Doyle shook himself and considered his options. There was the jungle area and he could stash a few monsters in there. A particularly good choice for that are the assassin vines since they would blend in. In fact, having a couple in the canopy of the larger trees near the road would be interesting.
That would set them up to ambush any delvers that get too close to the edge of the road. Though if he wanted that, just placing them on the cliff itself would work as well. The only benefit of using a tree is making it harder for any snagged to be recovered.
Even just killing the assassin vine wouldn’t fully save soone. After all, there is quite a drop. If they’re lucky, they’ll snag a branch on the way down.
Besides that, he could also place the Udoroot up in a tree, at least in theory. Sunflowers just hanging out in the canopy would be super obvious. But at least they are more like traditional carnivorous plants and so don’t need lush soil to survive.
The question would be about where to hide the root of the Udoroot. After all, if the delvers could just see it, the plant monsters wouldn’t survive all that long. And to be honest, the plant would do much better just chilling in the middle of the road.
Doyle pauses. ‘In fact, that is exactly what I’ll do.’
He had been planning on rigging sothing together to get them into the trees. Sure, there was a hope to get an orchid variation of the monster. Except the root was too big for trees of this size.
To do it properly would require sothing more like a redwood. Though maybe it would be possible to shrink the root. Of course, Doyle could guess that such a change would either require a higher minimum level or to weaken the monster. After all, there must be a reason it was the current size and sohow he doubted it was just to be bigger. All those psionic powers didn’t co from nowhere, after all.
Doyle takes another look at the floor and sighs. The more he looks, the more monsters would fit on it. For instance, the axebeaks would have a grand ol’ ti racing down the road.
But no, he wanted to limit things. So while he was tempted to add udoroots and assassin vines to the mix, maybe not this floor? As it was, there was a nice mix of golems, kobolds, goats, and those birds he hadn’t figured out a na for.
Though did he really need the goats? They were there as pack animals, but mithril was pretty light. Could the kobolds get away with just so backpacks?
One quick test later and he can confirm that this is the case. Sure, they need to do a little extra processing at the mine area. However, a more streamlined monster pool was worth the change. Plus, it isn’t like the three kobolds carrying the ore were ant to be actual threats.
Doyle pauses, how many had he ant to place in the two camps? It wasn’t that long ago he had decided. At least, he didn’t think it had been too long?
With a sigh, he decides it was probably sothing like five at the mine and five to ten at the main camp. Except now he wanted to spend so more points. Over 60k points wasn’t going to spend itself!
Of course, Doyle isn’t quite that forgetful. Rather, while playing around with getting the small kobold caravan figured out, he spent much more ti than he suspected. At this age, most dungeon cores don’t normally face this problem, but older ones certainly do. The fugue state of creation can cause ti to slip through their hands, with only ergencies waking them from it.
Doyle ignores this all. Even as a human, ti would slip by while reading and so he is sowhat used to it. Of course, before becoming a dungeon, the ti slips would be asured in hours instead of days or longer.
Either way, he powers through. First, up at the mithril vein, Doyle needed more kobolds. Sure, he could just hand wave the extra ore processing, but so far he had avoided such things.
So instead, he was going to need kobolds to do that job as well. In fact, as he considers the issue another issue cos to mind. Right now, all the miners are absolute beginners at it.
That didn’t matter too much with the copper, tin, and iron. Sure, the kobolds mined them slower than they should have been able to. It is just that they still were able to mine enough to finish the small veins Doyle had installed.
The mithril vein was not going to be that simple. While mithril wasn’t a tal known for its hardness. The tal had another quirk that if anything, made mining it more annoying.
While scholars generally don’t consider mithril to be a proper magical tal as it doesn’t have a minimum maintained magic level. Any miner will gladly tell you that it certainly tries. However, instead of holding onto the Mana, it all flows out into the stone around the tal. This, in turn, hardens the stone.
So long-lived races even use this fact to produce building material above the local world energy equilibrium. All they have to do is place a block of stone next to a thin sheet of mithril and the block hardens over the next few decades. Except Doyle isn’t letting the vein sit around that long, so you might ask what the problem is?
This ti, it isn’t even the system’s fault. Rather, making ore veins is a natural part of being a dungeon. After all, just consider the effort that needs to go into mining! A sure-fire way to get delvers to use up their energy.
