Doyle sighs, ‘I really don’t have a reason not to. [System, put ten points into dungeon core three.]’

{10 points applied to Dungeon Core III...

30/100 - You have earned 5 Stat points

35/100 - You have earned +50 World Energy/Hour and +1 Luck}

Doyle tilts to the side, ‘Huh, not technically the three wisdom points I wanted but it will work fine. Now where to put the two extra points?’

He looks over at his status panel that he hadn’t closed yet. ‘Okay, I have 29 constitution at the moment so one goes in there. Other than that, nothing stands out. Since I’m using wisdom so much, I might as well put the last point into it as well. [System, put four stat points into wisdom and one into constitution.]’

{First constitution milestone reached...

Analyzing dungeon design up till this point...

Diverse Strange Caverns subtype, Massive use of kobolds leading goats, Recent focus on shifting layouts, Focus on monetary loot with an undercurrent of gear, Use of breeding farms...

Speeding up changes brought on by Constitution...

Kobold species shifted from generic dungeon kobold to variant dungeon kobold [3a32z.q5b82.m1e62:COMMUNAL_HERDERS]

Updating Kobold info: Kobolds now have the Animal Handling skill at level 1

Goat template gains +1 Wisdom across all variants

Spawning examples of lv20 Strange Dungeon Stone, Coin Plates, lv10 weapons, and lv10 armor

Early unlock of farm zone}

Doyle tilts to the other side, ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting that. Hey Ally! Check this out, I have some questions.’ and he shares the screen with her.

Ally takes a look, ‘That’s handy. Except for the change to kobolds, none of this gives you something you couldn’t get. Rather, like with the farm zone, this is all about getting things early. Especially those spawned items. You will eventually get all your weapons and armor up to level ten, but these shortcut it by letting you eat some examples.’

‘As for your questions? I can probably pre-empt a few of them. First of all is the thing about your kobold species and that number. As you should already know from your experience with goats, nothing is new under the sun and the system has a large catalog of variants. Here, the system decided the generic kobolds everyone gets to start don’t quite fit you. Because you did not change them yet, so the system found it easier to change the type you summon to one of the many variants. In this case, one like the old kobolds, except for an inborn knack for handling animals. The scary number is just how it identifies which variant it is using, and normally you wouldn’t see it. For instance, your pattern will still be called kobold.’

‘Then we have the goats. With them you already know a few variant patterns, so instead it changed them to be a bit wiser so they can more easily follow instructions. This is an interesting change as it is to the pattern template itself and not a bonus to the stat. The difference there is that even without levels or paths your goats are up that plus one. Or rather, it would be more appropriate to say your goats are now at three wisdom instead of two. Likely if you didn’t have the variants it would instead of switched your goat pattern out for another like it did with the kobolds.’

‘Finally is the early unlock of the farm zone. I honestly didn’t know this was a thing, but it will be very useful for you. Right now you have those goat farms and while they are useful, it takes up points on the floor. Farm zones don’t completely relieve that burden, but it reduces it to a tenth. Though of course with some caveats.’

‘You can designate an area as a farm zone as long as adventurers can’t get to it ever. Once set as such you somehow portion off a section so when adventurers are delving the floor proper it doesn’t prevent you from doing stuff in the farm zone. More useful because this means the rapid breeding and growth doesn’t stop either. Besides that, any monsters in the area only count for a tenth of their point value rounded up. So not quite useful for you goats, but your kobolds would only count as five towards the floor total. Of course this doesn’t change the cost to summon them, but that isn’t really the point.’

‘Now the downsides to this. First, the reason they only count as a tenth is that they aren’t absorbing any world energy beyond what they need to survive after becoming an adult. That means every single one of them is like a newly spawned monster. Not too important for you but prevents other dungeons from flooding the surface even if being dived regularly.’

‘The next downside is you can’t send them out willy nilly. Monsters in a farm zone can only leave if there is a vacancy for them on the floor proper, and no one is currently on the floor. Right now your farms act as a sort of hidden source of power you can call out if you really want to take down a group and that would no longer be an option.’

‘Last but not least, monsters can’t learn anything in a farm. Not too important for your goats, but kobolds will miss it. In fact, it is more like they are automatons when in the zone instead of living monsters. While your kobolds get little time to train or forge bonds normally, they won’t even get a quick shakedown of how they will get along. Deeper floors in particular are heavily prone to swings in difficulty because of the monster’s learning. Group after group may die on the steel wall of spear and shield your kobolds perfect until the one time they all get killed. Then suddenly that room becomes a lot easier than even if you order them to do the same thing, the new kobolds won’t do it as smoothly as the old group.’

