Dungeon’s Path

A few days pass and both the town hall and the Adventurers Guild are packed with people looking for answers. Answers which luckily both the System provided receptionists are able to answer. Of course that doesn't mean they have the answers that people want. For instance, no, the town doesn’t have control over the party size. Such answers however do not put a damper on the rumors swirling around among the visitors.

Not that Ace cares. While it does make negotiations a bit harder with some of the merchants, the town doesn’t really need anything at the moment. With the dungeon they are actually producing much of what they need and until other places level up their crafters more, trade is more a matter of gaining more coins.

Now we leave the town to its troubles and focus back on Doyle. He is down on the ninth floor trying to get his ant farms working. While in theory it really is just as simple as that, a bunch of ant farms. The problem with judging the queens is still holding him back. Of course it doesn’t help that the system and his skills are trying to standardize the stats.

With non-monster plants, the system and his skills were designed to let them grow without too much interference. Animals and other such critters however are basically stuck into a mold as they grow. Doyle had sort of realized this, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

The horned rabbits just a bit to the side are actually a lot easier to deal with. After all, while their stats might be the same, what Doyle is judging them by for the most part is their horn and how well it picks up herbal properties. Yes, that is somewhat decided by their stats, but most of it comes from a sort of natural talent at manipulating the herbal energies, at least while being a critter.

It is quite possible that if their stats could ever reach the double digits, that the effect they had would skyrocket. As a non-monster dungeon critter though, such a thing is quite unlikely. Though it isn’t like this “talent” for gathering herbal energy is something directly inherited. Sure, put two horned rabbits together that both are great at it and among their offspring there is a possibility of one of them being even more talented. And sure, it does somewhat raise the floor on how low talent can go, but it is more like nudging a bell curve over a little.

There will still be rabbits born without any talent at all. This required a much more extensive set up than originally planned and sort of drew Doyle away from the ants for a hot minute. Though in reality it basically just meant creating a town of micro-parks. Each area is designed for a single rabbit family with the two parents marked out by cloth ribbons tied around their necks. Yes those ribbons were tied in a bow, but that was unrelated.

Anyway, since the children would have a wide range of possible talent, particularly good rabbits would be kept around, unlike with the wheat. And while it wasn’t likely that Doyle would ever have some perfect rabbit that could suck all the herbal energy from a plant. As the rabbit pattern increased in level, the chances of them dropping a herbal horn also increased.

In fact the increase was noticeable enough that some of the teams farming for food started to target the rabbits as well. Overall it slowed them down a slight bit as it basically involved their ranged fighters peaking into a room to snipe any rabbits they saw. However the horns sold quite well and Doyle was happy with the results.

After all, the farmers actually had to put some effort in which increased the amount of World Energy that Doyle got off of them. Plus it was pushing the skills of the ranged fighters up more and more. Something that in the short term didn’t really cause too much of a change, but both Doyle and Jim are looking forward to seeing what the long term results will be.

In the end though, Doyle turns back to his ant farms. The quick diversion of the rabbits helped him realize he could judge animals by things other than stats. Except that didn’t feel quite right so he went and talked to Ally real quick.

Ally laughed, ‘Nope, still looking at their stats. It is just that you’re looking at how their stats are expressing themselves. I’m going to guess that with the horned rabbit’s horn, we are looking at Constitution or Strength, though it might be both. One of the effects of that stat is allowing their body to process plants and extract any herbal power within then storing that power in their horn. 

‘Though if it is both, then likely one controls the extraction and the other how much power can be stored in the horn. Remember, you’ll be basically looking for the same thing in the ant queens, except through the lens of some other ability. The good news though is that your guess is correct. Once they can start gaining stats, those innate abilities will skyrocket!

‘If we take the rabbit as an example. They likely are limited in what kind of herbs they can process. Right now you don’t realize that because you only have normal stuff kicking around. In the future though you’ll end up with true magical herbs and at that point no matter how much a normal horned rabbit eats of the stuff, they won’t be able to put a single speck of it into their horn. So yeah, just figure out what you want to try and optimize with your ants right now, everything else can come later.’

Doyle sighs, ‘So I’m right back at the start.’

Ally laughs, ‘True, but now at least you know where the start is located.’

