The design team had indeed been working on new toys for the residents of Forest Grove and their allies. Most of them were unrelated to the topics that Wolfe had to talk about, but they had created a magic-powered mining tool intended to help the villages expand their dens.
Most of them had no Witches or other Magic users among them, so their villages had been dug entirely by hand and expanded over the course of years.
That was not optimal for population growth and really limited how much they could do with the space they had.
Some of them had improvised decent equipment for mining out of what they had taken from the army, but the utility of that equipment was still very limited, and Ella had found a plan in one of the design books that Myrrh Coven had traded to them which would be perfect not only for the villages but for Wolfe's plan to create a subterranean road network.