Dungeon’s Path

The average worker ant doesn’t actually require anything from Doyle except time, something he is more than capable of providing. Though more appropriately, a good queen will need time to produce an average worker. With the start of a new nest, there is just too much to do. First a nurse or two to help with the eggs, then some diggers, and so on. If within the first batch of eggs a queen has created anything even close to being average, they’re already losing.

Average worker ants are for once the rush has finished and the nest is dug in. At that point they’re useful for conserving food as while maybe they dig out less than a digger ant, once the same amount of area has been dug out, the average worker will have eaten less. Plus, it can do everything else at about the same level of efficiency.

The farmers, on the other hand, is a special role that requires special circumstances that wouldn’t naturally show up in Doyle’s ant farms. Well, technically the farmers are more than capable of showing up, Doyle just has to spawn in the correct ant variety. A detail that he actually managed to stumble into. See, his original ants did not have farmers. Rather, that got added in when he gained the myconids. A shame he hadn’t realized the detail as it hinted towards unmentioned changes that could happen with every new addition to the dungeon. Oh well.

Not that any other detail is important besides the fact that now all the types can be laid. After all, while those details are important in the grand scheme of things, Doyle does want to keep an eye on what eggs the queen first chooses to lay after all. He is perfectly capable of telling the queen exactly what eggs to lay and so all Doyle has to do is let the nest run for a while and then get the queen to lay ten of each type of egg.

From there, Doyle just needed to figure out how to test them. The porter being the easiest as its job is literally just to move stuff around and so a simple speed test or three will do. One while not carrying anything, another while carrying a piece of dirt of a specific weight, and finally while carrying a dead clone of themselves.

Though while that was the easiest, most of the others weren’t all that much harder. The only exception ended up ironically being the average worker ant. After all, what Doyle wanted out of them was to be the most average ant and so they not only needed to be tested against everything, he needed more than just ten of them.

This was something that took Doyle a number of days to figure out and until then he kept getting odd results for the workers. With the specialized workers, even if there is some variety among a type, ten was more than enough to find the highs and the lows. For the workers, though, you could pull ten and have them all be nearly the same only for the next ten to vary wildly.

So not only does Doyle need to run them through every test. He also needs to run a ton of them through those tests. Hundreds of worker ants needed to be tested for each nest. Well, only 300 to be exact, but that is still a lot. On top of that, he isn’t just looking for the best.

Oh no, Doyle is looking for the most average group of worker ants. Strong or weak, fast or slow, it doesn’t matter all that much to him. What he wants is for every single one of those 300 ants to look less like a bell curve and more like a skinny plateau. To be honest, if they all ended up being exactly the same he would be ecstatic. Of course, that isn’t possible with an animal, even in a world with stats, so he could only settle for them being almost identical.

All that figured out and with a few tweaks, Doyle takes a step back from his semi-automated ant farms and realizes a week and change has passed. Now, that time didn’t pass completely free of interruptions. Both Jim and Ace had been to his eight floor. Doyle had even been somewhat excited to see what happened, that is until they turned around as soon as they hit the Zero-G room. They apparently weren’t quite sure what to do with it yet.

Doyle nods to himself as he observes the ants go about their work. Well, at least he is able to watch their nest grow. With how big the time difference is between the nests and Doyle, it looks more like a time-lapse. Besides that, once the nest actually does get started, it doesn’t take long at all for them to finish up. After all, the part that takes the longest is getting the queen and drones saturated with enough World Energy that the queen can lay eggs.

Though once the process is finished, Doyle does still have to personally decide which queens get to pass on their legacy. Sure, he could technically automate even that as the tests do give solid results. The only problem is that it wouldn’t help the pattern’s level quite as much. Without his personal touch, the system just doesn’t let the pattern progress. Otherwise, it would be like giving the owner of an automated nail factory levels to a nail pattern.

This little quirk, however, frustrates Ally. Because while Doyle is perfectly willing to accept this limitation since he didn’t really know anything else, she knows better. Natural evolution works just as fine for dungeon bred monsters as it does ones in the wild. At least they do when a system isn’t involved.

In the end though, there just isn’t anything either can do about it and so Doyle turns to one final bit of pattern work he wanted to do. With the critters it was easier to breed them for pattern levels, for his monsters though, that just isn’t quite viable. Well, he does admit to himself that it  easily could be done on the ninth floor. All it would take is some of the floor’s points and room in the farm zone, but that isn’t what he wants to do.

