 8' ceilings, meaning ten floors.
Do you want the hunting lodge to be in the direction of the town as the crow flies (which there is a peak in between) or to the north where there is a lower rise?
I'm unsure what you mean by "low hills" in this context- you are placing your garden on a gentle slope which, as you move to the south west becomes steeper until it becomes a mountain, with the peak of the mountain 1.3 miles from your garden.
You also get a reply from your superiors- the town is to remain unmolested- it is a center for regional governance and the town leaders have already been "handled" to ensure nobody will be heading into the valley the covenant is in.
Within a day you can tell what construction rates are looking like- each of the craft mages you have been lent can effect up to 100,000 cubic feet of stone in a casting, doing a days work for a standard laborer when it comes to craft work, and can move somewhat less than this- 100 cubic feet at a time with concentration duration. The seven magi under ideal conditions could then excavate 700 cubic feet every 5 minutes. It is decided to start with the outer projects so the doors of the mystic tunnel do not slow this down, and they can excavate a stone corridor of 8 foot height and 4 foot width at an initial rate of 20 feet in 5 minutes, though as the blocks have to be transported further through the tunnels this slows down as the stone has a maximum movement rate of 100 paces per diameter with the spells they have learned. When the tunnel length becomes significant they will work in shifts and divide their attention between the two tunnels, also needing time to travel back to the work site from the entrance of each tunnel, meaning you end up with a final production rate of 15 feet per hour per tunnel, working 24 hours a day. The short tunnel from your sanctum to the tower is completed then in 3 1/2 days, with seven days for the tunnel to the lodge...
This does not take into account your own actions during this time, and the tunnels are considered to be standard construction.
Balaurega can reliably hit a 15 (finesse 10+2+1 terram, Int 3) and if she rolls a three or better hits an 18. So that's superior quality, either 1 month or 1 season's work per casting. (9 +3 magical crafting +3 month's labor or +6 season's labor)
ReTe spont is 48+roll, so level 25 reliably: Stone – Base 3, Touch +1, Mom, Part +1, Size +4 – 10,000 cubic paces per casting.
PeTe spont is 32+roll, so level 15: Stone – Base 4, Touch +1, Mom, Part +1, Size +1 – 10 cubic paces per casting.
Unless the craft mages aren't able to do so, Balaurega will have them use Perdo on the tunnels instead of Rego. They can make basic holes, then she will come behind them and craft them into actual tunnels of high-quality construction. She would like to use this strategy for all the subterranean work, if their PeTe is good enough.
She wants the hunting lodge to be placed so that if someone comes into this area from the town, that's the first thing they'll encounter. Is that the only path into the valley that doesn't require climbing over mountains?
Regarding her laboratory, I didn't know about the slope; I was trying to say that she found a spot with hills, or made some hills, just to create a bit of separation around her laboratory. She will be orchestrating improvements later, for now it's just setting aside an outside area and making a habitable cave. With your description, she will just create a bit of a rise along the northeast edge of a wide area that she's setting aside. (She's going for Natural Environment and Idyllic Surroundings).
At 1/4 mile separation you will get a natural environment more easily by not modifying the terrain than by trying to create barriers- that is roughly 4 football fields if you are American.
hey will remove stone initially to construct the lodge with, their perdo is not as good and they will need to use spontaneous spells for it, giving an effective spell level of 5 and causing fatigue from casting (or a spell level of 3 with no fatigue)- destroying stone is a base 4, range touch raises it to 5, they can get an extra magnitude about half the time to handle 10 cubic feet at a time instead of 1, but they still need to rest after casting for a minute or 2 before casting again. Assuming they switch positions after casting this gives you an average of 5.5 cubic feet every 2.14 actions, or 256 cubic feet per day, or 8 feet of tunnel per day, meaning a 1/4 mile tunnel would take 164 days working 10 hour days.
Or you ca let them handle the tunnels while you take on a different aspect of the construction which requires higher quality work...
You will need to improvise the spell as you do not have one prepared. You have a ReTe casting total of 43+aura (5) for a total of 48, fatiguing casting (requiring rest between castings) would be this plus a die roll divided by 2, meaning a total of 25 80% of the time, achieving 30 5% of the time, 20 9% of the time and botching 1% of the time. Or you can use fatigueless casting with no wait between casting and getting level 5 consistently (FYI, looking through your earlier casting totals you do not have access to props, since you have not trained in urban magic). Level 5 allows you to craft 1cu.ft blocks at one every 6 seconds, at level 20 you can craft 1000 cubic ft blocks, 10,000 cu ft at 25 and 100,000 cu ft at level 30. Ceremonial casting will add 2 to your total, bringing your safe casting to level 10 allowing you to work 10cu ft blocks every 30 minutes, while using it to boost fatiguing spont. magic would adjust percentages by roughly 20% at a cost of an hour and a half per casting.
The hunting lodge is currently unspecified in terms of size...
I thought anyone could use props, sorry. Anyway, don't need ceremonial for this.
Base Ind for stone is a cubic pace, not foot. 10,000 cubic paces at 25 is with target part, so with target ind that would be 100,000 (but she's not going that big).
Is there an issue with working from blocks that are separate objects? It's unclear to me whether Rego can join them together; or if the spell has to target Group to build one building from the blocks coming from the tunnels. If Group, then a level 25 will only be 1000 cubic paces.
Her goal with the hunting lodge is for it to appear "normal", so size will just be as big as it can be within acceptable bounds of what would be used by high nobles. How does size equate to occupant capacity?
