Turns out that making a monster system was Hard, so I moved to the item spawning system instead. I severely underestimated how difficult automating monster spawning would be. Making an item-spanning system was much easier.
All I had to do was weave an enchantment into the room and link it to my pattern database, which was easily done with the help of a few more minor enchantments, now I had a very basic item spawning system that would automatically spawn things at specific spots in my dungeon if certain conditions were met.
This system couldn’t function on its own though, so I wanted to link it to the loot system. After all, which proper dungeon didn’t have monster loot? These systems would manage the spawning of loot in both boss rooms and regular monster rooms.
First, I needed to create the loot system.
With a thought, two Ratlings materialized in my testing room, next, I wove a large enchantment into the room that would transform whatever died into their base parts.
Next, I ordered Ratlings to attack each other, one died eventually and I felt the enchantment kick in.
Oh!
GOONG!
A strange sound filled the room followed by a flash of light that consumed the dead Ratling, when the light cleared nothing remained, only ash. Even that was consumed a second later as the enchantment activated again, reducing it even further.
Well, that wasn’t what I wanted. I deactivated the enchantment and removed the strings of information I wove in. Clearly, I was too vague when I said base form so I instead wove in what I meant with greater detail and specifications and fired it up again.
BANG!
The Ratling exploded, not in your typical manner though. Its body just exploded into segments, fur fell off, then skin, followed by blood vessels, and so on until all the individual parts of the Ratling filled the room.
Not quite what I wanted but close, very close. I cleaned up the room and wove in some more strings of information before trying again. And this time it actually worked, the Ratling died and magically separated into its respective parts, without any violent explosions too! Wonderful!
There were too many parts though, the enchantment had separated everything, and I mean everything. I don’t need so many things, I mean who’s going to use Ratling toes to craft something? Nobody, that’s who. I would still have them in the loot table, just with a very, very low chance of dropping.
How I would set up drop chance and rarity was another thing altogether, that was a problem for future me though. As it was now, the loot system was complete, it just needed a few more tweaks and it would be finished.
I powered down the enchantment and tweaked it a bit more before rerunning it, this time with an ember lizard.
BANG!
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It exploded in a shower of gore.
To be honest, I did expect something to happen, just not this. What could possibly be the problem now? I repeated the same thing again and slowed down my perception of time and watched how the enchantment interacted with the dead ember lizard.
Tendrils of ghostly soul essence infused with my will reached out to the ember lizard’s body and enveloped it in a cocoon of magical energy. Next, it began stripping away at the lizard’s parts, or at least tried to.
When it attempted to reach deep into the ember lizard the enchantment encountered some resistance in the form of the ember lizard’s natural enchantments. The two didn’t mix very well and entangled, which caused an explosion.
Ah, I see. In hindsight, I should’ve known that there would be some conflict between the two. The ember lizard’s power-granting enchantment was very basic, something I’d made when I knew very little about enchanting.
I still didn’t know much, but I was in a better place now. The loot enchantment simply didn’t know what it was working with, and the ember lizard’s enchantments weren’t designed with such a thing in mind.
It had no such problems with mundane or relatively mundane creatures such as the Ratlings but anything more complex than that and it would fail explosively.
I had a solution in mind though, and got to work instantly. I simply needed to weave in a thread that would allow it to recognize and work around any enchantment within a monster. With a thought, it rebooted and I spawned another ember lizard to test the changes.
It worked, partially. The dead ember lizard was split apart into its various parts but every single piece was mundane.
Another bug! Come on! I just fixed one! So anyway, this was a problem. I needed the magical parts to remain magical, the loot enchantment just stripped everything indiscriminately. That was great and all, but only when dealing with mundane creatures.
I wouldn’t be having a lot of those in my dungeon, the Ratlings could be considered slightly mundane but everything else was either stuffed full of soul essence or had a decent amount of the stuff within them doing something.
Instead of stripping the magical bits away and destroying the enchantment to isolate, take it off, remove the part, and put it on back. It sounded easy, but I knew it wouldn’t be, since it would have to scan the entire animal first, look for the enchantments it carried, and remove the part it was on without damaging it.
For me, this was very easy, as easy as thinking. It was preprogrammed into me and I could do it in an instant. This didn’t transfer over to the loot enchantment as it wasn’t directly connected to me, and while it carried out my will it still couldn’t do things at the speed I did.
I wove in another thick thread with the updates and tripped a few redundant threads of soul essence before turning it on. The enchantment hummed to life and began reducing the ember lizard into its various parts.
Five seconds later, it was done. And I had ten pieces of magical monster parts on the floor.
Success!
Well, partial success. The time it took to work was too long, and I wanted it to be an instantaneous process. I dove into the complicated network of ghostly stings and began cutting away at the redundant ones. Once that was done I realized that the threads didn’t need to be as big as I spawned them so I thinned them down significantly.
And done! I hope I never have to revisit this section of the enchantment anymore. Now it was time to tie in a rarity enchantment. That was very easy to do, and I was done within a few hours. I then tested it for a few more hours to make sure it was working as intended and linked it up to the loot system.
Now that I had those two components in place, it was time for the loot system's last and most integral part: the item crafting part. I didn’t want my mobs only to drop raw materials, I wanted them to drop crafted items with special abilities as well.
Around this time, I realized that I no longer wanted the monster spawning system nor an item spawning system, there would be no chests in my dungeon, and everything would come from monsters. Boss monsters would have a 100% chance of dropping items instead of the chest that would usually be revealed after death.
This felt better in my mind and would push people to grind and kill monsters for things, they would also want to go lower as the rarer mobs would spawn the lower one went.
It felt wrong to limit the enchantment to only these things, I now wanted it to encompass and manage everything in my dungeon. From monster spawning to monster elevation. It would be the dungeon system, my ultimate creation, maybe.
It would essentially be a glorified automation system when it was done but it would be cool. I didn’t feel like I had the capabilities to make such a thing yet though, so I’ll just stick to the simple loot system for now.
It would do more than just handle loot but that would be its name for now, until I came up with something better.
Now for the hardest part; linking it up to my soul and making it work everywhere in my dungeon.
It was a simple thing to do, in theory. All I had to do was scale it up and make a few adjustments here and there and it should be fine, should, but things were hardly ever that easy. When I tried to scale the enchantment beyond the size of the room its strings of information snapped and unwove themselves before dissipating into soul essence and returning to me.
Oh, brother! More problems, always more problems. I tried willing the threads to hold longer but that only worked partially, they stretched a bit further but snapped eventually.
What a pain.