What Doyle missed was that Ace was preparing alternate options in case things go south. In Ace’s opinion, no one else in the little group of rebels was proper leadership material. Ben had done an amazing job of picking up followers, but that is all they’re good for. Give them a task and they’ll do it. Ask them to make a decision and they turn it back on Ben or the lady.

All of this and more was extracted from the group within only a few interviews. In fact, the reason they were given a single big house was to centralize them. Ace was actually worried what would happen when they got back to the place up river.

Then again, Ace was worried about them in general. The others in the group didn’t seem to have any mental issues and yet something has caused them to lose some of that spark that makes a person their own being. Doctor’s best guess is that the system’s arrival broke them. They’re still the people they were before, but with such an unpredictable event they just can’t.

Doctor even suspected that most of them stayed with Ben less because of loyalty and more because he asked them to follow him before the council did. Not that all the people were quite in it that deep. In fact, Doctor had managed to start pulling some of them back to reality. Ace, however, stopped him from going too far.

If they fully woke up, as it were, they might want to leave Ben and that could be the last straw. Instead, Ace had Doctor keep them stable and productive. Though that last one wasn’t exactly the hardest. You just give them a task and they’ll do it if they feel capable of it. If they don’t? They’ll just turn it down until you stop trying to push it on them.

Ace found it somewhat funny that one of the first post-system locks was being used to guard the psych reports of people who weren’t even citizens of his town. Not that he could control it. Still, Ace was hopeful that the lady would pick up where Ben had left off and Doctor was low key prepping the group for the handover.

They weren’t in too much of a rush, though. The ninjas had gotten an in with the council up river so there would be a warning if things were going to go down.

And so time passed and six days later, deep in the dungeon, Doyle finished setting up the tenth floor. It was a tough problem as he really had wanted to put a town in each of the mini caverns along the way to the boss’ cavern. Nevermind the fact that he wanted a few myconids to go around and build stuff. Except that last bit ended up solving his problem.

Why limit himself to only making one settlement? There aren’t any rules saying he can’t have abandoned villages. In fact, the fungal construction skill made it so things would work out even better.

So what was Doyle’s solution? Simple, he would have only a few of the mini caverns be inhabited at once and the myconids would be migratory. As one place falls apart, a group of myconids would move in and the construction crew would build it anew.

It wasn’t fancy and Doyle wasn’t going to have to use his dungeon rules to make it work. That, however, was the beauty of it to him. The floor wouldn’t be resetting or randomly moved around like some of his other floors. Instead, it would naturally develop.

Mind you, he understood this likely wouldn’t be noticed by most people. While things would change, it wouldn’t be fast and what did change wouldn’t mechanically do anything. To Doyle though, it was like one of those ant farms. Fun to watch even if in the end nothing really changed.

That, however, doesn’t explain what each settlement would have in it or how many. Because sure, random migrations are cool, but it still has to be a dungeon floor. So with that in mind, the earlier settlements will have weaker monsters.

There were a total of eight groups in the mini caverns, which means a third of the caverns will be inhabited at any point in time. Those seven groups were split into three. Oh, and of course the group of three construction myconids were free roaming.

So, the first of the three types had three groups and was made of three swarms, two lesser, one myconid, and nine shriekers. Next up had three groups and was made of five swarms, three lesser, one guard, one myconid, nine shriekers, and one violet fungus. The last had the final groups and contained the same as the second except it had three myconids, 30 shriekers, and 3 violet fungus.

All those groups ended up costing a smidge under 15k points. This was a few thousand less than he had originally been planning until he started doing the math for the myconid boss. It of course used the three free levels, but then on top of that it needed five more levels over the floor’s limits. That added up to 1,500 points, which on its own isn’t that much, until you remember that it then got multiplied by five for an actual total of 7,500 points.

Doyle had been playing with the idea of a raid boss, but that would have to wait for quite a few more points to spend. A raid involves six parties and so a raid boss takes up six boss slots. Not a problem at the moment, except each of those slots requires an extra expense. The good news is that each extra slot does not in fact require the amount to be multiplied by five.

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While the number of points available does go up at a decent clip, it would take quite a while before he has almost 23 and a half million points to spend. However, each slot used costs the original boss cost over again. That meant instead of 7,500 points, a raid boss myconid would cost 45,000 points. The floor didn’t even start with that many to spend before he took out the farm tithe.