Doyle grumbles but focuses back on his ant farms as he considers what he just learned. Some things started to fit into place for him such as why humans would gain regeneration at different amounts of constitution. Though it does make him wonder what differences he has since he wasn’t originally a dungeon core.

He shakes his core and checks the many ant queens he has at this point. For the most part, they look exactly the same. Of course there are some differences and if he bothered to sense for it, their pheromones would differ enough to tell one nest from another. Those few differences he did spot, however, were cosmetic at most.

With the workers, Doyle had witnessed a wide range of differences. Some workers could lift many times what another could, others could dig better, and so many other minor changes. Taken as a whole though, each nest didn’t have all that much of a difference between the highs and the lows.

Then it hit him. While all the ants are worker ants, the queen must be purposefully specializing them. So instead of looking at the highs and the lows, Doyle compares the percentage of specialized ants in a nest. The results were shocking.

Sure, every nest had basically every type of specialized worker, but the quantity of special ants varied wildly. Some had almost none and others were almost entirely specialized, but this wasn’t enough to come to a conclusion. So for every current nest, Doyle created five farms with clones of the original’s queen to man them.

Then Doyle watches as completely new nests are dug out and new workers are created. Most of those new nests followed the trend of the original, whether that was to nearly no specialized workers, all specialized workers, or somewhere inbetween. A few rare nests however showed a variance.

Nests that originally had almost no specialized ants would have nearly all digging specialized ants while the nest was being dug and then as challenges went away they would be phased out. Others which the original had nearly all specialized ants, would in one of the clone nests have basically none. That and more revealed itself to Doyle, though it was that first one that caught his attention.

The ability to adapt to a situation was important and even though those queens were running on instinct alone, they managed it. If digging was needed, workers more capable of digging would be born. If a bunch of workers died and needed replacing, first some ants specialized in caring for the eggs and young would be born, then a ton of regular workers would be born.

It all started to fall into place for Doyle as he watched those special nests react to various things he threw at them. The specialized ants took longer to mature and required more food so of course if they weren’t needed, they wouldn’t be created. Those nests which had nearly all specialized ants required way more food than the other nests and it just hadn’t really sunk in until now. It was like how before the system a nest would only have so many warrior ants because of the resources they required.

This was the key factor that Doyle landed on. Though not just the ability to specialize effectively, but more efficiently. While most nests had somewhat of a bell curve going on with only a few truly specialized ants, others would flatten the curve representing the difference between a normal ant and a specialized one.

To Doyle this represented some queens being more able to specialize. Sure, the peak strength a normal ant could use wasn’t exactly going to change easily, but some of the queens were more able to give birth to ants that were at that peak. Not only that though, those same queens were also more capable of creating average workers.

After all, the bell curve went in both directions or else it wouldn’t be a bell shape. When giving birth to normal ants, some queens would more often create subpar workers. On the other hand, the queens who were more able to hit the high notes of specialization, also managed to create the most average of workers. A decent balance between their abilities and how much they needed to eat and how long they lived.

More important than any of that though, was the fact it was reproducible. Sure, the original nest and the clone nests would have some variance, but the general talent stayed in the same ballpark. So with that, Doyle removed all the other nests and had the few nests he had focused on creating new queens and drones.

From there it was just a matter of letting them all swarm together and pair off to create new nests. Now all Doyle needed to figure out was how to judge them. After all, he can’t exactly be babysitting them the entire time. There had to be some kind of metric to go off of.

Doyle watched the new nests grow as he pondered on the problem. Though of course not all the nests managed to live up to expectations and were cut. Some queens are too shy about having specialized workers, others the opposite. So nests are constantly removed as the question flips over in his mind a few times.

An idea eventually began to form. While there seemed to be nearly unlimited ways the workers could be specialized, only a few forms kept appearing in nest after nest. The average worker, the digger, the nurse, the farmer, the fighter, and the porter.  There were other roles commonly seen, but Doyle specifically picked these six out because he knew exactly how to prod a nest into making them.

Methods that he could automate to some degree. Not only that, but with the help of Doyle’s Rules and Control he could have the changes in the nest recorded. A perfect way for him to test them! Though he does slow himself down and look it over again. After all, a nest that can change workers swiftly sounds nice, but what it really means is old workers dying off to be replaced by new ones. Some degree of longevity was needed as it would require too many resources if they lived like a mayfly.