I have read a lot of dungeon stories. But I never truly appreciated just how incredibly uneventful yet incredibly stressful being a dungeon was. The first three days after the adventures left saw me scrambling to get as deep as I could while maintaining enough Essence to carve out a boss room and relocate the Cave Spider Guardian on a moment’s notice. On top of that, I still need to keep a buffer between me and the first delver so they couldn‘t just show up and break me. A delver who still hasn’t shone up again. At this point, I’m convinced he’s either dead, or he escaped. It didn‘t look like he had supplies for a week and a half on him.

The fourth or fifth days were, contrary to my expectations, devoid of visitors. That was great for me, since the newly claimed section of mine shaft was completely empty. No traps, no monsters, no obstacles of any kind, and I needed time to correct that. I greatly scaled back the rate of expansion during those two days to focus on reinforcing the dungeon. I went heavier on the pit traps in the new section, changing some of them to be wider at the bottom than the top to make getting out more difficult. The lack of monsters was the bigger issue. Because it took hours to save up for even one of them, I had to cannibalize the second mine shaft to bolster the first. This left the second mine shaft rather bare, but it was only a distraction at the moment, so it wasn’t a major loss in overall protection.

The sixth day passed and still no one showed up. I’ll admit, I was getting antsy. I kept popping over the entrance, watching for the adventurers to return. It started getting to where I was spending as much or more time at the entrance as I was spending working on the dungeon. To both distract myself, and because I couldn’t delay it any long, I finally moved the core room deeper. I’ve honestly needed to do that for a while now, but I wanted to hold off until I found the end of the mine shaft and just move once. Twice at this point, I suppose. Since I haven’t found the end of the mineshaft yet, my plan is to place the boss room in the middle of the tunnel and have the core room built off to one side of it. That way, I could keep the boss between me and both the first spearman and other adventurers. The passage connecting the two is gonna be fairly short, but it’s going to be serpentine to reduce the chances of a stray attack making it to the core room.

The move itself was very stressful and incredibly uncomfortable. During the move, I put all of my monsters on high alert, not that they weren’t always like that, as well as put up some temporary barriers of thick steel rods anchored into the surround rock. I placed them only in the section of mine shaft between me and the entrance. My Essence gain dropped quite a bit, but that was better than my core getting stolen or destroyed while on the move. I did one last loop around the dungeon to make sure everything was in place. I resisted doing a second loop. Stalling wouldn’t make the process any better. I took a moment to center myself, then ordered Pete picked me up. The sensation of someone rummaging through my guts returned full force.

Getting to the mineshaft was a bit awkward. The Skeleton Miners were nowhere near coordinated enough to climb ladders while carrying something. Or climb a ladder period. I wanted to get this over with quickly, so to get me down the ladder, I had Pete drop me to Not-Pete. Unsurprisingly, skeletons are not great at catching things. At least I now know that I don’t take fall damage. At least not from that height.

This is why you’re my favorite, Pete.

To get Pete down, I just ordered him to stand on the very edge and ordered him to disassemble himself. Most of his bones rained down, but some were stuck at the top and required a spider to push them over the edge. Once Pete reassembled himself, he picked me up, and we continued down the tunnel.

Progress through the mines was, unfortunately, slow. I had to have Pete had to put me down not too long after entering the main mine shaft. The sensations that came with being moved continued to get worse the longer the move took and I needed to be put down to recover. I had to rest six or seven times throughout the trip. My breaks were not wasted, though. I used the break to first carve out the boss room and then the core room. They were just rough stone cubes, but it was a start. I used the other breaks to brainstorm about what I wanted to do with them. It just felt wrong to leave them as bare stone rooms. Especially the core room. That place it the literal heart of the dungeon and, even if I’d rather no one get far enough to see it, I think it should look the part.

For the boss room, I want to give the Cave Spider Guardian the biggest advantage I can, but I don’t know how it fights yet. The best I think I can do is to rough up the floor just enough to give delvers uneven footing, but not enough that the Guardian finds it difficult to move around. That’ll probably change as I add more floors, but I can‘t put giving an even or interesting challenge over my safety. For decorations, I shouldn’t be too fancy. If I had the corpses of the undead spiders, I could scatter them around the room. But I don’t have those yet. There will definitely be webs everywhere. And old mining equipment. I could scatter some non-undead skeletons around the floor as well. Having the Guardian step on a skull and break it could be a fun, intimidating introduction. I could also have some bundled up skeletons and web sacks hanging from the ceiling. If I can get the web containers working, I could also add a few of those for anyone that wants to try to get them.

Stolen novel; please report.

