I stood in the entryway to my experiment room, made a farm, then remade into an elf dorm. The glow of the moss illuminated the girl on her slab making the scene somewhat morbid, a girl naked and bandaged, seeming like what a mortician might walk in on, if not for the rise and fall of the girls chest indicating her continued life. It was a nice enough view, short silver hair framing a sharp featured face. Smooth skin marred here and there by the thin scars one might accumulate over a rougher life.

I had to pull my gaze away from her, wondering if it was just dungeon instincts drawing my eyes to her or if it was just natural desire. I dumped some of her clothes on the desk I made for her, noticing most appeared to be jumpsuits of some variety. It appeared she chose only utilitarian clothes rather than wasting space on something that might be more showy, or comfortable. Next to those I set down some of the rations and called it enough. I was sure I'd need to offer her some water at some point but, hopefully, I'd find a way to make water naturally before she needed to use all I had taken.

Finally I set about my real work, going deeper into the room and creating a sheet of general mineral to write out my plans. First I'd start by trying to upgrade my slimes. It would be simple in theory, just dump a boatload of biomatter into a spawner then send the slimes back in to increase my chances for a slime mutation. I was beginning to think I didn’t have the full picture and there might be a way to naturally mutate them, but that would likely take a long time, or require some sort of natural mix of conditions that were unknown to me. Whatever the case, I had the production to go about it in an artificial way so I'd abuse that as much as I could.

I started making marks on my sheet of metal, deciding to draw out a blueprint of a new room, something dedicated to simply sacrificing slimes in order to accelerate the mutations. I knew it was an odd direction to go now that I was thinking about defense but I was thinking that I might get something good out of it. Faster slimes to make more efficient farms, more efficient slimes that could get more mileage out of the materials they harvested, bigger slimes allowing for larger, and possibly faster farms or mining. Maybe even slimes that could convert materials, or harvest material in a more targeted way, possibly making a slime that could strain water from the sap substance I'd managed to make. All of them could give me more defensive options, either directly or indirectly.

I worked through several designs before I thought to do some testing, after all something like this would require a lot of oversight, requiring me to sit by a spawner and make everything happen. I also had the twenty second timer to contend with. I had two spawners to play with, the first floor spawner having been destroyed by the emergence and my secret room spawner having only taken a thought to re-activate. Even now I was pretty sure I could go up and start up the first spawner but I didn't really need it right now and it would interfere with my plans.

My first test involved moving to the secret spawner and looking at it for a few moments. I knew I could bring up an interface to show me the costs and cooldown but I tried a new approach. “Automate.” I spoke and pointed at it, smiling as I got what I had hoped for.

Automation.

Automation is available to keep a consistent number of spawns on the desired floors.

Requires direction for each floor and slime spawned.

I thought for a moment at the direction part, assuming it didn’t mean I needed to point the spawner in a specific direction. I spawned a slime and waited for it to form before having it slide a couple feet from the spawner. “You shall be Robert. I have orders for you.” The slime responded in the usual fashion, jiggling and giving a vague feeling of attention. “You shall give each newly spawned slime orders from me. Can you do this?” One more I felt something from the slime, confidence, and maybe affirmation. Good, that would probably satisfy the direction requirements. Now I have to think about the design of my new room. I didn’t really need two spawners but using two would double the number of slimes I needed to achieve higher mutation rates. Right now it would take a thousand biomatter to reach one percent, with each slime providing ten that would mean a hundred slimes per point. I sighed as I used my blueprint page to do math that I was sure was simpler than I was making it in my head. It would take ten thousand slimes to achieve a hundred percent mutation rate. I scratched my head, sure that wasn’t right.

I looked at my math, willing my numbers to change and be less, but it simply wouldn’t happen no matter how many times i re-did my calculations. I probably wouldn’t need ten thousand, even achieving a ten percent chance might mean I could potentially get a new slime variety for each ten I spawn. And rechecking my spawn window made me pretty sure just spawning one new slime would give me a new option in the spawn menu. I only hoped spawning a new mutation wouldn’t consume my mutation points and make me start from scratch.

