Dungeon’s Path

New monsters figured out, Doyle turns to designing his ninth floor. Not that there is much to design. He plans to take Ally’s offhand comment about how he can’t just have one long hallway and run with it. Not a straight hallway, though, rather a slightly curved to the left hallway.

Doyle doesn’t have a particular reason for the direction, but the fact it curves is so adventurers can’t see straight to the end in case of things like a line-of-sight teleportation ability. That or the ability to snipe all the monsters well before they can react. While that might be fun from the adventurers view point, he doesn’t want the floor quite that trivial.

The only other limits to the floor that he plans is that each segment of hallway will be the same size and unlike the sixth floor, none of the segments will be reused. Because, sure, he could create an infinite hallway with incredible ease. He just doesn’t want to this time.

Plus, it makes creating the floor super simple as it just involves digging out a repeating pattern over and over until the space is filled besides for the farm area. Something he might have had a problem with pre-system, but as a dungeon is incredibly simple to manage.

So after some back of the napkin math, Doyle begins to carve out 50 meter long segments which are five meters wide and four meters tall with enough of a curve that at the start of one segment you can only just see the beginning of the next segment. This turns out to be a somewhat aggressive curve when taking into account the fact he managed to fit in a kilometer’s worth of segments, though only after he remembered that orientation of a segment didn’t matter when you can control the direction of gravity. Sure, he could probably have fit more segments in, but 20 thousand square meters worth of tunnels was enough for now.

With all 20 segments carved out and a small bit of time spent connecting them end to end, Doyle uses one of the system assistance features that had been languishing. All it takes is a single metaphorical wave of his hand and the long hallway becomes one long stretch of the plains room pattern matched with a cave room pattern walls and ceiling. Looking at it, the system even automatically interspersed any naturally occurring plants, which happened to include the sunflowers he had just received.

Though Doyle does go back through it and add in spawns of the other various herbs he has. That and three ore spawns. A tin vein at the start, copper near the middle, and an iron ore vein near the exit. There have been more than enough floors since the last mining area. Especially since it had been weeks since the town hadn’t managed to strip the third floor of ore. Good thing there isn’t exactly all that much ore to begin with or the local market would have been flooded.

That, of course, might change once everyone has proper bronze gear so they can start trading it away. For the moment, though, the town seems pretty focused on using their small supply of bronze to create tools and reinforce their homes instead of using it for equipment. Not that Doyle blames them. A proper bronze ax is going to chop down a tree so much faster than a similar pre-system steel ax can. Though with the recent events in the dungeon, they might decide to start equipping at least the core teams with some bronze defensive gear.

Happy with the layout so far with only a small tweak so the sunflowers will tend to grow in circles, Doyle turns towards populating the space. Of course there is the usual melange of ants, horned rabbits, and so on. Enough critters that the place feels alive. Then he turns to his monsters to add a bit of death to the equation.

Sure he plans to include a few udoroots. The problem is that Doyle isn’t certain about the two new fungus varieties. The walls and ceiling might be cave-like, but the ground didn’t exactly scream mushroom infestation. Plus, as Ally had pointed out, he doesn’t currently have any mushrooms that the two monsters would be able to blend in with. They would just be sitting out in the open as strangely large mushrooms and in a hallway like this? Delvers would be targeting them down well before getting close. A big problem when their only form of attack is to bash people.

Doyle sighs to himself, no, he doesn’t get to play with his new toys quite yet. Though to be fair, if he wanted to, they could probably fit into the eighth floor somewhere. Not that he wants to. So instead turns towards the ninth floor and takes an overview of it. The plain terrain seems to have come with tall grass. A useful feature for sneaking kobolds or a pack of wolves.

That or Doyle could just place a ton of cattle again. This is basically their natural habitat is a little narrower. The thought of doing that is quite tempting, but he takes a step back and begins with some kobolds. Not miners, though. The third floor allowed for a race against time to get to the resources before they got all mined out and thus thrown to the whims of the system and how much of the ore decides to drop.

Here on the ninth floor, even those who have made it past the first boss and so can skip the first five floors will take a decent chunk of time to get to the ore. So no, no kobold miners. Instead, Doyle places ten kobolds at each ore vein with three earth mages apiece. Mostly because at some point the town had figured out that drawing upon earth near an ore vein will result in higher damage earth spells and Doyle wasn’t shy about taking advantage of that.

The other seven kobolds in the group would have one leader with a sling and then be split between spear and shield with a mace. All, of course, equipped with leather gear. At this point, the kobolds basically need the stuff to survive any hits at all since their Constitution hasn’t gone up any. Doyle can only shake his head at this and plan for when he has to start equipping them in metal gear. Though thinking about that, he also throws on a few extra silver and a handful of copper since he didn’t feel like making the weapons into loot drops, just the armor.

