With everyone up on their feet, Doctor looks over at the ore vein. “So, are we going to finish mining out the copper?”

Jeremy laughs, “If we had Kellinger with us to cheat on the extraction. But no, we won’t play at being miners. Though even with Kellinger, that might not be the best way to do it. While slower I bet someone mining the ore will give better results just like how someone with a skill crafting an item has better results.”

Susan nods, “Plus, who knows what knowledge someone with a mining skill will gain. Though you are missing the possibility were using magic to dig out the ore would grant a mining skill. With that in mind, I don’t know if Kellinger would want to chance it. Skills are too limited and he seems to want to go for the toolbox mage build.”

Jeremy shrugs, “Skills might be limited at the moment, but none of us have even reached level ten yet. This is still the early game, and none of us know what lies ahead of us. At the moment everything seems to be set back to pre-industrial times, but we know space travel is a thing. The biggest difference is mass produced stuff will be worse than trash. Give us a few years as well as the right people being saved and we will be right back where we started with technology.”

This conversation goes on but without any desire to actually mine the ore they do so while hobbling back to the floor’s entrance portal. 

Doyle continues to watch the group for a while longer before turning to Ally. ‘That Zach has a harvest skill and could have just told them is using magic to harvest things would be affected by it. In fact, didn’t he use it to harvest all those olives and such?’

Ally shrugs, ‘Mostly certain he just isn’t too social of a person. They didn’t ask, so he didn’t volunteer. Though I can confirm that harvest skills work with magic and sometimes you can even get a specialized skill for it.’

Doyle nods his core, ‘Makes sense. Now what do you think of my third floor? None of them have completed it yet, which I think says good things.’

Ally gestures at the wall where Doyle has projected an image of the third floor’s current layout. ‘Your random generation seems to throw in a good number of dead ends at the edges. Since it is random though that isn’t a problem. In fact, I have to say it is a good thing because they can’t be certain if a place leads somewhere or not at the start of the next day.’

Doyle sighs, ‘I could do more to remove the dead ends because some of them are a little nonsensical. For instance right now that one passage they didn’t go to just ends in a small room. It is too easy to see the room is a dead end. Same with the deadend room with a vine assassin. They didn’t pay too much attention, but there it is. I think with a little tweaking I can add hallways going nowhere to the dead end rooms. That way it will look like the room isn’t a dead end. Plus a hallway which goes nowhere is a much better indicator of a dead end as well, which is a nice signal. While I do want them to end up in the dead ends, I don’t want it to frustrate them too much.’

Ally shrugs, ‘I say let things ride for the moment. We don’t know how it will work out and it sounds like we will be having some fresh blood soon enough.’

Doyle’s core dims, ‘So how bad is it that they have a super lucky person?’

Ally grimaces, ‘I can’t really say. Of all the soul stats, luck is one of the harder to pin down. As a dungeon your own luck stat will work to counter those with extraordinary luck once they are inside. Mind you, this doesn’t give them bad luck, it just works to prevent the so called lucky encounters that plucky heroes seem to stumble into left and right. If this was a story, your luck would help in removing others’ plot armor.’

‘However, from the sounds of it, Daisy should have a luck stat of 50 or more. Mostly because it was able to affect your world even before magic arrived. You’ve just broken 20 so it would still be like she was rocking a score north of 20. The good news is that you are your own dimension, so while her luck will work once she is inside. It won’t be able to direct her to come in to snatch all the good stuff.’

‘That is also why I don’t think she has too much more than 50. She would have ended up in a better starter town near a normal dungeon. With this in mind, I say having her in the settlement can only be a good thing for us. Mostly because they decided to align themselves with us, even if it isn’t anything official. Since their future is predicated on us doing well, her luck will shift the odds in our favor out there. Though of course if she ever decides to leave the settlement, we need to go defensive. However, I don’t see it being likely in the near future. She would have left before now if that was the case.’

Doyle brightens up again, ‘Fair enough. Now what else do you have to say about the floor?’

Ally rubs her chin, ‘If I had to point out one thing? I would say that you need to deal with the earth mage kobolds. While the spike field was impressive, it caused a lot of problems. Sure, it did stop themselves from proceeding, but next time they will be ready for it. You got lucky this time with them not paying attention to the mage.’

Doyle shakes his core, ‘It should be fine how it is. They won’t always do that move for one. Plus, I can’t really judge how effective they will be against normal delvers. I might have to stop or limit the spike move if only because I can see it destroying groups, even once they are aware it can happen.’