Finally came the last bit of math I hoped I'd have to do for a while, calculating spawn costs versus my biomatter gathering rate. Ten biomatter every twenty seconds compared to, an eventual, twenty thousand an hour seemed like a drop in the bucket but I'd rather be sure. One spawner would set me back eighteen hundred every hour, spawning some hundred and eighty slimes per hour, with two spawners costing me three thousand six hundred every hour and spawning three hundred and sixty slimes. Despite my hatred of math, I did just a little more to see how long I might have to wait for ten thousand slimes, now realizing just how achievable that was with my farm.

Just over a day. Some twenty seven hours, more or less, and I could be spitting out a new slime with every spawn. It was a little ridiculous to me, and I now realized just why the girl was terrified of me. An ancient dungeon must be able to shed monsters like a dog shedding fleas. Granted slimes were by far my least dangerous monster, but even a hundred of the girls wouldn’t be able to stem the kind of flood I could release if I so chose to keep an ocean of them around.

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I was less dangerous if i considered my other spawners costs and cooldowns The hoppers having a minute cooldown and the spiders a five minute cooldown and a hundred biomatter cost, and finally my ramp bug costing five hundred biomatter with an, as of yet, unknown cooldown timer.

I could certainly offer considerable resistance if someone popped up again but I couldn't be sure of defeating a determined aggressor. The girls gun had certainly splattered my hoppers with ease and I doubted my spiders would offer much more resistance to the plasma spitting weapon. I couldn’t even be sure my ramp bug would be tough enough to take any shot from the thing, probably only offering itself as something an opponent would have to cut their way through to continue on. A slowing tactic to be sure, but little else.

With that thought out of the way I pulled Robert into my spawn inventory and moved to the farms third floor. I didn’t really need a dedicated room for what would be a two day job, I just needed a place to put it out of sight of the girl so she wouldn’t see it and freak out at the sight, or assume I'd lost my mind. I set the spawners up, glad I didn't encounter any kind of blockage for having too many spawners in one area, or on one floor, guessing whatever governed dungeon mechanics knew they’d like to consolidate their spawners so they could direct the spawns from a centralized area.

I dropped Robert at one and gave him his orders. “Direct all slimes spawned from this pool to enter the other pool and be assimilated.” He confidently jiggled his affirmation and sat waiting beside the pool while I spawned a slime from the other pool to make another commander. I didn’t give this one a name but gave him similar orders and received a similar response. Finally I started up my spawning. Luckily it was simple, though the spawners wouldn’t let me just set them to indefinite. I had to set an actual number to reach, even seeing how many slimes I had on this floor, though it seemed to count the secret room as a floor of its own. I currently had ninety slimes working, meaning I was at about half capacity for my farm, bringing me down to about ten thousand biomatter an hour, probably less than that since my farms weren’t completely efficient and hadn’t yet fully grown to their normal production level. Even at half efficiency I'd be flush for this job so I wasn't worried, I'd just keep an eye on my income and stop things if I started to lose more than I made.

With that settled I had other things to do but I stopped myself. I had just gone off without planning anything, simply taking step one and running with it without anything else to fall back on if it didn’t work. What would I do if it was a flop, or wouldn’t give me any results for a week or more. I couldn’t just hyper focus on one task without a fallback plan, or without testing the waters of other things I could do.

I moved back up to the first floor of the secret room and started on a new sheet of metal, scrapping the other blueprint sheet. “Alright, let’s get some things out of the way, what should be my priority?” I thought for a while before marking the new sheet. “Need to go deeper, get some new levels and materials. The new slime production can be directed to mining after I get my mutations rolling out, or I can give up on the mutations after a while if each new variation resets the counter.” I thought for a bit before adding. “New floor design, i don’t need to make them pretty and can flush them out later, just get the new nodes and spawns then keep it moving, maybe leave behind a bunch of slimes on each floor to make tunnels so i don’t have to start things from scratch on each floor when I decide to decorate things.” With another thought I finished off the sheet. “No more ramps, takes too long and is sort of pointless, I'm a moon dungeon, might as well go for something less natural looking and more artificial. Di a tunnel some twenty meters long then make it drop some fifty or hundred meters, maybe add in spiral stairs if I'm feeling fancy. Aught to make airlocking each floor easier.”