For the core room, I don‘t know how much I can hide or protect the core. In the last one, I was in a webbed over niche. But that’s not exactly hard to find. Barriers that can’t be bypassed also restrict my Essence gain, so a box or cage is a no-go. If I could make crystals that looked like me and glow, I could just hide in plain sight. But I don’t have glowing crystals yet. A pedestal makes me feel like I’m offering myself up a silver platter. If I can’t just block access or present myself front and center, that leaves hiding myself, or making myself annoying to get to. Or both. So how do I do that?

Where I’ll be in the room aside, I don’t want it to be bare. Fancy is out. I can’t justify the time and Essence right now. I like the idea of showcasing all the trials a party had to go through to get to the core room. But I don’t have enough to pull that off right now. Maybe I could do simple carvings of the story of the first three floors? But If they figure it out, it would spoil the next two floors. They might also question why the currently non-existent second and third floors match up with the carvings once I make them. Not that one then. Hmmm…Do I want to keep the abandoned mine theme for the core room? Probably not. I’m gonna be moving it as I go deeper and I don’t want to change the theme each time I make a new floor. The core room is supposed to be special, the very end of the dungeon, and I want it to feel that way.

I didn’t have an answer by the time I’d reached the new core room. For the moment, I had Pete just put me in a niche on the far wall. Pete and Not-Pet had their own alcoves in the room while the pair of small spiders got a fissure in the ceiling. Watching the spider climb up the wall to their new home, I had an idea.

What if I put myself on the ceiling? No super high, but just out of reach? And not in a cage or anything either. That way I’m not really blocking access, I’m just making myself more difficult to get to. Isn’t that the whole point of a dungeon? How do I want to do this? I need some way to hold myself to the ceiling, but not in a way that makes it impossible to get to me. That means I can’t be secured into anything. That means I have to be loose. To be loose, I have to be resting on top of something. Or maybe I could be inside something without a lid? Would a cage without its top work?

First, I raised the height of the ceiling. I didn’t just make it a taller box, though. The roof of the core room was going to be a dome. When I finished rasing it, it was high enough that even the spearman would have trouble stabbing me without jumping a bit. Not that I wanted him to try. To create the supports for my holder, I used steel rods that were anchored in the ceiling. There were four rods, each over two feet long. From the rods, I extruded horizontal bars on the side and a base with just enough space between the bottom bars to keep me from slipping through. I had a spider collect me from my niche and place me in the cage. Then I checked how I did.

Essence: 137 (+12/hour)

Damn. I could leave it be, but I’d be giving up seventy-two Essence every day. That isn’t acceptable. Could I just remove the bars on the side?

Removing the bars on the side fixed the issue, but now it looked like I was setting myself up to be grilled. I shifted the metal underneath me into a ring just small enough that I wouldn’t fit through it. After that, I adjusted the four steel rods so that they angled out from the steel ring. It was a super simple cradle, but it held me out of reach and didn’t affect my Essence gain. It was as plain as the rest of the room. I had some ideas about inlaying the steel with some other metal in a geometric pattern, but that would have to wait. So would decorating the rest of the core room. I needed to finish the boss room first.

Moving onto the boss room, I first absorbed the Cave Spider Guardian and re-summoned them in their new home. Even though I was prepared for it, the immense cost of the monster hurt. There was so much I could have used that Essence for. But the boss was important, and so was their room. Currently, the floor of the boss room, while not smooth, was not rough enough to do what I wanted.

While the real fine-tuning of the floor would have to wait until I could see actual adventures on it, I could still rough it out. Pete was gonna be my stand-in adventurer. I sent him into the boss room and had him and the Cave Spider Guardian move about it. I had them running, jumping, strafing, moving backwards, charging forwards, crawling, etc... They were moving in every combination of movements I could think of. They move around the boss room repeatedly and at as many speeds as I could get them. I probably spent too long on it, to be honest. It was hours of this before I was happy, but I got to where Pete of regularly tripping or stumbling during his movements, while the Guardian was moving around easily enough. Sure, skeletons didn’t have the best coordination in the first place, but Pete was the best I had. I just hope that this wasn’t all a waste of time.

I did some light decorating of the boss room. That amounted to placing some skeletons around the room and tasking a couple of Cave Spiders to web the place up. I domed the ceiling in the boss room as well and extruded stalactites of different lengths for it. I wanted to do a bit more in the boss room, but I’d already sent longer on this than I Intended. My defenses would not build themselves, Particularly in the buffer zone between me and the spearman.

On a side note, I don’t think that the mine shaft is not an actual mine shaft. I’d assumed that was what it was with all the mining equipment and the ore I’d found, but there were only a handful of branching passages I didn’t create. With a mineshaft this long, I’d expect the place to be a confusing maze of tunnels as the miners chased ore veins. I’m starting to worry that I did not start in a mine, but in a tunnel through the mountain or to some subterranean world.

I didn’t get to dwell on it much longer, however. I’d worked through the night and, as dawn broke outside, I felt three people enter the dungeon. The adventures were back.