Still, looking at the first floor made him realize how important his method of floor creation is. Not only does it keep his core at the center of his dungeon. It also helps hide himself from the outside.
After all, when your relative size and visibility is completely determined by how powerful you seem to be. The act of wearing his weakest floor as a disguise is brilliant. If instead of expanding inward, he had created the floors next to each other, it would be like broadcasting his existence to the void. A horrible idea when distance and time are more of a suggestion that exists only when something powerful enough decides they do.
Doyle shakes himself and turns his attention back to his new floor. A floor important because it comes right after a boss and thus will be visited a ton. Somewhere for people to grind out their skills and levels, especially if they got carried past the boss fight.
With that all in mind and a slight plan he had already had, Doyle decides on more of an arena style design. In this case, half a sphere. Though not the top half, but rather the bottom half, so that the roof is flat and the ground is curved.
After roughing it out with stone and dirt, Doyle adds water. Not just a little either. The bottom third of the area by height is filled with the stuff. That meant that at the deepest section the water was around 15 rooms deep!
Water in place, Doyle adjusted the sides of the area. Dirt and rock was added to make the middle third more walkable. The upper third he didn’t even bother with as while maybe a goat could take advantage of it, the area was too steep to reasonably expect delvers to mess with.
Of course, after all that, the hemisphere is looking less like a part of a sphere, but people would still get the idea. Now all that was left was to decorate and populate. Though there was one large half terrain, half decoration that he wanted to add before anything else.
While not impossible, Doyle doesn’t expect anyone to have a method to deal with the water so it could be a dead zone on the floor. That isn’t the plan, though. Instead, Doyle wants a giant mushroom.
Not just big like the mushroom trees the myconids have, but truly enormous! Specifically, Doyle starts with the stalk in the very center of the floor. How big was it?
Well, the area taken up by water was already quite big and the stalk was as big as a third of the water pool’s entire surface area. This did require the removal of a lot of water to Doyle’s embarrassment. He really should have placed this first.
Anyway, with the stalk laid down, Doyle added the cap. An impressive specimen that covered the entire ceiling. In fact, the ceiling was being used to cheat.
In a deeper floor with more levels in the mushroom pattern, Doyle might be able to create a free standing mushroom of this size. For now, though, the ceiling is actually what holds up the mushroom cap because the stalk certainly can’t. Especially since the cap itself is sort of thin, not really having the room to expand upwards like a normal mushroom cap would.
Then with the giant mushroom placed and water level back to where Doyle wanted it, he turns his attention to exactly that. After all, it is a quite large area of water and with no one swimming, it would be quite a waste. So from the mushroom stalk to the shore, he builds up a fungal bridge.
Not something that is floating, but rather a solid structure made with the same mycelium as the main stalk. Then within said stalk, Doyle creates a spiral ramp upward about a third of the way from the water’s surface to the ceiling. He shakes his head, lots of thirds being used on the floor, but it works.
Though once there Doyle realizes a problem. He plans for his core and eventually the exit portal for the floor to be located there. Except, while the stalk is tough, it is only on the level of a tough wood. Someone could, in theory skip everything by busting through the side.
That would not do, so Doyle is forced to encapsulate the entire inner area with dungeon stone. Though he does leave a thin layer of mycelium so it looks thematic. To finish the stonework, he sends a thick spike of stone from the top and bottom of the hollowed out area to connect to the top and bottom of the hemisphere.
Doyle takes a step back and looks at the floor to try and notice anything he missed. First was the entrance, which was somewhat randomly placed because of how the floor got formed. That got moved to the side of the hemisphere opposite of the mushroom bridge.
Then there was the lighting issue. Well, it would have been an issue, except Doyle had a sudden bit of inspiration. While more simulacrum than living mushroom, glowing spores would be a fun light source.
It took a few tries, but eventually Doyle got the cap to release regular mushroom spores. Well, regular except for the fact that some of them contained a single light source. Also, instead of that light source being hooked up to the floor’s world energy, it instead ran off of the spores’ natural supply of power.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Combined with some alterations to make the spores fall even slower, the lights stayed in the upper section of the floor before burning out. This was all mostly so that Doyle wasn’t dumping a blizzard of spores on the delvers. The limits meant the cap only had to release a light dusting.
This was probably not healthy to anyone with a Constitution closer to the pre-system norm. On the other hand, Doyle honestly felt that if you managed to get to this floor with any stat close to pre-system levels, they would either have a solution or were too weak to have gotten here normally. So, while he did prefer keeping his dungeon fair, it was only fair that on the eleventh floor, someone should be able to survive a light dusting of spores.
