I stared up at that blue and green orb, standing at the border of my dungeon, and couldn’t formulate a thought for all the emotions passing through me. I ignored a new itch in the back of my mind, simply staring up as shadow slowly hid the planet from my view, watching as the rotation brought islands into view, a swirling mass of clouds disappearing to the planets north as, what was plainly not earth, gently continued on its path.

It took me a long time to get my thoughts in order and bring myself back around from the shock, finally getting a thought through my head as emotions overtook me. ‘That rat bastard!’ was the first thought and emotion. ‘I spend half of eternity clinging to a spark of life in the void between life and death and he sends me to live out a second life in the void of space? What kind of twisted joke is this? Banishing me just for giggles, to watch me slowly go insane from loneliness?’ I couldn’t see a single light in the dark half of the planet showing whatever lived down there wasn’t advanced enough to come up here and go rooting through my dungeon. I stood there at the precipice screaming my silent rage into the void, cursing the planet, the moon, and the twisted guide that couldn’t be assed to stick me somewhere livable. I’d have to wait for who knows how many thousands or millions of years, praying for something on that planet to develop enough brains to wonder what life on the moon might be like.

I stood there, taking in air that didn’t exist for lungs I didn't have as my rage filled mind tried to stay fueled. I couldn’t let despair take me, i wouldn’t let despair take me. I’d spent who knows how long clinging to a spark without any hope of coming back, I’d not let this bring me down. With that i turned back towards my interior and finally focused on the itch digging into the back of my mind.

Dungeon forces have been defeated.

Core exposed.

‘Defeated my ass.’ I spat at the screen as I stomped further in, then had the mind to turn and stomp back to the entrance. I knew what had beaten them, the spiders and hoppers would probably have asphyxiated due to the lack of oxygen, as all I held just slipped off into space, and the slimes would have boiled or froze as the temperature and pressure difference hit them. . So, I stood before my entrance again and tried to seal it up before I felt an odd blocking sensation.

A dungeon cannot seal its entrance.

Well, that left a few questions, first and foremost, how in the hell was I supposed to make a functional dungeon with nothing in it. I could carve caves and plant traps but what kind of dungeon didn’t have minions? I cursed and thought it over for a minute before coming at it from a new angle. I started to use up my general mineral stores, having plenty of the metal to fill the room, I decided to make a crude door. It was nearly as thick as my forearm was long, then I decided to round it up to thirty centimeters just to have a nice even number. The door was on hinges that, unsurprisingly, broke the first time I moved the door into position. It took some fenagaling but I managed to get the hinges thick enough to hold the doors weight and, after a quick prayer to whoever the guids enemy was, I pushed the door shut, the dull metal gliding into position without a sound.

So I now had a door but I was a bit suspicious that I hadn't unlocked any new building options like air lock or airtight door. So I'd have to experiment. Instead of trying to seal off my dungeon and keep it air tight I moved to my experiment room and tried my hand at sealing that shut entirely, which managed to work. I was worried about how porous the stone might be but I didn't have much to work with and would just have to pray the wall could hold an atmosphere’s worth of pressure. I took stock of my experimental tube farm, noticing that the glow moss had practically desiccated, dry plants crumbling into dust at the slightest touch, or they could have been frozen but the difference was practically a moot point. The nodes were all as dead as doornails so i’d have to start from scratch, or so I thought. I’d only barely noticed the center of the node expanding slightly so I moved in to check it out, dusting the dead moss away from the point and exposing vibrant green growth. The growth quickly started to fade and die but I knew what was happening, my nodes were trying to start growing again. I moved quickly to help my nodes take advantage of their growth, knowing my moss could produce oxygen, when I was stopped by the new items on my nodes list.

Nodes available for spawning:

Glowmoss: 4 per cycle.

Glowshroom: 3 per cycle.

General mineral: 3 per cycle.

Creeping Crone: 2 per cycle.

An almost translucent white vine found in caves that resembles thin hair. Produces oxygen.

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Copper ore: 2 per cycle.

A green stone that, when refined, produces copper.

While I felt a little underwhelmed by my third floor unlocks, the aluminum-like substance seeming to be a higher tier metal, I welcomed the chance to have another oxygen producing plant. So, without much hesitation, I spent my nodes wherever they could fit, watching my new vine appear on a wall, thin extra vines fluttering down like hair in a wind, before quickly drying out and crumpling to the ground. In a moment of half genius I planted my copper nodes as well, thinking I might be able to make a crushable gasket for my door, though I wasn't sure if that would work at all. If all else fails I'd figure out a way to solder my door to its frame and leave as small of a gap as possible. I might not be able to get my dungeon perfectly air tight but I could certainly try my hand at out producing the waste.

