Farming was truly proving to be a difficult proposition. So far i’d gone through three test tubes worth of farms, and each had proven to be inefficient or simply too unstable in its construction, forcing me to remake the floor more than a few times. Finally though, I felt I was on the right track. I had measured out my slimes move speed while collecting in a tube, which proved to be marginally slower than the one meter per minute move speed i’d measured out, a rough hourglass and calendar providing me new abilities, namely a clock and a calendar, proving the slimes maximum speed, sadly the calendar only provided me a basic count of how long i’d existed in this world, ten days.
The moss tubes were the work of painfully boring hours, each tube connected by nearly thirty small tunnels that had moss growing in them. As the slime would make its way up or down one tube the moss would start to spread into the farmed tube and grow again. Each tube went sixty meters down, allowing for a slime to fully harvest it in an hour, more or less, and I had thirty tubes so far, figuring it takes five days for each tube to fully regrow itself. I would need around a hundred and twenty tubes to be at maximum efficiency.
I heaved a sigh as I re-checked my math. Unless I got a more efficient bio gatherer then i’d have to set up huge farms just to keep my slime at max work efficiency. It wasn’t the end of the world, just one slime was doing the work of nearly four or five others, and that’s assuming the others were constantly gathering, which they weren't. I’d spaced my nodes apart, giving them plenty of room to grow which meant my slimes had to move from spot to spot to keep collecting things.
The best thing to come out of farming so far was a new ability, secret room, which gave me camouflage options for doorways I made. All it took was a few stalagmites covering a hole in the wall I carved out, not wanting to give adventurers free access to my personal farming areas. So I had a new place to test things without making it overly obvious that I was a sentient being, something I wasn't sure this world would take kindly to, or was even expected at all. I had also figured out I could move my orb into a secret room but I was sure some adventurer would swing by with a mystical doodad that would lead them right to me, so I would keep bringing my orb lower, just with some bonus concealment.
However, while doing my work, I had amassed nearly four hundred biomatter, leaving me with room to expand my spawning ability. I was a little excited, spending hours, or maybe a day or two, working on one thing had left me painfully bored and even something as gross as spiders had an appeal. So, after moving out of my little hidden den near the first floor ramp, i headed over to the west side of the cavern to set up my spawner, noticing along the way that my general mineral nodes had become a near forest of stalagmites, near enough to two meters as i could barely see over most of them. I knew my group of hoppers was still working hard, I had even added another two groups to boost my metal production.
The spider spawner took two hundred biomatter, staggering me as it was twice the cost of even the cave hoppers but the idea of having an combat mob with utilities was still appealing enough to go through with the cost. After selecting the spot, and paying the biomatter, a white silken substance started to bubble up from the stone, slowly winding around itself until it resembled strands winding around a stone or rock, going through this process five times until i was left with five large silk sacks that looked like dog sized spider eggs. Remembering these things were supposed to reproduce through injection sent a shiver up my spine, even as i used info on it.
Spider spawner:
Spawns available:
Cave spider: 100 Biomatter.
I almost cursed at the outrageous cost, nearly half of my remaining biomatter but resolved to spawn one anyways. I spent the biomatter and stepped back, hands on my metaphorical hips. An egg started wriggling, the surface writhing as something tried to tear its way free of the sack. The egg popped out of place, rolling across the stone floor, and another started to take its place, as the writhing intensified before a leg like an oversized ice pick punctured the surface. The spider emerged slowly, tearing more of its silken covering away until it was half emerged, simply stepping up and away on unsteady legs.
The spider was nearly the height of my waist, growing slightly as it turned and gorged itself on what remained of its egg, leaving it just touching a meter tall in its normal standing state. The body was spiked, dark gray spikes adorning its, nearly black, abdomen, all making it difficult to make out in the low light of the cavern. Its thorax, sporting two more forward facing spikes, was dwarfed by the abdomen and had two indents in it that were the resting place of its front legs, which i think are named pedipalps, holding them in waiting like a praying mantis and the reason was clear, the ends of either of them were sharp spikes. Finally, and most unsettling beyond the sheer size of the spider, was its chelicerae, a fun word that hid evil. The chelicerae were long, coming out nearly a hands length from the mouth parts, and had two gleaming fangs like curved daggers that looked sharp enough to puncture tank armor. I was honestly starting to feel bad for my future adventurers.
