A Dungeon’s Survival

Cameron

A Horned Draco was the perfect candidate for fodder to feed to the Crystal Puffers. They were cheap, frail, and, in spite of those things, still gave out a significant amount of experience. With a few modifications mostly aimed at making them easier to kill rather than stronger, I had found a design I could work with. For a cost of eight DP and nine mana per lizard, one kill was enough to raise a puffer to level two, and two more would bring it to three.

A level two Crystal Puffer gave five experience, and a level three gave ten. From those numbers alone, just raising them to level two seemed like the most efficient option, but it wasn't actually that simple. Thanks to the added cost of the mana crystals I needed to grow the puffers on and the partial refunds I could get for reabsorbing the dead monsters, getting them to level three actually worked out to be slightly more cost effective, which was good since not needing to grow as many puffers also saved time and sped up the whole process.

Thanks to my experiments with this, I managed to reach level three that day, and Prism got to level two. There were no delvers to be seen, but Archie did manage to make progress on his end as well. Over a game of poker that night, he informed me that he had gotten one of the recipes Fabian had provided him with to work. At last, we had Minor Health Potions. I congratulated him on his success and began absorbing the stock he had prepared for me, even as we continued our game.

[You have absorbed 20 units of Minor Health Potion! Minor Health Potion has been unlocked as an item for you.]

[Minor Health Potion has been condensed into the Potions category.]

[Item: Minor Health Potion

Cost: 10 MP

Description: A magical liquid that causes the drinker's injuries to heal.

Effect: When consumed, the drinker heals (VIT) + 10 health over the course of 2 minutes.]

It wasn't the strongest potion, but it was a start. I had discussed the potential uses for it with the others as we played. That led into a more general conversation on strategy between Fabian, Archie, Vie, and myself which devolved fast once Fabian asked me about Prism's and my progress with the puffers.

“What!?”

When Adraugon found out that I had been feeding Horned Dracos, or as he insisted they be called, “dragons,” to, in his words, “worthless trash, unworthy of even being prey,” needless to say, he was outraged. According to him, he didn't actually care about the other mindless members of his species, and if they were to die in battle, it would be because they were weak and deserved it. However, treating draconids as a food source for weak monsters seemed to be a step too far for him.

In the end, a fierce argument broke out, and in order to pacify him, I had to promise to find another food source for the plants. I also had to give the enraged lizard one hundred copper coins, but once we got back into the game of cards, he seemed to quickly forget about the matter. Not wanting to repeat that mistake, I made sure to check with my other awakened monsters before even thinking about using their kind for my purposes. That was met with mixed results.

“If it is the most efficient method, I believe you should go for it, my queen,” had been Vie's response when I asked for her and her sister's opinions on using Shadow Vipers in place of the dracos.

Pee, on the other hand, hadn't immediately responded, which was unlike her. After I pressed her on the issue she relented and said, “If it's what you need to do, mother, then, do it. It does feel kind of wrong, though.”

That had been enough to deter me from using what I believed to be the second most efficient monster for feeding purposes. That didn't leave me with many options. Fortunately, Archie had given me the go ahead for using Trentis, but the next day, I quickly realized that wasn't going to work.

It wasn't that the experience they gave was bad. It was lacking, but it could have still worked. Instead, the problem I ran into was with the level one weeds efficiently killing them. Even the fire ones that attacked with the fungal plant goblins' weakness weren't able to consistently one shot-them. At some point, my Trentis' stats had just gotten too high.

Theoretically, some of the Crystal Puffers with combined elements might have been able to manage it, but I was trying to optimize, and their crystals were far more expensive to make. That put me in a annoying conundrum. I was quickly running out of monster species to work with.

Shade Lurkers were so expensive that they were out of the question before I even considered them fully. Plated Gators were slightly better in that regard, but they suffered from the same problem. That left me with Lizard Men and Bloodthorn Vines. Both were expensive, but using them was at least feasible. The Bloodthorn Vines were the cheaper option, though, and they had a severe weak point I could take advantage of, so I started experimenting with them first.

Upon summoning one, I was instantly met with a problem. How was I going to get one immobile plant to kill another? I couldn't spawn the Bloodthorn Vines in after the Crystal Puffers were grown since their presence would interfere with my Dungeon Core functionalities, and trying to transport grown Crystal Puffers was an absolute pain that, without exception, always ended up with them wasting the mana in their crystals to attack with, something that, in turn, cost me the very same mana I was trying to be efficient with.

One solution was to seed the crystals and stick them next to the Bloodthorn Vines before the puffers could grow up. My first attempt at this produced results I could not have possibly expected. I thought that, at worst, the Crystal Puffer I did this with would start puffing prematurely, resulting in wasted attacks fueled with an insubstantial amount of mana. What ended up happening instead was the exact opposite. It wasn't attacking at all.

