Dungeon’s Path

Well, Doyle was going to let it grind away in the background. That, technically still was the case. The only special thing of note is that on the fourth harvest, two things happened. Over to the side where Doyle was keeping a screen, the level of wheat ticked up by one. Compared to accidentally raising sugar’s level by six, a single level doesn’t feel like all that much, but it proved the concept even if it was going to be a slow one. After all, it took what would for a farmer be three growing seasons to get it. That all gets pushed to the side though as there is a much more important message from the system.

{Level Gained!

Level goes from 3 to 4, Strength goes from 40 to 48, Agility goes from 46 to 60, Constitution goes from 57 to 67, Intelligence goes from 44 to 54, Wisdom goes from 70 to 89, Presence goes from 35 to 43, Destiny goes from 65 to 78, Karma goes from 68 to 84, Luck goes from 45 to 59}

Doyle had finally reached level 4. Which compared to even the weakest citizen in Wolf’s Rest was quite slow, the lowest level citizen being at least at level 6. Still, as he looks over his stat increases, it was worth the wait.

Of all his stats, Strength and Presence had gained the fewest points at eight a piece. Though Wisdom is the real standout having gained 19 points! Over double what Strength and Presence got, and only one point away from an even 20. Besides that, more than a few of the stats are nearing 100.

There isn’t anything particularly special about the number, Doyle just plans to check the descriptions at that point. After all, the soul stats have restricted descriptions needing 1,000 points to unlock and more uses for the stats can be unlocked. So while 100 isn’t particularly exciting, it is a decent breakpoint to check in at.

Besides all that though, there is one thing Doyle has wanted to get back into doing which the boost to his stats now allowed. The automation of floors. Sure, he had been sidestepping the issue by making all his latest floors with massive farms, but that doesn’t cover every situation. Because, in the end, the farms still need time to restock.

If a large group of adventurers decided they all wanted to dive one team after another, it is more than possible that without automated respawning a floor could run out of mobs. Anyway, as it is Doyle feels he spends way too much time restocking the second floor. The only thing that disappoints him is that he is so close to being able to automate a third floor!

So after a quick refresher on how to bend his mind around for it, Doyle focuses on the second floor and waits for the current group there to leave. This doesn’t take long and from there it is just a matter of doing what he would normally do except with a couple of tweaks. After all, the second floor does have a small farm area that is set up to restock the goats and kobolds. It even still uses hidden passageways to walk the monsters to their stations.

Something Doyle is quick to change, converting it over to use portals like the later floors. Not only is this easier to automate, but it fixes a minor problem that could potentially pop up if enough groups were going through. It hadn’t come up yet as the second floor still had four instances. Otherwise, it was near certain that eventually someone would come across a mass of goats and kobolds in the fourth room, which had got stuck there while trying to get to their positions. That would not be a good look for Doyle if the team managed to survive that incident.

Still, there were a few quirks here and there that took him a moment to figure out. For instance, the very existence of a farm introduced difficulty. After all, Doyle wanted to draw from that first, but not down to the last monster, and only then summon in new monsters. While it doesn’t really save that much, every bit counts when you have silly expensive things waiting to be bought. Good thing floor automation seemed to handle intent decently enough and so he managed to finish up before the next team was due to enter.

That left Doyle with nine hanging Wisdom points of which he could in theory use five of to put in another loot rule. Which, while tempting, Doyle left alone for now. The stat was only a single point off of getting another floor and, sure, the second floor was annoying because of the frequency of needing to restock it. The third floor, though? That was extra annoying because he had to keep in mind where the monsters went on a day-to-day basis.

Doyle paused after thinking that. He had another solution for the problem. As it was made, the third floor randomized itself by literally moving pieces around. Why bother with that? It isn’t like he was doing that on the much more complex sixth floor.

So Doyle focused on the third floor and started to make changes. This was actually easy enough to do, despite some of the quirks. For instance, the way the tunnels would connect to one another smoothly by morphing the terrain slightly. All of that was taken care of easily enough as the portals he used physically connected the sides so they still changed. That and more was taken care of so it was only a matter of placing so many portals.

It wasn’t as many as on the sixth floor of course, but it still took him a good few days to complete. At least all delvers being on the floor did was interrupt him. Since it involved portals that, unless active, were completely non-existent Doyle didn’t have to turn off the normal floor randomization. Then, once the portals were in place and connected, he was able to go into his previous rules on shaping the floor and replace actual physical re-arranging with turning on and off portals.

