Doyle considers the volume of space he has to work with, because at this point that really is how he can look at it. No need to do anything fancy or try too hard to fit in awkward shapes. Just the ninth floor shows how much he can warp things. From a sphere, into a kilometer long tunnel that is five by four in size.

Though all things considered, he didn’t really use all that much space. Even taking into account leaving room for farms, he had plenty of space left over. In fact, he could have made much more than just a kilometer of tunnel. At this point, his limit was more based on the space he could fill with monsters instead of the actually available space.

This pointed towards more environmental based dangers. After all, 33k points to spend on monsters might seem like a lot. That wasn’t even one point per square meter. Not that this was ever the case. Even on the first floor, he technically had more space than that, but it was close back then. 

It just seemed like less because Doyle had been using only a slice of the floor. Now that he had nailed down how to connect space seamlessly. Well, now that he realized that he could do it. Kind of not fair to his species if he tries to claim it was something he figured out when it just worked automatically.

Doyle shakes himself, no need to get into the weeds like that. The tenth floor is going to be a spectacular cavern and to start the entrance will be a nice corridor of five meters wide by four meters tall. That way it would match the previous floor’s size. From there, though, it would expand.

As he lays out the start of the corridor and places the entrance portal, something catches his attention. The portal looks wrong. It is the same as any other portal except the first floor, but that is the problem. On one side, the portal is in the center of a big wall and it is the same on the other.

Just looking at it and you would think someone has bricked up the tunnel, leaving only a small door. Doyle was able to change the wall to look like bricks if he wanted to. He didn’t. Rather, he grabbed the edges of the portal and stretched. On the first floor, he needed to carve up the wall to change the portal.

Now, while using his carvings would help, the increases in his territory control skill allowed him to change the floor portals without them. Doyle hadn’t realized that, but when the disconnect between the corridor and the portal was noticed, he acted without thought and his instincts took over. Though now that he had done it once, something clicks in his head.

Doyle takes a moment to look over the portal and nods his core. While carving would have resulted in a cleaner edge, that doesn’t matter if the portal extends past the stone walls. Now instead of looking like a portal on a wall, it looks like a portal is covering up the passage. The same was true on the tenth floor as well, and very much fits what he wants.

The only downside was he couldn’t make it so you can see through the floor portals. There is just something about the dimensional interference that ruins such attempts. Not that Doyle tried too hard, having opaque floor portals is a good way to differentiate between an inter-floor portal and an intra-floor portal.

Doyle turns to the tenth floor proper and considers how he wants to do this. Caves and caverns are a classic, but how big does he want it all to be? The ninth floor was long, but relatively thin all things considered.

For a boss floor, Doyle wants to go big! So while the entrance passageway continues with the same size that the previous floor was, he soon has it turn a tight corner and then expand into a modest ten by ten passage. A perfect size to allow some verticality while not going overboard.

From there, Doyle extended the passage, and occasionally turned a random direction. This included having the tunnel go in a direction that should technically have it overlap with previously laid tunnels. Except they didn’t, because that would be silly.

Doyle did feel a little bad about making just another straight shot to the end, but it was a boss level and he promised himself to create a maze on the next floor. Despite the fact it was going to be a straight shot, that didn’t mean the tunnel would be uniform. Some sections he tightened up, forcing a choke point because he has some plans.

Other sections, however, ballooned outward. Up and down, side to side, and sometimes multiple directions at once. Over the two kilometers of tunnel, there were 23 such locations. Doyle didn’t put too much thought into the actual direction, instead just listing off the directions at random.

Those directions and tight spaces were in order down, tight, down, left, up and right, tight, down, left, right, right, up, tight, down, tight, right, left and right, down, tight, up and left, up, left, tight, up, down and right, right, tight, right, left, up and down, and he finished with another down. By themselves, these odd sections don’t look like much, especially since he hasn’t applied the cave pattern to the floor yet, but they do have a purpose. With all the points he has for the floor, Doyle plans to set up a number of small myconid villages.

For now, though, there is one final section to create. The two kilometers of tunnels took up only about two-thirds of the space Doyle had available and so there was still something like one hundred kilometers squared. Some of that was technically eaten up by the expanded sections of the tunnel, but he hadn’t been planning on using it all, anyway.

