Happy with the kobolds, Doyle turns to the 13th room, the five-sided square with strange furniture. The room is interesting because of the design that he just can’t figure out how to repeat, but otherwise the layout is simple enough. A bit of a problem, as that also means it doesn’t lean towards any specific set of monsters except maybe kobolds.
That, or maybe wolves dressed up like grannies to play off that old story. Doyle shakes his core and refocuses on the room. Without thinking about it, he starts to list off a few monsters. ‘Wooden goats, kobolds, age the kobolds?, single mad bull but need some clay, maybe one assassin vine under a bed?’
After a quick look over the list, Doyle strikes off the bull. The room isn’t a shop, though some clay would be useful. Besides that though, the list is decent enough if a little samey. Admittedly, the idea of aging a kobold is a good idea, with the question being if their level is high enough or not. It might not work, of course, as kobolds aren’t directly related to dragons.
Nevermind the fact that Doyle doesn’t even know if dragons grow with age either. That is the general trend in their myth, but even with the soul nonsense, myth doesn’t always match reality. Which, as he thinks about it, is a very strange thing to think.
Doyle sighs and moves onto figuring out the 13th room. A single assassin vine should be fine and the under a bed quirk could work. There isn’t really enough space under a normal bed, but that is easily fixed by hollowing out the strange beds. After all, they are all solid pieces of material without any actual bedding. This leaves enough space for the assassin vine. Just a regular one, the elders cost a bit much for what is essentially a gimmick.
That taken care of, Doyle spreads a herd of 40 wooden goats across the room in random clumps centered around the wooden furniture. No particular reason for that, it just felt right to Doyle. Plus, while the furniture doesn’t hide them like grass does the grassen goat, the furniture can hide their numbers to a degree.
From there Doyle throws down 20 kobolds and has them hang around wherever the largest clump of goats is. Not purposefully random, but random enough that the room would change. Or not, he isn’t particularly bothered either way.
What is important though, is that with so few of them Doyle feels perfectly fine with making them all mages. To balance this out, some 20 magic users is a little intense, they get regular clothes instead of leather armor. As a nice kicker for any delvers, Doyle makes it all loot, which should drop quite often. Doyle doubts they are going to run out of clothes in the settlement, but perfectly fitted clothes will probably be popular.
Finished with that room, Doyle moves onto the 14th, the hall of mirrors. This room provides some interesting possibilities, mainly because the “mirrors” are actually just portals feeding back out the way it came in. That allows any monsters behind them to reach through and launch a sneak attack.
Of course, the best monster for that kind of attack is the assassin vine. Being able to be completely hidden yet still able to reach out and touch someone is valuable. This move, however, is a little cheaty so Doyle limits it to a single assassin vine.
Besides the assassin vine, Doyle decides to go with the myconids for this room. With the already trippy experience of a mirror hall, a bunch of spores to paralyze and knock out fits right in. The question was, how many? The room was big enough to really pack them in if he wanted to.
It honestly felt like the three vine rooms, though Doyle wasn’t going to leave this one for later. If only because he really wants to throw as many assassin vines at the vine rooms as possible. With a sigh, he falls back on the tried-and-true method. That of eyeballing it and adjusting it later if needed, because random is as random does.
So without much of a plan, Doyle throws down five sprout swarms, five lesser myconids, and a single lesser myconid troop guard. Not that many, but the assassin vine is a bit unfair so Doyle felt it was only fair to reduce the number of monsters in the room. After placing the monsters, he pulls back and is satisfied with the result.
This left the 15th room to fill. There wasn’t really a question on what would go there though. He was a goat dungeon and goats there would be! The tripping hazards made it perfect and the cheapness of the units allowed for a decent number of them.
What Doyle meant by a decent number was definitely up there. Of course, the sixth room had more monsters but when you throw 100 goats at a room only 36 meters to the side, it looks impressive. That is smaller than many sports fields. Oh, and it wasn’t just normal goats though that was a bulk of it. There were only 20 wooden goats and 10 grassen goats.
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Those in place, Doyle decides to pass on arming them. There were just too many of them to need armor. At least as far as he can tell. Maybe once someone reaches the floor, he can reassess the situation.
This leaves Doyle with 7740 points to spend and a vine room to spend them on. Though at this point Doyle remembers that he really should set up a farm zone to resupply the floor. That causes just a minor headache as he looks back over the floor to figure out where to cut points.
