I need a loot chest. Treasure to be pondered. Valuables to be taken, valuables I won’t miss. Come to think of it, that is not entirely right. I am not creating valuables myself. I am growing or designating a container as a loot chest, and it takes care of the rest. I’m not entirely certain how it works, however, here it seems that the more I think about something, the better my understanding.
Regardless of what it is or how it operates. It took a while to grow, a whole 32 days, and who knows how long until it becomes useful? I suppose better safe than sorry. Once completed, it started slowly gathering loot. There were diminishing returns, but that’s something to investigate later. After 5 days, I tried having a rat loot it, but it found nothing. Yet it felt like it was there. Quite a strange behaviour. Hopefully, it will be there when a delver comes. Somehow, I feel confident that it will.
Inner working of loot chest aside. Mana in storage is mana not working. I need an expansion plan. My floor space is running low, so either I put a planter near the roof or I expand. Neither seems like a great idea. For the planter, I would need a different plant, something to hang down and catch sunlight through the window. I vaguely recall a fern like that at my grandmother’s house, but I don’t feel entirely confident about recreating it from scratch. Another possibility is getting one from outside… Do ferns even have seeds? If they do, how do I instruct my minions to look for one? The map room… no, the war room.
War room is an idea I had brewing for a while. A map and some mana patterns. I think I can do it. The question is where. I could grow another room, but that’s a lot of walls to grow, and for all of their tunnelling, rats aren’t going to help with construction. They can hollow out the room, but I still have to build the walls. Another thing, I really need moths to have easy access to it, as they are what I send out for expeditions. Their attic is a crawl space with barely enough room for their spawner, but that might be a good thing? I could lift the roof a tiny bit, keep the nest attached to the ceiling and lay the map below it.
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Not exactly elegant, but relatively cheap. It took 10 days to add space and 18 to weave it into the war room. However, I must say, it was worth it. Over just a few expeditions, I started forming some understanding of the area. First the resource note, flowers, fruit, sap leaking trees, and all other things’ moths found tasty. I knew they were pollinators and could eat smaller bugs, but all the other stuff was news to me. Also, it seems I am in a forest, good to know. Second things, dangerous areas, birds, bats, spiders and wasps, all those things can kill moths. They could be replaced, but it meant no return on expedition cost.
It took some time to develop a decent strategy. Most kill bugs are stationary, simply stay away from their nest, and they stay away. Similarly with spiders, new webs form regularly, but once found they can be avoided. The bigger issue was birds and bats. They are actively hunting, but even they have patterns. Predicting their movements means fewer losses. Fewer losses means I am confident in sending more of them out. Combine it with the fact that they gather more mana by focusing on good spots, and the efficiency gains are substantial. Not as great as with strawberries, but substantial, and my strategy is improving. On top of that, I am finally learning about the outside world. However, the best part is, I am having fun. It feels like a game, games with slowness rivalling Neptune’s Pride, but everything is slow when you are a dungeon.
Just as I thought that, the doors suddenly opened.