Sure, Doyle could have made it a half raid and it would have only cost 22,500 points or set up another few myconids as bosses. In the end though, that wasn’t what he had envisioned for the floor so those nifty options would have to wait. In particular, boosting his Intelligence gained more importances as besides another path to boost the multiplier, that was the best way to get more points on his future floors.

So, along with the boss myconids, the final group in the large cavern was made up of ten swarms, nine lesser, three guards, eight myconids, 34 shriekers, and five violet fungus. This was quite the large number of monsters, but they all fit in the final cavern with room to spare. Oh, and while technically not part of the group, the three construction myconids would walk towards the final cavern and depending on how close to the floor’s entrance would decide if they made it.

But that was all just the monsters. If Doyle had been only focusing on them, he could have been finished in a short afternoon. While limits can spur creativity, there is only so much you can do with six fungus monsters on a fungus floor. No, where most of his time got spent was on designing the settlements.

Though you might remember that Doyle was going to let the myconids build their settlements, so how could he be designing them? Sure, he could hard-code what the settlements should look like into them. That still wouldn’t be in line with his goal.

Doyle’s answer was simple enough, partly cribbed from Ace, and yet it netted him a new skill. At the most basic level it is an extension of that old saying, “build it and they will come”. Except in this case it was more along the lines of, “build a road and they’ll build on it”. Ace used this idea to make sure people mostly colored inside the lines when building stuff in the second ring and Doyle raised stone in such a way as to leave stone paths.

Though that was just on the surface. A myconid village was more than just houses on a road. They would be building areas to grow their mushrooms, places to grow different mushrooms, and of course other places to grow mushrooms. Yeah, the myconids mostly grew a variety of mushrooms for all their situations.

Going to another old saying, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, except in this case all the myconids had was mushrooms. There were differences, though. Food mushrooms, tree mushrooms, construction mushrooms that somehow differ from tree mushrooms, and mushrooms that get turned into small objects. The last one in particular needed those shelf mushrooms, which was a little difficult as they generally grow on actual trees and don’t quite mesh with the “tree” mushrooms.

So, after having a small group of myconids build a town for themselves, Doyle got to work sculpting the terrain so the settlements would be built in a way beneficial to the dungeon. Of course, there were the roads. Simple enough to make as all that involved was raising some stone just slightly above the rest and made the stone itself denser. That way they wouldn’t gather standing water and mushrooms would have a harder time taking root.

After that was creating some shallow areas for water to pool and raising areas to prevent that. This would cause the myconids to grow food mushrooms closer to the pools and the trees farther. The reason for this is the food required a ton of water. Doyle wasn’t certain where they came from or if the food mushrooms even existed on his world before he brought in the myconids, but they seemed to store a ton of water in their stalks.

You could tell the food mushrooms were ripe by when they fell over. The stalk was just so soft that it couldn’t hold the fully grown cap up. This was actually an interesting tactic as by falling over it caused a large portion of their spores to puff up into the air.

Doyle ended up having to stop himself, though. Not because he was finished, but because he had a feeling like when using his biosphere balancing skill, yet different. A quick check of his skill list showed he had gained the Village Planner skill and once he realized that he understood. Shaping the terrain anymore and it would change from planning out the myconid settlements and instead turn into him basically placing everything himself and just letting the myconids do a bit of the style.

This realization didn’t quite make sense until he thought of two pre-system video games. What the new skill was focused on was like those city sim games where you could zone an area, but the simulation would decide what went where. If he tried to design things further, it would turn from that and into a family sim. While placing every individual wall to a house can be fun, that isn’t what Doyle wanted.

Though, of course, with this new knowledge, he couldn’t help but take a look at Wolf’s Rest. After a few days of observing the place in action, Doyle decides they did a decent job and likely someone Ace trusted had, if not Village Planner, then at least a similar skill. In fact, Doyle was mostly certain it was another skill, one that is more general.

This was simple enough to see once Doyle let his own skill guide his instincts while looking at the town. At first it had felt like his skill because the second ring area was very much built on those principles. Someone had planned out the area and then others had built it however they wanted.

The inner ring, on the other hand, lacked the feeling at first. It was all built off of a single centralized design and people followed it. Except the closer Doyle looked, the more he felt principles of his skill at play there. In the end, while he couldn’t feel much from the inner ring, he could tell that both areas were intertwined.