Next, Doyle sets ten of his new Udoroots to be dispersed through the floor semi-randomly. Of course, he leaves some space between where they can be and the kobolds, but otherwise just hooks them into the plant spawning so they end up placed around similarly to the sunflowers they look like. Sure, he could have personally placed them, but doing it this way means that even someone clever with recognizing patterns should in theory not be able to tell what is a harmless patch of flowers and what is a phrenic menace.

After that comes two packs of wind wolves with 30 members each. While not randomly placed, they are given free range to roam between the kobold camps, with one pack between the tin and copper and the other between the copper and iron. Also, while they don’t end up completely spread out, the packs aren’t all gathered tightly in one clump.

Doyle takes a look at the floor and sighs. While he had placed a few decent sized groups, compared to a kilometer long tunnel, it isn’t really all that much. With that in mind, he doubles the number of Udoroots on the floor. He might as well get as much value out of them as possible. Though that still leaves him with 11,000 points. Sure, he probably wants to keep about 5,400 of that clear for the farm, but that still means 5,600 points to spend.

With a sigh, he starts to place goats and cattle. Doyle hadn’t meant for the floor to be free of them, but he also didn’t want to end up being endless floors of livestock. Still, not much he can do when there is a kilometer of space to fill. So first he takes that 600 and turns it into 150 goats. Simple enough, break that into three large herds in the first section between the tin and copper. They spread out a bit and fill in the space nicely.

After that Doyle decides to get a bit mean and spends 4,500 points on earthen cattle. That meant the second section between the copper and iron ore veins would have 250 of the cattle wandering around. Though that was a little unbalanced so he took 50 of them and placed them with the goats.

That still left 500 points or as Doyle saw it, ten more kobolds. This time, though, instead of groups, it represents ten cowboys. Well, cowgirls, seeing as the ladies are the ones more suited for using Qi. Not that he has managed to figure out how to get them to use Qi yet, but since there are already mages, it can’t be too hard. Anyway, ten kobolds dispersed through the big herd of earthen cattle to provide just that little extra oomph. They get to wear full leather of course, and wield a spear and a sling.

Bows might be powerful weapons, but Doyle doesn’t want to mess around with getting the kobolds competent with them quite yet. That done, he had exactly 5,600 points still reserved to fill up the farm. Or in other words, enough to have the entire floor’s population twice over. Maybe he could have optimized it more, but at this point the behind-the-scenes stuff vastly outnumbers the actual floor since he can have them at a tenth of the cost.

Though Doyle can definitely see there being a point where at least the heavy hitters of the floor end up being just in reserve instead of in a farm area. Sure, the farm area allows them to grow up quicker and such. However, if they aren’t in a farm zone, they can be a part of the main floor’s strength if needed. A useful thing if someone comes along with less than upright intentions towards his dungeon.

Doyle shakes his core, that all is for the future. If he really wants to have all the points, he is going to have to up his Intelligence score by a good bit. Especially since he can see some of the later monster options costing an arm and a leg. Even right now where comparatively the monsters are of lower level, he still has a good number of them in the hundreds of points. Just trying to imagine how much one of his world’s mythical monsters would cost is enough to make him feel poor.

Though that does bring up a question and so Doyle turns to Ally. ‘Heyo, finished the ninth floor and after some fluff gathering came up with a question. I know that the gods and such were soul memories or what have you, but what about all the mythical monsters we have? Dragons and such I already know are a thing because of our conversation when I picked the kobolds, but there are so many other mythical beasts out there.’

Ally laughs, ‘Yes and no. Don’t expect to be getting a dragon in your dungeon anytime soon, or ever. I’m sure enough of those myths also go over how intelligent those beasts can be? Well, while not all of them are, many so-called mythical beasts are sapient. You can however get lesser versions of them because part of what makes them mythical is that they grew into their sapience instead of just having it.

‘Sure, every once in a while a dragon couple will manage to have a kid and that kid will start as a dragon. Most of the time, stuff like dragons are the result of a monster growing and purifying their blood until they become some kind of peak existence. Dragons just happen to be the best known of the mythical beasts because on any planet where one exists you generally can’t throw a rock without hitting some half-dragon something or other.

‘You actually have a decent example of this already, though more on the minor side of things. Don’t forget you have the lesser shadow wolves. The second that “lesser” part gets dropped from the name, you have a fully sapient wolf on your hands.’