Though speaking of spores, their presence did ease his next task. That of spreading mushrooms around the floor. Through the magic of being a dungeon, the spores being released were of all types of normal mushrooms and so with the time speed up, every bit of solid ground was soon covered.
The only change Doyle had to make was disable the mushroom tree spores from being released. This floor was meant to be open and those trees could end up blocking off large areas if he wasn’t careful. Not that he wasn’t going to use them.
Oh no, the mushroom trees were very important. They would block the line of sight so people couldn’t snipe all the monsters. It was just that the mushroom trees were going to be personally placed by Doyle, instead of randomly grown.
Though the spores ended up helping with blocking the line of sight more than Doyle had expected. While only a light dusting, since they hung in the air so long, it created a pretty effective sight blocking haze. Of course it didn’t completely block sight, but when the scenery is mushrooms and the monsters are going to be mushrooms, even a little bit goes a long way.
All that was left was to populate the floor. Well, Doyle did spend a quick moment duplicating the entire set up on the flip side as a farm area, but at this point that was second nature. Though if Ally was feeling spicy, she might have categorized it as him delaying having to choose how heavily into the mushroom theme he was going to lean.
After all, Doyle could make an entire floor of myconids again. It wouldn’t be hard. Though this thought sends him down another delaying tactic of trying to figure out if a new myconid form was available. It wasn’t.
That means as far as fungus monsters go, Doyle has the shrieker, violet fungus, and the four types of myconid. Not a very large selection. Then again, the first floor only has goats and kobolds.
Though as Doyle thinks about the first floor, he can’t help but want to include those monsters. Well, maybe not the normal goats, but those grassen goats might end up alright. Just pair a couple small herds with a kobold shepherd and the starting monsters on the floor would be covered.
Just the starting monsters, though. Doyle already has some practice with beaming in new monsters once the floor has been started and he plans to do something similar here. So instead of packing the floor to the gills with monsters, he instead plans to have a steady stream of them.
Doyle nods to himself as the plan starts to come together. He can see it now, the goats and kobolds are chilling on the floor. Then when delvers enter, the center stalk starts spewing out myconids that come at the delvers nonstop from both sides.
He turns his attention to the entrance and steals a bit of space from the farm to make an entrance hall. Then with a rule makes it so none of the fungus or spores can enter that area. A decent, safe space, though Doyle doesn’t want delvers hanging out in there while recovering.
Another rule is placed. The room is safe as long as they don’t leave it. Once they do, they have only half an hour of cumulative time before it stops being safe. That way they have time to recover from the boss fight, but can’t cheese the floor.
After all, the monsters are coming to them, not the other way around. Of course, Doyle decides to ignore the fact that for every previous floor they could back off and recover. That wasn’t what floor eleven was evolving to be about.
This time the delvers can choose to stand in place, and the monsters would come to them! All that mattered was if there was enough points to really drive the point home. Though with that, another idea came to Doyle.
Instead of having the entire thing start when they enter the floor, let them make their way around the water and to the bridge. Then use an unending swarm of monsters to push them back. The monsters don’t even need to be that tough.
After all, it is kind of hard to stand your ground when monsters are literally piling up to get to you. Doyle’s core glows brightly as he considers how many sprouts he can send out at once. Technically, a swarm costs a hundred points, but that swarm can in turn have a hundred sprouts in it.
Plus, while adding more points to a sprout does indeed increase the size, even a two point sprout is already less mass than two one pointers. That meant Doyle had to figure out the other monsters and then spam sprouts. An easy enough task and a decent point sink for 41,160 points the floor can contain.
Though Doyle right away cuts down the spendable number of points to 36,000 to save a bit over a tenth of the points for the farm. Plus, the number felt rounder to him. Though he keeps in the back of his mind that there are about a thousand points in reserve if he really needs them.
Now it was a question of what balance of monsters he wanted. Right away, he cuts out the shriekers and violets. While decent monsters in other situations, Doyle doesn’t need stationary mobs on this floor when it is possible that the delvers skip half the floor.
Then he looked at the grassen goats. They only cost 25 a pop, so two herds of eight each with a 50 point kobold goatherd would end up costing only 500 points. Double that so there are two herds to each side and Doyle feels that should be more than enough goats and kobolds for the floor.