ALL NOVEL What About the Hills – Chapter 47
Doyle glances over his goat farm and nods. It turned out exactly how he wanted it, if a little opulent. He has one last thing to do in the room. While he had said he would wait to spawn monsters Doyle still places down a breeding pair of goats. As with the rabbits the goats will need some time to become real enough to have kids so he wanted to get them started on that.
Doyle creates a couple of cubes in his core room and clacks them together. He only has two more rooms to design. Of course that is ignoring that those two rooms are almost the same amount of space as the rest of the rooms on this plus the first floor. He counted! The two huge rooms could hold 288 small rooms worth of space while everything else can hold 299. Just 11 small rooms difference.
The simple way would be to just punch a bunch of depressions and hills in it and then cover it in clover. He wasn’t going to do that, of course. After he considers the two rooms as a whole, what he comes up with is crib notes off of his two large rooms. Not completely, of course.
Well, at least not for the second huge room. The first huge room gets a double dose of boulder fun. To make corridors about four small rooms wide he places down two columns of boulders like in the large rooms. The biggest difference is he doesn’t make the piles go all the way to the ceiling. This will allow the adventurers to climb over the barriers if they desired to.
He couldn’t leave it at that, though. While it was somewhat of a theme on this floor, he didn’t just want to make rooms broken into corridors. After he looked the entire floor over, it hit him. First, he sunk all the other rooms down as much as he could without touching the outer edge of his territory. This pushed them down about two stories, which was just enough for his plan.
Back in the first huge room, Doyle stretches the ceiling back up to previous height. From there he changed the flat terrain into upward ramps with the boulder piles as the borders and even grew them higher. Now instead of just a stack of stones, the rocks form more of a cliff but not enough.
Not for Doyle, at least. To fix this he fills in the gaps created by his boulders, then smoothes out any excessive protrusions. Now happy that it looks like a cliff and not just a hodge podge of loosely piled stones, he repeats it with the second line of boulders. This brings the exit of the room back in line with where the original floor was at.
Doyle just puts down one extra addition. He places even more boulders on top of each cliff face. Just a single file line of them so that if he puts kobolds in the room, they have something to hide behind. Not quite the planned room of hills, but close enough. He still isn’t done with it.
He wants to leave the cliffs as bare rock but, and he sighs, Doyle needs to put down his dirt and clover. ‘I really need more variety. The clover looks nice, but being the only groundcover makes it dull.’ Not much he can do about it at the moment, so instead he plants a couple olive trees at the ends of the two boulder cliffs. Not that a three meter drop is all that exciting, but it will prevent the weaker sorts from just passing through the room in a straight line.
Another glance over the room frustrates him though as he realized a mistake in his design. In the large rooms the hollowed out boulder piles had created the nesting ground for his lizards, and here he was filling it all in. Now instead of having some naturally formed areas Doyle has to go through and dig out the areas he wants the lizards to live in individually.
This final bit is enough though, and Doyle is happy with the design. To wrap up the first huge room, a sizeable collection of lights are placed in the lower left corner of the ceiling. Now the boulders throw a shadow behind them for things to hide in.
Tired of the nonstop creation, Doyle turns his attention back to his first floor. Just in time to see another group of adventurers turn around after the vine room. The fact that a couple of kobolds with daggers are hiding in there is well known at this point. This doesn’t make it any easier for groups without a spotter. Sadly for them, the person best suited for teaching others that skill is off gallivanting in the forest.
While the kobolds aren’t killing people, their sneak attacks are enough to injure someone and battle ready healers are another one of those rare birds in the settlement. Not from a lack of instructors this time. There just aren’t enough people in the group who want to learn healing and go out and do combat. Most are just fine staying safe while earning paltry amounts of experience from healing. Even if the skill growth is slow without stress, they feel threatened by the dungeon in a way the combat types don’t.
Doyle actually gets lost in watching the never-ending stream of invaders for a while. Some groups don’t even attempt to enter the vine room, being fine with just killing six goats. The realization that those groups aren’t in it to dive his dungeon but rather just harvest food finally drags him out of the experience. To see his first floor work like clockwork as the adventurers and harvesters enter and leave had put him in a Zen-like state.
‘I have to be careful about that. Sure later on being able to zonk out might be nice to pass the time but I have a floor to build. Just one more huge room to design and I can place monsters down.’
Mentally, he slaps himself in the face and goes to the last huge room. The place is a giant blank canvas and all he has to do is fill it. Boulders to funnel people around is sort of the theme for this floor, and he plans to do more with it here. He doesn’t however want to force people to travel through the entire room. Instead, Doyle wants to tempt them to try and full clear it with herbs placed towards the back of the room.
He needs more space. Doyle raises the roof and lowers the floor a couple stories each. This gives him the biggest possible space to work with. ‘Now how to get them down from the entrance to the room which is six meters up? I could just raise the floor up, but do I want to? This room is going to be another kobold hang out so some more trappings of a civilization of sorts would be nice. What do I have available?’