So I spent more than a few hours working to add as many nodes as the space could take, hoping I'd eventually hit the point where I made enough pressure for my nodes to grow out properly and fill the room. I also considered that I wouldn't be able to make the room over-pressure itself, as I hadn't seen any problems caused by over-pressure before. Or I thought I hadn't, I was no doctor and I didn't think slimes and spiders would be overly bothered by an extra atmosphere or two. However I had to err on the side of pessimism here. I also sat down, letting my node spawn cooldown expire, and started to craft a small safe, a square of metal with about a cubic foot of space for an interior. This would be my test for a different type of gasket, assuming the copper failed or just wasn’t as good as I could hope. I sat, looking at the door to the ‘safe’ and focused on one thought. ‘Cork gasket’. I knew full well, due to my occupation and working on older cars, that cork was used for more than just bottling up wine and whiskey so i did my best to remember just how it acted in my hands when i was holding cork, holding that image in my mind i tried to connect it to my biomatter store, which was painfully low at 34 biomatter, too many spiders not enough farming.

Slowly the gasket started to form, looking entirely too much like styrofoam for my liking but I'd take anything that could hold air. The green material formed around the rim I had made for the door of the safe, applying like a putty rather than a wood, until I had a complete ring around the rim. Then I closed the door and tipped the safe onto its back with the door up, spending some stone to put weight on the door. I knew adding pressure inside could eventually blow open the door, rendering this test pointless, but I only needed this experiment to show whether I could make a simple biomatter gasket or if I'd have to fool around and make a sort of copper gasket, after spawning a new cave hopper.

It took a little time for the cooldowns to expire, and I spent all but one cave moss on the surrounding room, accepting that there would be overlap but wanting the room to quickly pressurize. Then, with more than a little trepidation, I approached the safe. ‘I’m not a human, my head isn’t real.’ I repeated that mantra in my head, knowing I'd need to see inside the safe to place a node in it. I approached and wondered if this was a sort of phantom limb situation, feeling a part that didn’t exist any more, would my mind allow it or would I be bouncing my head off the safe? I knew I could drop a node inside then shut the door but when I spawned a node it spawned with a good bit of extra material instead of slowly growing an inch at a time when it had been removed in its entirety. With my mind sufficiently occupied by inane thoughts I quickly pushed my head forward into the safe where darkness encompassed my senses.

It certainly felt like I was just kneeling with my head in a box but I didn't stop to question it, mostly fearing I'd be stuck with my head in a box until I scrapped the safe. I quickly planted the node, my vision filling with a soft blue glow, and retreated, sitting back and patiently watching the safe door. It didn’t take too long before I determined I was doing something wrong, the simple fact being air wasn’t visible. I could sit here for days and not realize every oxygen molecule was slipping right out of some crack or gap in my wall, but I was truly stuck. I didn’t have enough general mineral left to coat my experiment room and if I scrapped my door I'd only get a fraction of it back. My only real hope was to sit back and hope something would start to show improvement, otherwise I'd be stuck digging by hand until I found a floor that held a more useful material, or I could spawn enough nodes that the leaks would be less of a critical problem and more of an annoyance.

With that depressing thought in mind, also forcing me to remember i was trapped up here without any companionship until the life on the planet below evolved into something sentient, i forced myself to sit and wait, eventually closing my eyes and falling into sleep, or maybe it was a form of hibernation for overworked dungeons. Whatever it was, I awoke with a start, jumping up and finding myself in a similar state as I had been. My nodes hadn’t grown and I was still stuck in a dark enclosed room, a strange sense of claustrophobia. I heaved a sigh, realizing I'd probably been out of it for hours and hadn’t been placing my nodes down for that entire time.

It was more than a little disheartening to find out how i’d wasted so much time but i had to keep working, even if i wasn’t getting any delvers any time soon it didn’t mean i wanted to sit around and examine moon rocks for the next week while my dungeon re-compressed. So, I moved on to my little gasket experiment, kneeling down and pressing my face into it, only to end up surprised. It was a complete success, I couldn't hear hissing on the inside and the glow moss was still alive. I could only guess that the larger patch of glow moss combined with the smaller space to make a perfect little room that filled quick enough to keep the moss alive. While the success did make me happy I moved quickly away to try a new experiment, an oxygen chamber.

Perhaps i should name it something else but, the idea was to make a small chamber with a moss node and let it oxygenate, then put a pinhole in it to let it leak air naturally into the experiment room, hopefully finding the sweet spot between producing enough to keep it alive and not producing enough. With that in mind I put a pinhole in my safe, sticking my head back in to confirm the sound of a whistling leak. I also had the sense to start a timer to see how long the leak would take to kill my moss, if it managed to kill it.

With that out of the way I moved on to make more oxygen chambers, digging into the wall to make more one square foot areas that would host a new node, using stone to act as a barrier. I wouldn’t put a pinhole in them yet, planning to time them out and see how long it would take a single chamber to become viable. While I preferred the moss for these experiments, already knowing it would grow on every available surface, I added in the creeping crone to just make sure I knew the capability of everything I had to play.