I started up the usual rounds of tests for the spider as I had my other creatures, a simple walk, turn, then dash which proved it walked at a sedate pace that might be best described as a casual stroll. Its running pace proved to also be somewhat lacking, perhaps at the higher end of an average human jogging speed which, after some measuring, racing, and painfully slow math, I figured to be around seven kilometers an hour. It had some ability to hop a short distance, about five meters, but the windup was obvious and I didn't think they would be able to hold that wound up position for long. Their best trait, for combat, proved to be a web they could produce, which proved to be very sticky and consisted of strands that would cling and get caught on anything they were dragged across meaning they wouldn’t necessarily have to run down anyone that came to challenge my second floor.
The final, and currently most useful, trait the spider had was a very nice tunneling ability. It would approach whatever place i ordered it to and begin slamming those pick like legs forward in an explosion of strength, sheering into the stone and crumbling it with relative ease allowing one spider the ability to tunnel nearly as fast as four of my humble slimes, the drawback being the spider couldn’t collect or dispose of the stone it mined. I had started to think the spider was a worse miner by far but an idea struck me and I ordered my spider to dig a tunnel at a slight incline, years of space engineer forming a simple plan. All it took was digging a small ‘pool’ below the entrance to the spider tunnel and chunks of rocks would come rolling right down into it, where a quickly spawned and relocated slime could passively chew through all the spider could throw at it. I knew some stone would accumulate and, if I didn't want the place to look like a roblox dungeon, I'd have to add curves eventually but this offered me a simple way to expand my interior and give me more room to put naturally growing glow flora.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
With the idea of quicker expansion in my head I spawned a second spider and had him move down to the third floor tunnel. I had made this floor deeper, nearly three times the length of the last ramp while maintaining its gradual drop. The telltale ridges of slime mining were left everywhere despite their best efforts to make it look fairly clean. Bob and his crew were hard at work expanding the landing area when I arrived with the new guy, giving him a few orders. First, I had him web together his back two legs with a long flat almost blanket looking web giving it an ability to scoop stone along as it went, which proved to be less effective than I hoped until one of the slimes got caught in it. Then I likened it to a ramscoop instead of a broom as, I decided she’d be Broomhilda, dragged the helpless slime along in her war against stone.
I was considering moving my orb down to the third floor when a nagging sensation started itching at the back of my mind, an itch I couldn't identify what exactly my new body was telling me. I sat down and closed my eyes but sleep wouldn’t come to me, i couldn’t eat so hunger wasn’t my problem. I tried physically scratching my orb but, beyond a bout of vertigo, achieved nothing, until i was fed up and tried using information on the itch.
Warning, structural integrity of floor one failing.
Cause: Grace period ending, new dungeon emergence imminent.
Please select emergence point. 9:37:42
Ah, I'm about to emerge. Well, that’s not terribly good, and my attempt to remain calm isn’t working too well. I hadn’t done much more than farm and make farming bugs, my only two supposed fighters being tied up in mining work and I lacked the funds to make any more. I could maybe swing a third in ten hours but I didn't want to bet on winning any fight they would come across. I took a moment to compose myself, wondering if it was residual panic from my first death cropping up or if it was some innate dungeon fear of outside forces. Whatever the cause, freaking out wouldn’t help me now.
So, with some determination, I moved up to the first floor and started to create more rooms, something I could do much quicker than my slimes or spiders if I put my back into it and ignored node cooldowns. Within an hour I had expanded my nine rooms into 28, including my starting room. It was trivial to set up new walls in the doorways that I had made to move more quickly, turning my grid into one long tunnel that eventually leads to the second floor ramp. Finally I was left with one last option that I'd never explored before, traps. I had wanted to look at them earlier but I knew I would be tempted to spawn them in and use my creatures to confirm the efficacy which would just be a drain on my resources. So, staring at the first doorway I opened up that tab and took a look at what I had in stock. Using info on each one so i wouldn’t place something that would be useless in the confined first floor.