No, Doyle wants to try and level up the monster patterns in what is technically the “correct” way for a young dungeon to do so. That of watching the monsters fight and then figuring out what is wrong with them. From what Ally has seen in some of the tutorial text, this should be enough to level up the pattern.

So Doyle turns his attention to the first few floors where he spends much of his time observing the first floor. Not because he doesn’t want to observe the other floors. No, it is simply because even the second floor is somewhat of a rare place for the farmers to head to. For every team that runs the second floor, three or more will have done the first and the rate for deeper floors after that just gets worse.

This of course, led to quite a bit of experience with the ins and outs of how his goats fight. Not even the kobolds on the first floor get all that much of a work out sadly, though at least the goats are Doyle’s heavy lifter. That and the show is quite fun.

Sure, most of the delvers who farm the first floor know what they are doing by now. Still, there are more than a few “amazing” displays of skill. About three such situations really stick out in his mind.

First was what looked to be a newly formed group. The two tanks in the group had a nifty plan of basically bouncing a goat back and forth between them with shield bashes. Not the worst plan Doyle had seen, though it was about the worst executed one he had seen. At first it seemed to be working and if not for the fact both tanks lacked any actual shield bash skill, it might have gone all the way. Instead, they just batted it back and forth a few times until one of them mistimed their bash and ended up knocked down with a dizzy goat trampling all over them.

The second incident was from a more seasoned team of delvers, which makes it all the more embarrassing. See, the goats have free range of whatever room they are in and may do all kinds of goaty things. This second team marched right into the first room, a room that everyone knows has four goats in it, and proceeded to charge at the three goats. No, that wasn’t a typo, the three goats.

The fourth goat was in the room, it had just decided the corner in the blindspot of the room’s entrance looked like a wonderful place to lay down and so managed to get a kidney shot in on the rogue type, you know, the guy who in theory should be good at spotting things? Such a stupid mistake that ended their run early. The rogue didn’t die, but he ended up needing some serious healing to take care of that kidney damage.

Last, but certainly not least, was a team who broke the rules. Doyle had set up the rules around having a six person party to be a little loose. After all, it wouldn’t be fair if someone ran into the dungeon while the first floor was full and there was suddenly an instance with seven people in it. This team, however, didn’t accidentally end up with seven people.

Since the number of instances is known and the rules around how it takes care of overflow have been figured out, they knew how to abuse it. So six of them went in and then waited. After that, the seventh person let a few teams cycle in and out before running through the checkpoint and literally diving into the portal.

Now, the people guarding the portal could have stopped him, but Jim had gotten word that this was going to happen. So, with just a few small nudges and a word with those on guard duty, the incident was allowed to happen. Not only that, but once the guy was through both Jim and Ace walked out of the Jinn’s shop to address the crowd. Then they waited to see what would happen.

Not that they would ever learn what truly happened. See, with the leniency provided by telling the adventurers guild about the dungeon’s party size limit, some options opened up to Doyle. Key for this incident is that while he isn’t able to order his monsters around like he is able to when the delvers aren’t disturbing the energy with their presence, he does gain the ability to give them simple orders.

So while the monsters in the first room and the vine room all snuggle up behind the terrain at the start of the vine room, the rest all run over to the back of the vine room and wait. Those delvers proceed to the first room and are confused by the lack of goats there, so much so that they almost give up. They don’t though and continue on into the vine room, which also looks empty.

This spooked them a good bit, but still they continued. If only they had looked closer or had more experience with the floor. After all, there isn’t much room to hide. Except the two kobolds have their daggers and so, with the short amount of time they had, cut down a bunch of vines and piled them on top of the goats and themselves.

Most unfortunately for the cheating delvers that they did miss them as this was basically Doyle’s last warning for them. At this point, it was more than obvious what they were trying to do and so the jaws of the trap closed on them as they reached the back of the vine room. 26 goats charge at them with the kobolds close behind. As that party turns to retreat, though, the seven goats behind them begin their charge as well. Suffice it to say, that team didn’t make it out of the dungeon that day.

Even better for Ace, though, is the fact that they tried this early in the day. If not for that, there would always be the question of whether the group had just gone deeper into the dungeon. But no, the miners were still on the third floor and the path to the exit that day went right past them. So when they returned without having seen them and a number of parties having cycled through, it was quite clear that it wasn’t just that day that they wouldn’t be showing up.