Mike was still in the expanse of white space but he was no longer aimlessly floating along. Instead he was reclining in a comfortable leather chair thumbing through the book that had been given to him. It was titled "The Dungeon Instruction Book" and was split into three sections. The first section of the instruction book was just an introduction. It reiterated everything Cali had told him and went into some more detail about where he was and how things worked. Apparently this place was actually his own personal Dungeon Workshop. While he was here time would not pass outside this space, and he could create anything he wanted in here simply by willing it into existence (which he had promptly tested by recreating the chair from his apartment). The purpose of this Workshop was to allow him a place to fully design and his Dungeon before connecting it to the world. He would return to the Workshop at the beginning of every month in order to make any upgrades he wanted but between those visits he would be unable to make changes so he was warned to go over everything and make sure he had completely finished before triggering the connection to Calimandao. The three crystals he had been given were called knowledge crystals. They could be transformed into whatever form he wanted and contained a wide array of knowledge to help him with his design. One had information from Earth, one from Calimandao, and one from all the other Dungeons that had been created thus far.

The second section of the instruction book outlined the basic rules and requirements of designing a Dungeon. Essentially everything came down to something called Dungeon Points. He was given a certain number to begin with and everything he added to his Dungeon would cost him some of those points. Each month he could earn more and then when he returned to the Workshop he could use them to expand upon what he had already built. While he was in the Workshop he could freely test things out to see how much they cost him and decide if something is worth purchasing, but as soon as he triggered the connection to Calimandao his purchases would be locked in and his points would be spent.

There were four ways to earn points. First, Mike would gain points whenever a Challenger entered his Dungeon, which scaled with the level of the Challenger. Ordinary people would earn him a small handful of points whereas powerful high-leveled Challengers would earn him a lot. Second, he would gain points whenever he absorbed unattended items brought into his Dungeon from outside, scaled to the value of the object. Objects could be absorbed each day at midnight and only if left unattended for at least ah hour. Third, he would gain points whenever a Challenger was killed or expelled, which again scaled with the level of the challenger. Whenever somebody would die inside a Dungeon the Dungeon Master had the option to expel the challenger instead, which meant they got deposited outside the nearest entrance and would be unable to enter the Dungeon again until the beginning of the next month. Killing or expelling both yielded the same amount of points. The fourth and final way to earn points was to invest them in the Core Room. Each month, after triggering the connection to Calimandao, any unspent points remaining were automatically invested into the Core Room. If any challengers made it there these points would be lost and used to reward the Challengers who managed to make all the way through. However, if no challenger made it to the Core Room by the end of that month then the Dungeon Master would be rewarded with double their investment back.

At a minimum all Dungeons must include at least one Entrance to serve as the connection point to Calimandao, exactly one Core Room which had a bunch of restrictions on what it was and was not allowed to contain, and at least one valid path between every Entrance and the Core Room. The exact definition of a "valid path" actually took up the majority of this section. The instruction book went over what was and was not "valid" in excruciating detail, covering a wide variety of edge cases and unusual scenarios, but from what Mike could tell, all it boiled down to was that it must always be physically possible for a typical Challenger to get from every Entrance to the Core Room. A Dungeon typically included a number of dangerous things along the way to prevent Challengers from just walking straight through unimpeded. Actual costs of everything were very complicated to calculate, but as a general rule the more dangerous something was the more points it cost.