Traps available for spawning.
Spike trap: cost 10 stone.
A single stalactite primed to fall on invaders that walk below it. Can be improved with the addition of a slime.
Pit trap: cost 10 stone.
A simple pitfall, approximately 5 meters deep, meant to capture invaders, can become deadly with the addition of placed spikes or slimes.
Spike blanket: cost 50 stone.
An improved spike trap adding additional stalactites to affect an area below it. Can be improved with slimes.
Creeping horror. Cost 50 biomatter. 3 Available for spawning.
An almost imobile creature that can be placed at the bottom of a pit trap to improve capturability. Implants caught creatures to facilitate breeding.
Three nodes, three different spawns and four traps? This was throwing off my feng shui, or voodoo or whatever you call it but I'd deal with it. I had three traps, all of which could be improved by slimes and a trap based creature that apparently took a page out of the cave spider book of horrors. I ignored my revulsion and started to plant my traps, simple pitfalls as spike traps would not gain any real speed in the tight rooms of the first floor. I had plenty of stone to throw around so I did, planting a single pitfall in front of each doorway, only dropping a slime into the first one as the others were mostly for slowing people down. It was hardly deadly but I wanted the fantasy equivalent of ‘no trespassing’ to be plain and clear. I simply wasn’t ready for adventurers, I was only two floors deep and my nodes were barely at a level of sustainability. I needed to play for time and this was the best way I could do it.
The pit traps proved worth the cost, digging themselves out in seconds and being covered by a thin layer of stone that seemed to conceal things pretty well. A quick test proved that the stone would hold some weight but, I suspected, only enough to let someone get their other foot off the ground. I reconsidered my not being too deadly and added some short general mineral spikes to the bottom of the rest of the pits, looking like a mix of nails rather than man killing things, my desire being to injure people and make them reconsider running my dungeon.
Next I decided to focus hard on my second floor, planting the occasional pit trap and spike blanket, using my nodes of general mineral to try to camouflage them rather than having random groupings of spikes here and there on the ceiling. It was a bit of a slow process but, thankfully, the cooldown seemed more designed to keep a dungeon from accidentally placing overlapping traps or creatures. For my third floor ramp I heavily trapped it, not using any general mineral to hide the spikes and simply letting the trapped section act like another warning sign. Finally I decided to move my orb.
It wasn’t an easy decision, I had hidden it well in my testing chamber and I knew it would take mining through a meter of stone to get to it, but I'd rather not risk someone coming in and being able to sense it then just making off without much trouble, my orb in hand. At least on the third floor they’d have the mining crew to contend with, and whatever else I could relocate in a hurry. So i cleared out a new area, a hole fifty meters into the stone behind my ramp, and relocated my orb, suffering through the vertigo once again, before completely sealing my orb in, save for a pinhole i left in my placed stone in case there was some inherent need to keep my core exposed to some degree.
At last there was little else to do, I could check my new spawners and traps but I didn't have the biomatter to dump into a new spawn and a couple new spike variants wouldn’t do much more than what I had done already. I moved up to the first floor and wound my way through the rooms until I was standing at the room I'd chosen to be my entrance. A bare six hours had passed but i wouldn’t play out the clock, i was as ready as i could be and three more hours wouldn’t improve much else. I reached out and pointed at the wall, selecting it as the point for my dungeon entrance, the stone crumbling and a whistling noise that grew louder as the stone deteriorated further and further. Finally, with a rush of wind and a great roaring noise, the crumbling stones exploded outwards, taking with it a slime that had been weeding nearby, and I stared up the entrance ramp at an impossibility.
There, hanging in a sky filled with more stars than I had ever seen in my life, bound to earth, was a beautiful orb of green and blue. A planet hung in the sky, reflecting beautiful colors as I walked up my ramp to stare around the entrance to my dungeon. Shrouded by darkness there was practically nothing, no trees, no vegetation, no wind to send the coarse dust billowing away. I was trapped on a moon.