Doyle starts with his change on the first floor. More so because there isn’t much to change. The actual floor still does its job just fine. Instead, he implements his plan to allow Ally to travel through his dungeon, even if people are diving. This isn’t all that hard.
Because of the extra space on top and below the rooms, Doyle can create a large area with fairy sized holes leading to each of the rooms. The only problem he can see coming from this is that if anyone found the tunnels. Of course he adds a trapdoor to the holes so they won’t be found just by searching.
However, anyone able to manipulate stone or at least break it could find the tunnels. At the moment no one around can mess with his denser stone yet, so he adds a second trapdoor where it starts. And to finish this system of tunnels, he puts in a portal he plans to connect to a similar one on the second floor.
With that finished, Doyle moves onto the second floor and gives the floor a similar tunnel treatment. After that, he has one more change to make. While goats are sort of his thing, Doyle was never a fan of goat's milk. The clifftop goat he had placed for milking has to go. He had leveled it to five, so when he replaces the goat with a cow, he has the points to make the replacement a level 3 cow. Though he doesn’t know if higher levels change anything for stuff like milk.
Doyle turns to Ally, ‘Is milk from a higher level animal special in any way?’
Ally looks up from watching Ace talking to Jeremy and shrugs. ‘Well, yes, and no. This is one of those things where it depends. Specifically, as with most things, levels mean nothing. This all comes down to stats. In fact, your cows and their massive amount of constitution will produce amazing milk. Though at this point, this will amount to only being healthy milk. Something you already get from Moota, so I guess you get doubly healthy milk.’
‘Soon enough, the milk should start giving some minor benefits. Not to the point of healing or some such, but as a supplement. For instance, if used as the base of a healing potion, the potion will have an improved effect when healing bones. Even if the milk isn’t used like that, if constantly drunk, it will assist a person when healing their bones naturally. Now go back to messing with your floors. Those two are talking about some important things and I want to keep track of the settlement’s development.’
Doyle rolls his core but turns back to his second floor. With the information, he doesn’t mind plopping down a level three cow in place of the goat. Counting the bonuses it gets the cows constitution clocks in at a decent 23 points. A far cry from the 35 his level five goat had. But then again, he doesn’t want to give some super milk on his second floor, anyway. ‘Hopefully the settlement didn’t notice how good the goat’s milk was.’
Besides the cow though, once again there is not much else to change on the floor. It makes sense as Doyle had recently updated them, even if he did just gain a bunch of new stuff. ‘Though I guess most of the stuff was in potions and such. When I go back and update all the drops, I will have more to change.’
With a mental shrug and a bobble of his core, Doyle moves onto the third floor. With the random placement of stuff and multiple levels to the floor, tunnels are hard to figure out. In the end, he can only blindly set each room up with a hidden tunnel on any of the walls without an opening. Then, when the rooms get placed, have those tunnels connect up to a grid of tunnels. Worse yet, he can’t even get them to all exit into a safer, dense stone area. He protects them somewhat by cladding the tunnels in dense stone, but it won’t be as safe.
Tunnels figured out he makes one change to the monsters on the floor. From each of the mining groups Doyle removes three goats and six more goats from the farm area. With that he has just enough points to include some earthen cattle, one to each group. He doesn’t equip the cow or anything because he hasn’t used them yet.
Better they underperform the first time through. Plus, the mining groups have proven to be just a bit too much of an increase in difficulty at the moment, anyway. Not that this change is going to make the encounter easier. Depending on how good the cattle are, this could instead increase the difficulty.
Doyle takes another look over the floor and sighs, ‘I wanted to change some stuff up again, but I did that recently. There just isn’t anything to change at the moment.’
Doyle shakes his core and moves onto updating all the drops. The first thing he does is add a copper coin on top of everything. In fact, by thinking about it opened up a special loot screen with the coin already filled in.
{Default Loot:
All Floors, Every Creature: 1cp}
‘Huh, that is convenient. Though I thought I had to spawn stuff myself. I wonder what the catch is. Hey Ally, I just found the default loot option. Do you know what is up with that?’
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Ally stretches and sits up on her bed, ‘Did you finish updating your floor? It took you a while, we are halfway through the night.’
Doyle’s core dims, and he glances outside, only to find she is telling the truth. ‘Where did the time go? It didn’t feel like it took that long.’
Ally shrugs, ‘There wasn’t anything happening and you aren’t being rushed or anything. Give it some time and time will fly past for you when nothing important is happening. Anyway, it looks like we just popped another tutorial window.’