Doyle nods, ‘I can understand the learning thing. Bosses would get around this trouble because they are literally the same monster. Though that does bring up a quick question about learning and bosses before I ask my other questions on the message. How does an early floor boss not become an absolute killer for anyone near it in strength? Immortal fighters end up learning quite a bit about how to fight.’

Ally laughs, ‘Yeah, you aren’t the first to ask that and the answer might cause a bit of skeeviness for you. During normal times, sapient monsters will just be doing whatever and living a normal life with memories of all the past fights and what not. When an adventurer enters the floor, though, a change happens. Based on the floor and their level, their connection to your dungeon will restrict their memories to make them an appropriate fight.’

‘While you have a little control over this, you are very restricted in what you can do. This means even with thousands of years of fighting experience, a dungeon’s fifth floor boss will be just as dense as it has been since the start. About the only upside to this is the memories from such periods don’t transcribe quite like a personal experience. Though that might be to prevent bosses from falling one after another to the trauma, so some see even this as a gray area.’

Doyle’s core dims as he thinks about this revelation. ‘Yeah, I’m not exactly all that happy about that, but I can understand the need. Can’t have a level five goat boss with a charge skill at level 1000. It would be a bit of a glass cannon, but it would be a nuclear glass cannon. Anyway, I also wanted to ask about the strange dungeon stone and the coin plates I just got. No clue what makes them special.’

Ally shrugs, ‘Strange dungeon stone is just that, strange. Like most of these rewards, you would get it eventually as it partly comes from your dungeon type being strange caverns. My guess is that it unlocked for you because of your use of shifting rooms and monsters. You can think of it like putty for covering over the cracks in your dungeon design. Maybe you haven’t noticed yet, but when your rooms move around, they don’t perfectly seal up the connection points. At the moment the gaps aren’t big enough for even a bug to fit through, but with weirder designs that could change. Now you can fix that by slapping some strange stone on at any point where the dungeon stone could be open to the area outside of the floor proper.’

‘As for the coin plates? While not rare, they aren’t common and count for ten times the cost of the coin it is based on. A copper plate for instance is worth ten copper coins. So yeah, just filling in that gap between one copper and the one hundred copper you need for a silver. The biggest benefit of a coin plate is the fact that because the value of coins comes from the quintessence, the plate itself can be small. Without needing the material value to mean anything, each plate, while bigger than a coin, isn’t all that big. In fact, a coin plate is only twice the size of a coin. Oh, and they’re square. An important detail, I guess, though at twice the size I would hope everyone can figure it out.’

Doyle rolls his core, ‘If I had to guess, size doesn’t mean everything. Like you can’t expect a fairy small enough to sit on a human’s finger to handle human sized coins. You also can’t expect some giant to fumble around with coins that might as well be dust. Likely a coin’s size depends on who gets it, rather than any intent to focus on humans. It is just that humans apparently make up the majority of sapient life in this dimension so most coins would be human sized.’

Ally kicks back and stairs at the ceiling for a moment of introspection. ‘Huh, I guess that would make sense. Plus, even if the smaller fae around the court had gotten smaller coins, it isn’t like I would have seen it. Being human sized is almost like a sign of nobility to start with. The only reason I’m so small right now is because that is how dungeon fairies are and really about the only fae able to get around the discrimination.’

Doyle tilts to the side, ‘Why would being human sized be important? I would think being bigger would mean something or other. And do you mean in this dimension or in general?’

Ally laughs, ‘You would think that, wouldn’t you? It would make some sense. The bigger you are, the more energy you can hold. Of course, that isn’t how things shake out for the fae. Most fae are small things with the bigger ones coming up to an adult human’s knee. They are where all the stories of fairy cobblers and housekeepers come from and they have about the same social standing.’

‘As fae get bigger, their minds grow as well until about chest height. Then all the gradual increases in size drops away. At that point you skip right to fae of human height or at most a head taller. This is where I fit in, fae royalty. Beyond that size, though, things get weird. Fae royalty grow with time and power, so technically my mother would be the size of a moon or small planet if she let herself go. Sort of like how dragons never stop growing.’

‘However, fae royalty see it as a badge of honor and a showing of their control to remain human sized. That means the only time you will see old royalty be bigger than humans is for a battle where they can’t focus on controlling their size or if something is wrong with them. That doesn’t mean there aren’t fae that are bigger, though.’

‘It is just that all the big fae are more like animals than folk. Not necessarily in shape, but in mental ability. A white doe maiden of human size is as much royalty as the part of the court that looks like actual humans. On the other hand there could be a giant fae that looks like the exact copy of some human but they won’t have a mind beyond base instincts. Not that they aren’t powerful, they are. Rather, they are seen more like forces of nature.’

Doyle nods, ‘That is interesting and I can see why remaining human size is important socially. Even the smaller fae would likely use human sized coins to look special.’

Akhier

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