She will probably aim at the equivalent of a 21 pace cube, which will take either one or two castings.
When the group question is answered I can just make a roll or two.
working stone with touch range and individual is base 4, and yes it is paces, not feet, so that does give you some more to work with (note: calculations above were based on base individual of 1 cu ft, so that would be 9x the speed listed.)
Craft magic can reshape rock but cannot merge separate rocks, and handling multiple rocks in one spell requires target:group. the blocks produce by the craft mage excavation are 2700 cubic feet (100 cubic paces) apiece. Minimum thickness for load bearing masonry is 1 ft, so that allows 2700 sq ft of wall per block used. This also means both tunnels are completed in a day. non-loadbearing stone (for example roofs) can be as little as 6 inches thick (numbers taken from an online building code). Rolls are required for casting since there is a botch possibility.
looking at your rolls I'm not sure how you entered twilight- for 1(which you didn't realize) you have now been working in this aura long enough to not be rolling botch dice for it, so you only have 1 botch die. Secondly you only have to roll for twilight when you take two warping, and you take 1 warping per botch...
but on your botch check you rolled no 10s, so you had no botches.
You may have had the spell levels for size+3, but the blocks you were working with that had been excavated were only size +2, with group target you can target 10 of them, and you can use one size level to bring that up to 100, when there are 100, which would mean starting relatively late in the day...
re the twilight, I misread the botch result, sorry.
re the blocks, she will just wait until there are enough of them - in fact waiting until the tunnel from the tower to the hunting lodge is done, otherwise the lodge would just get in the way.
re: props- anyone can use them, not everyone will have them. You would need to go out and acquire them before you can use them and list them in your inventory, including which arts they are for, not just present them as part of a roll out of nowhere. Most magi are not even aware of their existance.
regarding the blocks- the first ones will be produced the fastest, but the 1/2 mile tunnel will produce 92,400 cubic feet (yes feet) of stone, with each block being 2700 cubic feet (100 cubic paces), so the tunnel will only produce 34 blocks and some rubble.
92400 cubic feet is a 45 foot cube of solid rock; so constructing a building from that amount of stone is probably a sufficiently large structure since it obviously won't be solid; but not sure how you're translating physical size to occupant capacity.
it's a combination of size and quality, and judgement like anything in ars magica:
a tower on p. 71 of covenants holds 100 points of inhabitants-
from fortifications a small tower is 4 stories high with 1-2 rooms per floor, which is the same height as a standard tower for a tower keep, which also describes the largest towers as being 80 ft high and 53 feet in diameter (though at the base 32 of those feet are the walls themselves) which means the largest tower is 10 floors with a 21 foot diameter floor. The small towers are, from the description 4 floors with probably 15 foot diameter, which means the largest tower is 3140 sq ft of space while the smallest is about 706 sq ft- the smallest tower should hold 50 points of inhabitants while the large tower should hold 200, which puts the small tower at a bit over 14sq ft per point of inhabitants, while the larger one is 15 sq ft per point of inhabitants. The mystic tower has a 30 diameter base, is 50 foot high meaning it would have 7068 sq ft of space, which is essentially the larger tower x10, so it is stupendously sized, and of flawless quality, so it can hold 10,000 pts of inhabitant. Of course labs have a flat sq ft requirement separate from this...
I do want to track resource usage however and how much stone has been used or remains, as well as for my own records get an idea of how many occupant point are used or remain, so I would appreciate the questions I ask being answered instead of dismissed.
Sorry, didn't mean to dismiss the question, didn't realize I wasn't answering it clearly - the hunting lodge is built from whatever material is provided from the tunnel to it. Not sure how 92400 cubic feet of solid stone translates to size of the actual constructed building. I was thinking of something like this: https://great-castles.com/barden.html
The spare blocks (if any) will be arranged in a circle about 10 paces out from the main tower.
Assuming the tunnel to the lab and tannery/refuse is of a similar length, from the same amount will build the lab, then use whatever is left to make a normal-sized tannery.
92,400 cubic feet of stone with 1 foot thick walls would be 92,400 sq ft of wall, except that you also have floors and roof with 1/2 the thickness. So if you were to have a three story manor house with 10 foot high levels at 200 feet by 200 feet that would use 88000 cubic feet of stone and have 120,000 sq ft of space between the three levels.
A typical manor house or hunting lodge appears to be about 10,000 sq ft, so this would qualify as a stupendously large manor house. Barden, by comparison, appears to be a small manor/hunting lodge of around 5,000 sq ft. (est)
well, the goal is not to attract too much attention, so we will go smaller. 100 ft x 50 ft and three levels above ground, 2 levels below ground, so 100x50x2 (long wall) + 50x50x2 (short wall) + 100x50x(.5)x2 (ceiling/floor) using 17500 cubic feet of stone and giving 25,000 sq ft of space, if my math is right.
Let the tannery be 50x50 and only one story with one story of basement, so 20x50x4 (walls) + 50x50 (ceiling/floor) is 6500 cubic feet of stone.
50ft tall would be 5 floors, not 2. 10 foot floors would make the walls 20 feet high above ground- below you are excavating not adding. Total stone used for construction would be 18,500 cubic feet (I had an error in my spreadsheet before, I only counted the walls of the first floor) and you have excavated 150,000 cu ft.
FYI when you finish the project if there is leftover stone you can let the house know and they will haul it away for storage or sale. Istrian stone is nearly as valuable as marble...