‘Though now that I think about it, I will change the kobolds so they don’t spike the entire room. That sort of attack isn’t a smooth difficulty curve when compared to the previous floors. The kobold groups do have the best loot but the spikes are a bit much.’

Ally nods, ‘Good point, I should know this, but it is kind of hard to keep grounded when the only people delving on the regular are professionals at it. Anyway, besides the kobold mages I don’t see much else to change about their groups and the assassin vines are doing their own thing. That leaves the myconid sprouts. I suggest doing something to make them less obvious. Sure, a room or two with all the mushrooms crowded around a central pool is fine. Don’t have all the rooms be like that.’

Doyle sighs, ‘It is so much easier to have the water pool at the center. I will have to go through and figure out how to shift that around. Might be able to do something with the applied cave style. After all, despite connecting up at random, the styling smooths out any obvious edges, so it looks natural.’

Ally gestures at the map again, ‘It isn’t like you’re making random rooms every time. It is all plug and play with pre-existing stuff. Just change a few to not be centered. As you said, the styling will fix any oddities when it matches up with other rooms and halls.’

‘Besides that, the floor looks good. A little hard to fully judge it after only a couple runs on one setup. But this is sort of one of the downfalls of a randomly designed floor. You can’t really judge them easily. Maybe everything looks to be going fine when suddenly there is a direct path from the entrance to the exit. Though you’ve put in some safeguard against that specific sort of thing. I’m sure we will have nonsense popping up for years to come. That’s fine, though. Just get the fourth floor soon and it won’t matter too much.’

Doyle sighs, ‘That might take a while. I only have, let me check.’

Doyle looks at his stat sheet, ‘Oh, nevermind. I actually have 1051 world energy already saved up for my next floor. Over a fourth of the way there. Huh.’

Ally shrugs, ‘You literally just caused so much damage to the previous group that they had to retreat without fully healing up. Though don’t expect it to go too quickly. This was gained from a trio of near-death experiences, and I don’t see them making that mistake again. Still, you should be able to gain enough in the next few days. Especially since I don’t think they will slow down their exploration, what with the discovery of ore in here.’

Doyle laughs, ‘I can’t wait until the first pack drops. I almost wish one of the people coming from outside loots one so the news would spread. As it is, the settlement is on the path to collect the four I set up. Once those are gone the chance of an outsider just getting one drop.’

Ally nods, ‘Especially since goats are the most likely in the kobold groups to die. The kobolds manage to survive, but the goats just don’t stand a chance. With them not surviving, it will be very hard for the one with the lootable pack to gain enough energy in any reasonable timeframe. It will happen, but they will basically have to wait for you to place them on later floors to have any sort of stock of them.’

Doyle tilts his core to the side, ‘While I will probably be placing a lot more of them on later floors. That doesn’t feel like the reason you say they will have more of a stock of the bags. Is there something special about later floors?’

Ally claps her hands, ‘Good question! And yes, there are actually a few special things related to later floors. Specifically with loot drops, the lower the floor, the more loose energy is in the air to realize items. Of course, stuff you specifically have for the later floors will still be just as rare. That however will have more to do with the cost. At a certain point you could make stuff like your wooden shield drop and it will drop every time as long as you haven’t literally just spawned the monster.’

‘At the moment, this is hard for you to detect. A toss up between the difference not being all that much at the moment and you not being skilled enough at detecting such things. Get your territory control up there in level and it will become a lot more obvious.’

‘There are other things which will change with later floors besides that. Though the extra energy is worth it alone. You will have high level adventurers planning out multi-day trips to the deeper floors to train and cultivate. On a planet like yours there will only be one, maybe two, places with a concentration of natural energy equal to a dungeon’s lower floors.’

Doyle nods, ‘I assume there are reasons to not just flood people with low quality loot on the deeper floors?’

Ally laughs, ‘No, but actually yes. There is no mechanical reason to prevent you from just creating a bunch of low level loot on any of your floors. After all, once you get floors that can instantly spawn low level loot you can probably just summon it whole cloth. The thing which stops you from doing that is people won’t bother taking the loot out of your dungeon. This causes all kinds of trouble for a dungeon as getting the processed energy out of the dungeon is sort of your purpose.’

‘Not that you can’t do that, mind you. It is just that dungeons which do spam low quality loot tend to be located in large nations and get used as an easy supply for basic soldier gear. You don’t have that option at the moment so we can ignore it. Later we can revisit having a bunch of basic gear to supply the settlement in some fashion.’

Akhier

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