Veronica sighed as she opened her construction menu screen. Looking over the second floor layout, she could see just how dreadfully empty everything was. Originally, she would have filled some of the rooms with challenges. Maybe she would have even bothered with adding [Critters] and some other environmental features to make the rooms more interesting. However, she just didn't feel like it right now. She barely felt like she had the mental energy to work on anything right now, but the fact of the matter was she needed to do something to improve her current situation.
Challenge rooms could be avoided thanks to the open floor plan layout of the second floor. However, it was likely that some adventurers would still attempt them since the promise of a reward was too tempting. Bo also seemed way too obsessed with conquering her dungeon and enjoyed challenging things a little too much. So, there was every possibility that he would attempt any new challenges she added for that reason alone.
There wasn't any value to trying to lock the challenge rooms since they weren't actually rooms. So, Veronica decided to take a different approach to making the challenges on this floor from the one she had taken on the second floor. She wanted to make the challenge seem easy, but also have a secondary effect of adding extra defense to her dungeon. It wouldn't exactly affect those who chose to forgo the challenge, but, again, she was depending on the adventurers to willingly walk into the [Trap] she was setting.
Would you like to spend 80 DP to research stone brick tower ruins using the [Base Resources] stone, wood, and clay?
Yes
No
Would you like to spend 10 DP to research wooden bows using the [Base Resource] wood and boar meat (sinew)?
Yes
No
Would you like to spend 10 DP to research wooden quivers using the [Base Resource] wood?
Yes
No
As the system didn't differentiate the different cuts of meat any more than it did different types of cheese or grass, it made for an interesting sight to see the system list boar meat in place of sinew for the wooden bows. It was likely that even the adventurers had bows made from better materials than wood and sinew with materials like horn or shell to reinforce their bows, but those weren't materials she had access to. Still, it would work fine.
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For arrows, she was planning to spawn in flint arrows, which would cost her 1 MP for every five arrows. She had received them as a tribute fairly early on thanks to an archer who had left a few of them lying around her dungeon. It would be a pain to have to restock the equipment for this challenge on a regular basis, but her goblins wouldn't exactly respawn with arrows and a bow when they were killed since she didn't plan to assign them an actual archer class.
For the challenge setup, Veronica used the land terraforming option to separate the room into a main walking path and a few landmasses, which she added the tower ruins to. She added more towers than she planned to add goblins as she could only have three goblins assigned to a 100 MP limit spawner due to their 30 MP cost. She then created the wooden bows, quivers, and flint arrows needed to arm the goblins. As it didn't hurt to let them keep an extra weapon, she let them keep the melee weapons they spawned in with.
The point of this challenge would be for the adventurers to cross from one end of the room to the other following the main path, just like mobs in a tower defense game would. Her goblins would then shoot their arrows at them in an effort to injure them, or better yet, kill them. Maybe Bo was getting to her, but Veronica simply couldn't be bothered as much with feeling guilty over people dying in her dungeon when there were people like him who seemed to take joy in killing her. It only seemed fair that she took whatever measures she needed to in order to protect herself.
Before she could set the challenge officially, she did need one other thing, though.
Would you like to spend 24 DP to research a black throw pillow and blanket set using the [Base Resources] undyed cotton cloth, undyed thread, duck feathers, black dye, and white dye?
Yes
No
It was a bit plain to just have them be one color without any sort of pattern on them, but Veronica thought it was already quite generous of her to choose a color that wouldn't show stains as easily. Due to their smaller size they could easily be used for travel to sleep comfortably and things like mud and blood would be much more noticeable on brighter colors than they would on darker colors. Another 150 DP to set the room's theme and 24 DP to set the challenge with its reward and the task at hand was finished.
The overall costs to create the challenge room has only amounted to 298 since there wasn't even a point to locking the doors. She did need to eventually look into things like the room settings options and adding resources to the rooms, but she wasn't sure when, if ever, she'd get around to that. Seraphina had made it out to be important since it would be a good way to draw in adventurers, even when her emotional fluctuations caused [Monster] stampedes that would otherwise chase them away. However, she didn't really care that much about that right now. She just wanted to be left alone.
Veronica hadn't even been interested in sleeping when she had first arrived in this world. She still thought of it as a bit of a waste of time, but she was starting to see its merits. At least when she was sleeping, she wasn't constantly worrying about the next time Bo would show up. It was annoying having her first thought be that it might be Bo coming to kill her again every time an adventurer showed up on the second floor and the dungeon warned her of their presence. The world didn't revolve around that bastard and her thoughts shouldn't be either.