After all, something like a square cavern with each wall being 45 or so meters to a side would be a bit crazy at this point. Plus, Doyle needed to set up some farms anyway. So he decided to settle for a rough hemisphere with a max height in the center of around 30 meters and a diameter of around 50 meters. His boss was certainly going to have a bunch of space to work with.

Though with the basic design of the floor laid out, it was time to start decorating it with the first step being easy enough. Doyle just selected the entire floor and applied the Cave Room pattern to it. This made it all look close enough to a natural cave, though he did do a second pass over everything to add in a bunch of extra stalactites and mites, especially in the boss room.

While the large open cavern area definitely got spammed with the rock features, the pattern tended towards smaller ones and so none except on the edges managed to connect up. Doyle quickly fixed this with the biggest one being in the exact center. One giant dripstone cave feature that connects the ceiling to the floor.

It was still missing something. Despite Doyle’s best efforts to sculpt the stone, it lacked one important feature. A feature that would not only give the place the right ambiance, but also assist in a flourishing fungal infestation. That of water constantly dripping.

On the third floor he did a little work with this, but that mostly involved having a bunch of water up top that slowly worked its way down before being reset. There hadn’t been any effort to make it seem natural beyond the fact it was dripping off the stone and generally went downwards. Besides that, it was basically nearly pure water with none of the dissolved sediment that would be building up the stalagmites in the first place.

That, and it all just flowed on the outside of the rock. The water wasn’t draining through pores in the walls. On the third floor, if you wiped off a section of wall and stopped water from flowing down onto it,  the wall would dry. For the tenth floor, Doyle wanted to make things mimic reality a little bit more.

Now, he wasn’t going to let things get out of hand. With the temporal speed up that happens when delvers aren’t around, it is entirely possible that too much stone would build up or wear away. Doyle had a plan for this though and instead went about figuring out the waterworks first. You would think this step would be simple.

The problem is that not only is the rock Doyle is using not the correct type to let water easily penetrate it; he doesn’t have access to the correct rocks, either. As luck would have it though, he can cheat. After all, he isn’t trying to make a real habitat, just mimic one.

Though Doyle’s first attempt ended up a failure. His idea was simple enough and someday he might be able to accomplish it. After all, if you need the rock to be porous to let water through, All he needs to do is add pores to his rock. A cute idea that probably would have taken way too much time. The reason it failed wasn’t that, though.

Rather, it was the fact that with his current control of his dungeon, Doyel was unable to make small enough holes and gaps in the rock. He wanted a slow drip of water, not small jets of water spraying out. So, this turned him to the second plan. That one failed as well.

The idea of heating and chilling the rock rapidly to creature fractures for water to travel through was a valid idea. It is however unfortunate that if used as part of a wall; it feels like his dungeon is damaged. The feeling isn’t quite pain, more of an itch really, but Doyle isn’t willing to suffer from an entire floor constantly itching for a water feature.

That left one final idea. While not quite the correct stone, the cave look he was going for was more of a limestone cave, it was likely Doyle could create a more porous stone, specifically sandstone. That stuff is basically sand which has been pressed together really hard for a long period of time. Though he does somewhat remember there was a pre-system method of making the stuff that involved bacteria? Or was it basically a method similar to cement with different base materials?

Doyle couldn’t quite remember and at the moment didn’t honestly care. What was important was if he could pressure some sand enough to make sandstone. This was easy enough to test. The hardest part was actually making the sand because sand isn’t just ground up rock. It is made of all kinds of minerals that have ended up being eroded by water. Good thing he isn’t trying to make literal sandstone or else it would have been even more complicated.

As it is, Doyle used a few different ingredients to perfect his pseudo sand. Of those, what stood out was quartz, a tiny amount of iron, glass, and egg shells. While the resulting mixture was still mostly volcanic rock black, the color definitely was more towards gray than not.

It had taken a light hand with the iron dust and powdered egg shell to get a color he could accept as not being too far off. Still, it was finished and so Doyle absorbed some of it. Then was promptly disappointed when he checked his status. The mixture wasn’t added to his list of patterns. Though strangely enough, he did feel like he could create the stuff, even if the resulting quality would entirely depend on the patterns used to make it.

This didn’t phase Doyle too much. The fact that it allowed him to duplicate it at all was good enough. Though he was certain that someday he would get access to some sand. After all, there was a river right next to the town. Eventually someone is going to end up in the dungeon with some sand in their pants cuff or at the bottom of their bag.

Akhier

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