After doing a room by room tally, he finds that most points have been spent on the second room, the Null G area, and the 14th room. Particularly the second room, which spends almost four thousand points by itself. The problem with that is most of those points come from the windcutters.
In the end, though, Doyle caves and removes one of the windcutters and its kobold, then redistributing the 4 spare regular axebeaks to the other two. This drops the number of points used by 950. From there, he moves onto the Null G area. Then moves right on as he really likes the balance there.
Instead, he hits the 14th room and cuts the troop guard. 600 points removed but not quite enough so Doyle backtracks a room and removes 20 wooden goats. This leaves him with 9570 points to spend. To make things easier, he decided to hold back 20% of the floor’s spending limit so the farm can have twice the number of monsters that the floor held.
This meant he had 5050 points to spend on the vine room. A good bit less than he would have liked. One elder alone will blow 750 points, leaving barely enough for 14 normal assassin vines. That might seem like a lot compared to how many have been placed previously, but this is for 3 huge rooms worth of space.
Doyle couldn’t help but sigh. He had originally wanted at least three elders, one for the seventh room and two for the eighth. Now he is limited to just a single elder because even a single additional elder would require cutting three of the normal ones. That just isn’t sustainable for the vine rooms.
With a shake of his core, Doyle distributes the assassin vines. The elder, of course, goes near the eighth room’s exit. No wandering elders here. As for the normal assassin vines, they get split up between the seventh and eighth room. Four to the seventh room, which made it a bit of a roll of the dice whether a group of delvers would even see them. Then the remaining ten are placed in the eighth room.
It still wasn’t certain that a group would run into one of them, but it was better than could have been if he hadn’t cut away some of the monsters in the other rooms. Doyle sighed as he set his eyes on the Zero G area again. A fun little place that was, if anything, more of an experiment.
There are handholds and floating platforms throughout the massive room, but it could be improved. More specifically, this was the room he decided to carve up. It was tempting to mess with the square room with the five corners. Yes, very tempting, but Doyle knew better than that. To mess with reality bending when you are in that reality, tends to be a less than clever thing.
So Doyle chose the room based on a story, not the first, but the shadow. He was actually half tempted to carve the story as he remembered into the walls. That idea was tossed though as he only remembered bits and pieces. Plus, he didn’t exactly want to imbue the monsters with that story.
No, Doyle had another plan. One beneficial to both his monsters and the delvers. After all, getting used to zero G isn’t exactly the easiest thing. The question is how to represent that with a carving?
Doyle decides to start with the handholds. Those are simple enough, a person needs a good grip on them to better traverse the room. That doesn’t even need any fancy carving, but rather some simple stippling and or checkering. Whatever you called it, the idea was to carve a pattern of groves so you had something to grab besides a smooth surface. He had learned a bit about it when younger though most of that had fled his mind.
Still, he remembered enough to do a simple pattern across every hand hold. From there, he moved to the floating cubes. There were already some carvings from the handholds and he extended that. The lines extend outward and splay out. If he was still human, the design would have required a lot more work, but as a dungeon he can cheat. Each line is carved at the same time until the cubes are completely covered with the lines only stopping when they hit another line.
This wasn’t the most creative of ideas, but it worked and created a nice design. Doyle turns to the rest of the room. While what he had done so far would make it easier to move around the room, it wouldn’t do his main goal. That of improving people’s ability to adapt to the environment.
So with that in mind, Doyle started to carve simple scenes into the walls with the handholds as anchors. From each of them, figures grew that represented outer space and beings of all shapes and sizes existing there. No, not just existing, but learning and adapting.
Doyle fell quite deeply into the task, more so than when he is working on the great sphere of the seventh floor. The sphere has a particular design that, by design allows him to pick it up and drop it at a moment’s notice. This scene, however, just flows out of him. If he had any presence of mind, then breaking out of the zone would be easy enough. That was the trap though as he had nothing spare for such thoughts.
This meant that once finished Ally shocked him by informing him that a month had passed. The good news was nothing happened. A few groups tried to bash their heads against the boss but Ally hadn’t felt the need to inform him as they couldn’t even face the first patrol. While a little annoyed by not being informed the first time, he did admit that was fine going forward.
More interesting was that the founders hadn’t done another serious dive and Doyle very much wanted to go and figure out what was up with that. So with a thought, he refocused on the settlement itself only to see a very good reason for why they hadn’t been in all that much. The settlement had grown.