A Dungeon Masters had the freedom to add anything they could imagine into to their Dungeon, but everything typically ended up falling into five general categories; Environment, Props, Mobs, Loot or Rules. Creative Dungeon Masters could potentially come up with something which overlaps multiple categories or even something that falls outside of these categories entirely, but these five helped simplify things, especially for newer Dungeons. Environment referred to the foundations of a Dungeon, including the physical structure of the walls, floors or ceiling, as well as less tangible things like lighting, temperature or air quality. Props referred to things designed to be moved around within the Dungeon. This could include things designed to enable a Challenger to traverse sections of a Dungeon, like boxes, ladders or ropes, but could also refer to certain equipment or traps. Mobs were animated creatures who populated and defended the Dungeon. They could either be preprogrammed with a series of instructions or could be granted certain levels of intelligence and independence for additional points. Loot was anything that could exist outside of the Dungeon and was the most complicated category to determine point cost. The vast majority of Loot did not have a specific cost but instead modified the cost of whatever it was added to. For instance, it could potentially make a harsh Environment cheaper if there was valuable Loot added somewhere within it that Challengers could harvest, or Loot could make a difficult Mob cheaper if it dropped when the Mob was defeated. Since Loot could be anything that could exist outside of the dungeon it was also possible for an ambitious Dungeon Master to try to make something designed to act upon the outside world, but anyone who tried to do that would find such Loot prohibitively expensive and nearly impossible for all but the most advanced Dungeons to afford. Rules were not physical things but expressions of pure will imposing themselves on reality within a Dungeon. This could include trivial Rules like [When a certain button is pressed, a specific door will open.] or complicated ones like [Living things in this room aren't affected by Gravity unless they are carrying a certain Prop.].

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The point cost of anything added to the Dungeon depended on a lot of different factors. The Base Cost of anything was determined by a measurement of how dangerous it was and how difficult it would be for a Challenger to get past it. This Base Cost is then adjusted by a bunch of modifiers, reducing or increasing the Final Cost as applicable.

There were too many modifiers for Mike to remember all of them, but the two most important ones seemed to be Theme and Synergy. Theme was a measure of how closely something was related to the Dungeon Master's home world. If Mike were to create something which was common on Earth or well known in Earth fiction there would be a significant discount, whereas if he were to create something that nobody on Earth had ever heard of there would be a significant cost increase. Synergy looked at how something interacted with everything else around it in the Dungeon. The Base Cost of something only takes into account how dangerous that thing was on its own, whereas the Synergy modifier takes into account where it is placed within the Dungeon and how everything around it affects its threat level. A Mob placed in a perfect environment for it to take advantage of cover or ambush unsuspecting Challengers would cost more than that same Mob placed in an environment where it was hard to take advantage of its strengths. The Synergy modifier also incentivized putting easier challenges near the beginning of the Dungeon and harder challenges near the end.

The third and final section of the instruction book was the longest, and reminded Mike of the patch notes you might see for a video game. It was basically a long list of extra rules that Cali had tacked at some point during the past three hundred years after coming up with the initial design of how Dungeons work. Many of these rules were obviously added in response to Dungeon Masters discovering loopholes in her rules or designing completely unfair challenges that went against the spirit of the whole system. These could range anywhere from the obvious to the bizarre, including things like [You can't make a rule that gives you more points], [No Time Travel] and [The maximum discount that can be granted by adding Loot to something is half the Base Cost and Loot beyond this value cannot be added]. Mike skimmed through them and could already tell that he would have to work pretty hard if he wanted to find some kind of exploit in the system that hadn't already been tried and patched. Besides, even if he managed to find one it was likely that Cali would add another rule patching it too.

----------------------------------------

Mike heaved a sigh as he closed the book. That was a lot of information to remember. He would probably have to keep going back to refer to it while working on his design. Since time was stopped outside his Workshop until he activated the connection to Calimandao he apparently had as much time as he needed, but he still didn't have big ideas on what sort of Dungeon to build. He turned his attention to his three knowledge crystals and thought about what form he should give them to make it easiest to access the information. After spending some time weighing his options, he waved a hand and willed a remote control and a big screen television into existence. Then, following the directions in the instruction book and focusing on the crystals, he willed them to fly into the television set and transformed them into three streaming apps called Earth, Calimandao and Dungeons.

Going through them one by one and scrolling though options he saw that it had worked exactly as he had intended. The Earth app contained all the information he could ever want from Earth, (including every television show and movie ever made), the Calimandao app contained everything he could want to know about this new world he had been brought to, and the Dungeons app contained information about each of the other Dungeons that had been created thus far. Well, he needed ideas, and that seemed like as good a place to start as any. Mike sat back, got comfortable, and began to binge through everything on the Dungeons app.