I stared dumbfounded at the fire element Crystal Puffer as it sat peacefully atop the flower of my Bloodthorn Vines. Hesitantly, I had Prism approach it. As the slime drew near, the puffer sprung into action. A blast of fire shot out.

Prism, being in their own fire mana saturated state, was left largely unaffected, but the same couldn't be said of the Bloodthorn Vines. They were left writhing and in a sorry state. They did survive, albeit barely, but that was the last thing I was concerned about. The entire situation made no sense, and I was left with more questions than when I started.

Realistically, I should have begun looking for other approaches then and there, but the whole interaction had intrigued me. I wanted to understand what was happening, so grinding experience came to a halt while I let myself get distracted.

The first thing I did was ask Fabian about it. There would have been no point in me wasting time trying to understand something if he already had the answer after all. He didn't. According to him, if it was a well-documented interaction, he was unaware of it. The monster didn't see much use in Dungeons, so that made sense. It was apparently a niche topic among Dungeon Fairies, the kind of thing only a select few would bother with researching.

Disappointed but also excited, I began looking into it on my own. To start with, I decided to try various things to test the bounds of the violent weed's newfound pacifistic tendencies. I had the Bloodthorn Vines pick it up with a tendril and move it. There was no reaction. I spawned more Bloodthorn Vines in a nearby room and had a Trenti carry the puffer to it. It attacked as soon as it could.

I had the uncontrolled monster brought back to the first Bloodthorn Vines. There was no reaction. I had the vines attack it. It responded in kind, and I was left both needing a new puffer and new vines.

I continued with similar tests to those until I was eventually interrupted by a familiar group of adventurers. The scouting team had returned. Having cleared my Dungeon up until my Crystal Puffer room much more swiftly than last time, they killed the Bloodthorn Vines I was experimenting with and hung around without trying to go up the shaft for just long enough to make me question if they were intentionally testing my patience. Then, they left. That incident was enough to make me decide to dedicate the rest of the day to digging out a couple of new rooms in the heart of my Dungeon for a dedicated farming setup.

The next day, I finished up with my tests. My findings were that if a Crystal Puffer was grown directly next to another monster, within only a few feet of it, and remained next to it for the duration of the time it took for it to grow up, regardless of whether that monster was one of mine or another uncontrolled Crystal Puffer, when it matured, the puffer wouldn't attack that specific monster unless it was attacked by it first. I could only theorize as to why this was, but in the end, it didn't matter. I just needed to figure out if I could use this to my advantage.

The first idea I had was to create a dedicated gardener to help tend to the plants. I was struggling with Dungeon Points, however. As it stood, I was in the red, having to actively remove things temporarily just to facilitate my experiments. I did end up using this method to transport puffers from the growing room to the farming room, but dedicated the Trenti doing the carrying was not.

On the bright side, I, at long last, had a method that facilitated the puffers killing the Bloodthorn Vines, but I had yet to get the vines into workable condition themselves. As it stood, they were too resilient, and once I weakened them, they didn't give enough experience to be worthwhile. On a whim I gave the vines both Necrotic Venom and Velocity Transference just for the sake of it and saw the experience they gave skyrocket. After reinforcing their souls with a little bit of magic, I had a variety that cost me 31 mana to make and could boost the weeds from level one to three in a single go.

They still weren't as efficient as the Horned Dracos, so I kept messing with them for a while longer. This time, when Flur's group stopped by to interrupt me, they didn't make me wish I had hair just so I could rip it out. In fact, I was able to work through their visit. I did still have to stop to reset the Dungeon once they were done, but it was worth it to have adventurers again. Unlike the weeds I was trying to cultivate, they at least earned me several hundred experience points every time they came through, so that was a plus in my book. Sure, it barely scratched the one hundred sixty-nine thousand I required to reach the next level, but at least, it was something.

Eventually, after they left, I found it: the design I would be going with. I had almost stopped and gone with the basic one I had already come up with, but out of curiosity more than anything else, I had kept going, inflating the plant's soul in order to benefit from the most cost effective stats I could stuff into it. In the end, my modifications ended up raising the cost to thirty DP and forty-one mana, but the variant I created was enough to get the weeds all the way to level four with just one kill.

With the twenty experience per kill that the empowered Crystal Puffers now gave, it was about as good as it was going to get. I was tempted to try pushing my modifications to the vines farther in hopes of increasing the efficiency even more, but I couldn't spare the DP to do so for the time being. There was no way making them strong enough to give an extra one thousand six hundred experience points would have been cheap, and I already had to remove my Horned Dracos and various rolling boulder traps as it was.

Still, though, it had been worth it. I now had a reliable source of experience, and it didn't hinge on people raiding my home and killing those I cared about. At this rate, maybe I wouldn't need to rely on adventurers for experience at all.