Even those who “cheat” with magic tend to use just as much of a toll from their use of power. So of course the creation of ore veins cos quite naturally to dungeons. Except a part of that is the fact that the creation runs fully on autopilot.
A dungeon core decides there will be tal in an area and boom, ore vein. Doyle has a little more control, but that is mostly over how big the vein is and where. So for mithril and other such special ores, the vein will take on the properties normal for a natural vein of the stuff.
Which for mithril ant an area of stone that is a magnitude more power dense than it should be. This difference isn’t on the sa scale as going from no magic to even a wisp of the stuff as that is a qualitative change. However, it does make it harder to mine in general.
So after not all that much consideration, Doyle buys the kobolds the mining skill. It was actually really cheap, coming in at only four adjustnt points. Even more convenient, it even covered basic ore processing since that was still at the most basic level, smashing up ore.
The skill wouldn’t miraculously let the kobolds chop through the stone like it was tofu. However, it would give them the knowledge of how best to leverage their strength while mining and how best to strike the earth. Maybe later on it will provide such benefits, but especially in the early levels it is more about reducing wasted effort instead of going above and beyond.
Still, after watching a team of four kobolds mine the vein for a few days, it was clear that the bottleneck was going to end up being how many kobolds could mine. More was faster until the point that their swings started to interfere with each other. Doyle could partially alleviate the problem by having the vein run along the cave wall instead of away from it.
That ant up to seven kobolds could be mine at once. Then Doyle only needed four more to process the ore. One to haul and three to smack the impure ore with mauls until they could separate out much of the unwanted stone.
On top of those workers, Doyle added a trio of earth mages and six sword and board fighters for defense. Well, the mages would also help sorting out the ore. While the magic infused stone was even harder for them to manipulate than it was for the miners to mine. It didn’t stop them from sorting out the bits with tal.
Then, of course, there were the three haulers. Moving the ore back to the camp for slting. Sure, inefficient, but Doyle was using it to guide the delvers along the hidden jungle path.
As for the camp? That was going to require a skill in and of itself. Not only that, but if Doyle truly wanted them to slt the ore, this couldn’t be so fly-by-night affair. Except he had set no previous kobold group up to slt the ore in the first place.
Doyle hadn’t felt the need to. Besides that, slting copper and tin was relatively easy and magic took even the basic difficulty out of it. You still need a fire to get things moving properly, but then an earth mage can just make the tal flow out of the ore.
Iron? That wasn’t as easy. However, a fire mage made getting a hot enough fire much simpler. Especially when it was already possible for a man to jury-rig together a set up capable of extracting iron out in a forest without any assistance. Of course, that had been getting it from bacteria muck from a stream.
Mithril was a whole nother problem. A tal not possible without magic? Of course, you weren’t going to be able to slt it without the stuff.
It was at this point that Ally ca in clutch. While she wasn’t certain on the specifics, she pointed the way. The answer all ca down to the sa problem people originally had with forging iron into a useful form.
In the sa way people had trouble making and containing a hot enough fire, magical ores needed you to make and contain an area of world energy that was dense enough. And not just a little denser. In particular, mithril was actually more of a pain to slt out of the ore than so of the more exotic magical tals.
After all, the stone that contained it was already magically dense. Good thing Doyle happened to have a solution for this. In the normal progression of civilization, the first people to slt magical ores tend to do so using even more magical stone or clay.
Doyle was skipping right past that and setting them up with an array, the only array he had. The simple world energy gathering array for individuals. There had been only one problem. It was for level 14 individuals, which was well below what he needed to slt mithril.
Now Ally wasn’t certain what level he needed to slt mithril. However, it was obvious enough that it needed to be higher than the tals minimum level and likely by more than just one or two. Oh, and it wasn’t an option to just wait for a deeper floor.
While, if an environnt is hot enough, you can just slt normal tals. Part of slting magical tals is the pressure. Even if the environnt is naturally dense enough with world energy, because it can flow the tal won’t slt.
Oh sure, if you do get a hot enough temp, even the toughest magical tal will eventually lt. At that point, though? I’ve got to ask how you managed to reach the heart of so elental plane of fire without being able to figure out slting the ore normally. Above or below a certain temperature, the simple motion of atoms is no longer enough to define what temperature is anymore. Because in a magical world, absolute zero isn’t so absolute anymore.
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