Doyle goes over his ever growing database of patterns and settles on wood and leather. First, he puts down two pillars made of tree trunks that rise up to the entrance. A crosspiece is connected to them with leather bindings. Then from the entrance he lays out a floor of rough planks, using more strips of leather to weave them together.
It looks secure, but he isn’t quite sure how much it can support. To answer that question, Doyle creates blocks of stone on the platform until it breaks. A little too soon for his taste, so he thickens the plants and crosspiece. Another round of testing and Doyle is much happier with the results. The planks should be able to hold a party of six even if a couple have metal armor on. Too many more at once or a few too many tanks though and crash boom bang, they get an express trip to the ground floor. Happy with the platform, Doyle makes a couple spiral staircases, one to each side.
Now that the adventurers can make it to the floor, Doyle is back where he started. Wondering what he should fill the floor with. He basically wants the room cut in pieces. It should be a minor hassle to get to the back half of the room, as well as having a lot of hilly terrain. To start, he creates a smattering of boulders throughout the room to mark where he might put a rise.
That done though, he realizes there isn’t all that much space. Now there is a good 36 or so meters a side to the room but he can’t really do any sweeping vistas with that. Just a tad defeated, Doyle decides that maybe he should follow the type of design he used in the first huge room. Not entirely though, as an alternative plan forms in his head.
Doyles rises the back third of the room up two stories and unlike the last room this is more of a sheer cliff face. Someone can work their way up if they want, but it won’t be fun for those wearing restrictive clothing or armor.
For the front two thirds of the room Doyle raises up a strip of land a single story. This time the sides are a more gentle slope. Not really meant to stop people, but discourage those with bad balance or a pack full from running around. With that, all he needs to add is the finishing touches. Dirt and clover goes down easy enough but the thing he really wants requires him to ask Ally a couple questions.
Doyle’s view shifts to her room, where he finds her laying back on the stone bed. A quick glance outside is enough to realize the time is now past midnight, and so of course no one is currently traipsing through his place. ‘Hey, Ally. I have a question for you.’
Ally stretches out and yawns, ‘huh? A question? Sure, what do you want to know? Not exactly much to distract me at the moment.’
With an awkward laugh Doyle starts with something he just realized, ‘how would you like me to cover your bed and chair with a cushion. I do have a pattern for cloth after all.’
Ally stands up and rolls her shoulders, ‘that would be nice. The stone isn’t bad as my connection to you makes it so it can’t hurt me. However actual comfort would be nice.’
Doyle whips up a quick set of padding and set of sheets. That out of the way he gets down to what he originally wanted to ask. ‘How can I plant some trees? I don’t have the pattern for them, but I do have the olive tree. It is just I don’t want to fill a room with them and I do have a more generic wood pattern. My idea didn’t pan out as despite being a huge room it isn’t enough.’
Ally rubs the bridge of her nose, ‘show me your database. Actually, just project it on my wall here so I can keep track of what we have available.’
A decent idea, so Doyle sets up a view of this in her room. Through this screen he sets up on another wall. He is sure there will be more things to display, so organizing them now isn’t a terrible idea.
{Dungeon Patterns: goat lv10, material patterns lv7, food patterns lv6, shrubbery lv6, clothes lv5, kobold lv5, armor patterns lv5, axe beak lv5, assassin vine lv4, weapon patterns lv4, vines lv2, clover lv2, horned rabbits lv2, prey insects lv2, Basic Rooms lv5, horned lizard lv1
Weapon Patterns: axe lv4, sword lv3, dagger lv2, bow lv2, arrow lv2, mace lv2, staff lv1, wand lv1
Armor Patterns: greaves lv5, boots lv4, tunic lv3, helmet lv3, shield lv2, cloak lv1, gauntlets lv1
Material Patterns: dungeon soil lv5, leather lv5, cloth lv5, Earth standard air mix lv2, volcanic rock lv2, metal patterns lv2, wood lv2, wax lv1
Metal Patterns: copper lv2, tin lv2, iron lv1
Food Patterns: herb patterns lv6, olive lv3, bread lv1, salt lv2, sugar lv1, wheat lv1, lemon lv1, strawberry lv1
Herb Patterns: sage lv6, aloe lv5, pepper lv2, mint lv1, rosemary lv1, tea lv1, lavender lv1, peppermint lv1}
Ally reads through what they have available and nods. ‘Okay, it looks like some of your food patterns are leveling up. That is good and we should see them grow once more people become able to harvest them. As for your question though, I think you should be able to grow any tree you have the wood type for. Though there is one caveat. I don’t think the trees will grow fruit like your olive tree does unless you set it to. Also, a little late with this but we should change it so the screen shows us the change in level when compared to the last time we looked. All your herb patterns might have gone up, but I can’t really tell.’