‘Default loot is like a more automated version of automating your floors. Apparently it is easier to set up because all the system does is attach the loot to the monster pattern. This is one of the conveniences the system provides. Each rule takes up half a floors worth of wisdom, so what? Five points? Yeah, that sounds about right. You have a lot of control over the specifics of the rule, so it is convenient. That and this gives you a use for all that extra wisdom.’
Doyle nods, ‘Interesting, I noticed that I would end up with way too much wisdom compared to how much I am gaining. Probably going to be a bunch of other things like this.’
Ally smiles, ‘Everyone has stat benefits like this. I’ve mentioned about the regen humans tend to get at around 25 constitution, this is similar. Besides paths, stats are one of the most common places for bloodlines to show up. Anyway, If you pull up the description of Wisdom right now it will have been added.’
Doyle tilts his core to the side and pulls up the description.
{Wisdom: The finesse of one’s mind. Your race’s crystalline mind can result in impressive non-standard results. Most important though is this increases the flexibility of your thoughts. This stat will increase your ability to connect disparate facts that others might not as well as form a mental defense of much greater strength than normal sapiants. What it does not do is make your judgement any better. One side benefit of wisdom for your race is that every ten points allows for the automation of a floor, and five points allows for dungeon-wide loot rules. This comes from warping a segment of your unconscious mind and setting the new pathways in crystal perfection.}
He rolls back upright, ‘You’re right, the description has and five points allows for dungeon-wide loot rules added to it. Though now that I am looking at wisdom, it reminds me I still haven’t checked presence. Let’s check it now.’
{Presence: A mind’s specialty is projecting. Your race has turned what for most is an external stat into an internal one. This represents a core’s ability to affect their own monsters on a mental level. This stat will increase your ability to fine tune the behavior patterns of non-sapient monsters.}
Ally looks it over and shakes her head, ‘Well that isn’t too descriptive. It doesn’t really tell us more than we already knew.’
Doyle takes a bit longer to look over the description again before disagreeing with her. ‘No, it might seem similar to what we knew, but it is different. The description specifically calls out behavior patterns and the fact the stat doesn’t work on sapients. We didn’t know that before, we knew presence was going to let me control my monsters better. Going by what it says, I feel this mostly affects how stuff acts when invaders are on a floor instead of during down time. Plus, with so little listed, there must be a lot of hidden things still. After all, it is the shortest description. Even agility has more text.’
Ally squints her eyes at the screen before nodding. ‘That makes some sense. Though it might also be possible that most of the text for presence comes from how the stat interacts with your sapient monsters. But since we don’t have any yet, the description doesn’t show us anything about that.’
Doyle nods, but then realizes something that has low-key been bothering him. ‘I keep nodding and what not and you respond to it, yet you aren’t in the same room as my core. How does that work?’
Ally pauses as the non sequitur washes over her and then laughs. ‘You don’t pay much attention to my room, do you?’
Doyle bobbles, ‘Well, it is your room. I’m not going to creep on you or anything.’
Ally wipes a tear from her eyes, ‘Fair enough, I appreciate that. Though the answer falls more in line with me not returning the favor. If you just look across from my bed, you will see one of the screens I have up displays your core room. You’ve probably not noticed it because that is also the screen I use when looking around the place.’
Doyle tilts to the side, ‘A little creepy to be watched but fair play. If I had paid attention, I would have noticed. Anyway, moving on. Did you find out anything important from Ace and Jeremy’s talk?’
Ally nods, ‘We might finally see some other people around here. Ace has been sending out scouts to watch for Jan’s return. While there haven’t been signs of her return, the scouts have seen some people down that small river over that way. You know, the way those thugs managed to escape. Apparently the people backed off when they spotted the scouts. But if there is one creature that curiosity kills more than cats, it is humans. They will be back.’
Doyle beams, ‘I don’t know why, but hearing that more people will be around makes me ecstatic.’
Ally shrugs, ‘You’re a dungeon core. Of course, the prospect of more divers excites you. So far not much has happened here that would trigger them. There are a few people here and no one of any real threat around. You can’t really kill anyone and no one can kill you so you feel safe just spinning your wheels as long as enough people keep diving in.’
Doyle dims down for a second, ‘I don’t care that I’m a murder cave but it still doesn’t feel all that good hearing I have instincts about it.’
Ally rolls her eyes, ‘You have instincts for it the same way humans have the instinct to kill small animals for food. Admittedly, the instincts you have are stronger in some ways, but you’re still a sapient being with control of yourself.’