I felt good about part one, let’s add another idea and another sheet. “Need more miners. Slimes are good but slow, spiders are good but can’t clean up after themselves. I can go with the tried and tested method broomhilda provided, a spider dragging a slime, but that might not be fast enough. For the downward segments slimes ought to be more than enough but I can't really improve anything from the spiders. Maybe they can be mutated as well. Plan to test mutation abilities with my spawns. Otherwise, just spawn a bunch of spiders for the main segments and let them go to town, keep a fleet of slimes in reserve to clean up after them so they don’t get slowed down trying to keep things nice and tidy. I’ll just have to eat the time loss when spiders have to mine out thinner tunnels for the exits.” I thought about it for a second. “Could make the main sections wide and long enough that the entrance doesn’t need to be tunneled away from them, just drop from the end of one section to the start of another. This could also add a chance to hide exits so it slows down any attacking party.”

With that thought out I added a new sheet and wrote ‘water’ at the top of it. “Gonna have to keep the elf alive. She’s going to be the closest thing I have to google out here for the threats I could be facing so keeping her alive is paramount.” The other things will simply take time, mining and spawning, leaving me little to do, so maybe i run some experiments myself. I could also try to figure out some ways to improve her life here. A happy elf might be much more inclined to teach me than an unhappy one. I could try to make bedding for her, or I could just go and steal her ships mattress. Maybe silken clothes could be a good idea, but that was more of a pipe dream. I was no seamster and I wouldn't even know where to start. I was pretty sure I could make a silk hammock, which would probably beat a mossy slab. Food would be a good option, if I ever figured out a way to make fire, or heat. That was also assuming i’d get a node, or creature, that was edible and delicious. The thought of food also reminded me of a less happy part of biology, what goes in must come out. I’d need to make a place where she could relieve herself, and shower. The first would be simple enough, a small throne and an unlucky slime would deal with that, with moss as an acceptable enough tp stand in. The shower would have to wait until water was less of an issue.

I stepped back and looked over my plans. So far I had expansion covered, with the new floor designs and plans ready to go. I had spawns covered, with slimes hopefully spitting some useful boys out in the next day or two. I had food and water for the elf covered, with plans to endear her to me, hopefully. It was looking good for now. I’d have to find a way to better farm my metals but, without any kind of automation, the best I could think of was some kind of funnel system that would feed hoppers directly with slimes right behind them to gather up the processed ores. For now they’d just have to free graze and have slimes trail behind them. I added ‘mutate hoppers!’ to my sheet to better emphasize them.

With all that written down I could only think of one more thing, unless I'd forgotten something. Figure out a better communication method. I couldn’t stay limited to pictograms, it was simply too slow and cumbersome to stay my method of communication but I was drawing a blank on how to get something better. Tesla arcs might be able to make something like a synthetic voice, but i lacked electricity, and no clue on how to make a tesla arc, or even if that was the right term for what i was thinking of. Maybe some kind of organ or piano-like thing, but I landed back at the same problem, lack of knowledge. I wouldn’t even know how to make the sounds come out like words. Morse code might work, but i didn’t understand her alphabet, or Morse code.

I sighed, plenty frustrated at my utter lack of progress with my ability to communicate with the elf. I’d simply have to hope I could teach her the English alphabet or get some kind of spawn with vocal cords. The latter seemed likely enough, who wouldn’t love some kind of monster that can pretend to be another delver to lull you into a false sense of security before attacking. With having to pin my needs on hopes, I left to enact some of my plans, or at least start them up and plan more. I needed a break, maybe something would give me an idea to work with while I did something constructive.