Lake Kakapopo has, in recent years, become far more important to the Riewaye people than previously. Previously its existence was simply a nice little fact, very little trade occurred and the people who gathered salt were primitive and unable to make much of a difference in Riewaye society. That was from the time of the Late Confederation all the way until even the Post-Apocalyptic Era. Yet with the introduction of horses and the idea to ride them, and with that idea having spread around the Droga region within only a few years of its being brought to the northern edges of the Golden Sea, the steppelands between the Droga Valley and Lake Kakapopo have truly opened up for settlement. For the first few decades it was a solely pastoral lifestyle, as the irrigation techniques of the Droga could not be applied to the riverless steppelands, but as time progressed the ways of farming dry land have come back to the agrarian Riewaye, who lost the techniques as the Droga and the advancement of irrigation technologies became dominant. Planting crops with more space so that each individual plant can absorb more moisture from the soil (the rainfall throughout much of the steppe is somewhere around fifteen to twenty inches every year on average), little tilling of soil, leaving fields fallow, etc., have all been put into practice in the rich black soils of the Kakapopo-Droga Steppe.

All so that the settlements on the lakeside can be connected to the Droga and prosper.

The lake is shallow, at its deepest point it is only about as deep as five men are tall, and throughout the entirety of the useful region it is more than shallow enough to allow salt harvesters to stand in the water and fill buckets up with salt... and buckets they sure do fill.

The lake, pink with the salt-loving organisms that call it home, has only a few varieties of fish, and they are much smaller than would otherwise be expected from such a large body of water. The lake can be fished for enough food to supply the villages on the shore, and it's easy enough to find enough salt to preserve the fish with, and this, coupled with crops imported from the settlements further form the lake and meat from hunted animals, allows the salt harvesting people to supply themselves.

The main issue is the salinity of the water. Any cut or wound or really even just pure exposure of skin to the water is enough to begin to eat away at your flesh, and this was a very difficult thing to deal with in early years of colonization. Salt production was slow as men and to take their time, could not stay out for long, and overall didn't quite like the idea of having their bodies dissolved away ever so slightly in the lake.

Then it was discovered the covering your legs with a layer of fat, whether from an animal or a plant, would keep the salt away, and since then production has skyrocketed.

The lakeside is still being colonized, though, and it will be many generations until the Riewaye people are comfortable enough to settle and take full control of Lake Kakapopo. But despite the rather sparse settlement thus far the fact of the matter remains that any chiefdom that controls the salt trade would quickly become the wealthiest of the Riewaye states...