Satisfied with the changes to the second and third floor, Doyle took another look over his early floors. Again. Didn’t see anything to change of course so all he could do was mentally sigh and turn to something else. At this point he was certain there must be all kinds of things that could be fixed now and are being hidden under a heavy instinct based haze.

Somewhat grumpy, Doyle turns to his ninth floor. While a kilometer long hallway was an interesting thing to find in a dungeon this early on, he felt the need to do something more to take out some of his annoyance on. Which for him meant carving. Sure, the seventh floor was really close to having the framing finished, but the ninth didn’t have anything at all yet.

The questions as what to carve? Well, Doyle already had some ideas and a restriction in mind. To be specific, whatever got carved would take up the entire length of the hallway. There was a section of ceiling that for all intents and purposes was an interrupted canvas. Of course, some of the obvious choices were mythological creatures known for their size. Creatures like the World Serpent.

That, however, was quickly thrown out when Doyle remembered what exactly his carvings could do. Now, he wasn’t expecting to call out a literal world serpent if he drew one well enough. That didn’t change the fact that his conceptual reinforcement skill is best known for its use in religions to create a better idol.

There had to be some kind of serpent god out there that identified with the world serpent just going by what he had learned and Doyle didn’t feel comfortable with potentially setting up a beacon for it. He already had enough deities to deal with. Besides, classically, the world serpent was the son of Loki and if there was an entity he wanted to deal with less than a snake big enough to encircle the world, it was a trickster god.

Instead, Doyle decided on something to remind himself of home when in the far future it wasn’t there anymore. The idea also required far less carving, which was a nice side effect, there was just so much space between all the planets in the solar system.

That’s right, Doyle had decided to carve out the classic representation of the solar system with the sun at the start and ending with the cloud of icy bits and bobs which had been recognized as the most distant region of the solar system at the exit. Now, he hadn’t been too much of a space nerd as a human, but for a while there it had caught his fancy, so had kept up on things. That combined with something about being a dungeon core allowing him to dredge up trivia like that allowed for a beautiful rendition.

Yes, he understood that the actual shape of the solar system was nowhere near that neat and tidy. Orbits went at all kinds of angles even if they did somewhat subscribe to the idea of a mostly disk shape and none of them were actual neat circles but rather tending more towards being more egg-shaped, but it got the point across.

About the only disappointment, if you could call it that, was the effect this kilometer long art piece provided. All it did was give anyone who was on the floor a sense of nostalgia for their home. Mind you, this didn’t mean where they lived or their childhood home. Doyle had a deeper intent than that.

No, it gave a sense of being homesick for the place a being feels as their true home. That could be where they currently live or a childhood home. It, however, could also be more general and mean something like their entire country of origin or as specific as a single room they had stayed in for a week one summer while visiting their grandmother.

Maybe if this had been a stronger effect it could have distracted delvers, but in the end Doyles intent wasn’t to harm. It was a simple reminder of a place that still existed, but someday wouldn’t. Art for the sake of art and if he had tried anything malicious, it would have been ruined.

So, while somewhat pointless as far as improving his dungeon, Doyle was satisfied with the results. Though his core did dim for a moment as he thought about how none of his various “homes” over the years had stuck with him as his home. Still, there wasn’t anything he could do about that now besides making this dungeon into his true home.

That finished, Doyle turns to his farm setup. The wheat had been harvested many times by now and managed to beat out sugar, coming at level 9. A level that might be a slight bottleneck in progress as it had been that way for longer than the others.

Not that this disheartened him, instead it turned his attention to expanding the operations. This method was proved to improve the level of his normal plants, which mean expanding it to more than just wheat. There were so many plants to level up and each would require some of his attention, which wasn’t really what he wanted. After all, it would be kind of a waste if he let an entire harvest of wheat die out because he was otherwise occupied.

Good thing he had figured out how the speed up on his floors worked so it was a simple matter to fix. Doyle just had to create 19 separate rooms, one for each plant, and lay down some rules. Well, rule, singular. It was a simple enough thing, once all the plants had matured and produced whatever they were meant to produce, slow down time until he reset it. This wasn’t enough to stop time, mind you, but it did mean he could leave strawberries on the vine for quite a while before they even started to go bad.

That technically wasn’t even needed as all that he required was a viable seed. The only reason to preserve them was so he could judge the mature plants and fruit. After all, kind of hard to tell if one strawberry is better than another if both have mostly rotted away.