Are we there yet?

Not yet.

Okay... It has to soon right? You said we were almost there ages ago, why is it taking so long?

Be patient. We are almost there – don't worry.

You're lost arn't you...

I'll have you know I have built a compass to find the homeland. We should be there any day now! It's straight ahead.

...I'll trust you for now but I'm going have some strict words with you if "almost there" is another week of traveling.

...

Excerpt obtained from yet another passing pair of nameless dwarves off on an adventure.

Innearth excitedly showed his friends the “Dungeon Doorway with the ability to see around it” and instantly got the gang's attention. They all wanted a door and Innearth was happy to share…sadly they all still seemed busy and after the quick buzz of initial excitement, their messages slowed down again and were sent with less focus, less attention.

Leaving them to their own devices but anticipating their return Innearth really began throwing his all towards dungeon design.

Now, Innearth had been stewing on what he wanted his last few floors, in reality, to look like for a while.

He already knew what he wanted the hard mode Ice caverns to look like – and had long ago begun the process of filling them with ice-related materials. Part of the reason for taking so long to finish it, however, was wanting a good transitionary floor between the Crystal and Ice floors. Something that really popped out. He had put off everything for so long because of this goal adventurers seemed to have noticed – one or two breaking through and exploring past the edge of where Innearth wanted them to explore.

Something he had been hoping to figure out was a “puzzle” type floor…but without any really good ideas along those lines, he was now focusing on his newest materials.

Cosmic void and the essence potions.

Essence was an easier theme to work around so Innearth began designing a brightly coloured set of rooms and hallways.

Pillars of essence were created along with “sandwich walls” containing two of the most transparent crystal materials Innearth could make and a thin layer of the essence potion.

Next Innearth began making common monsters for the floor. He started with the spider schematic but decided to swap some things around. Instead of all being a “squished sphere” for their center Innearth made spiders with pyramids and cubes. Different sharp-angled shapes done in a shiny crystal to help accent how different they were.

Inside, each had a different essence base concentrated around their pincers – if bitten an adventurer would quickly find all their skills shifted to “market mana” or “building mana” or even something like “street food” mana depending on what the mana filters chugged out.

Each spider was given multiple simple skills that converted between mana types well and the whole floor was designed in such a way that monsters would be shooting spells through the essence walls and randomly changing them in a hectic manner.

Because the essence potion used everywhere was a solid loot, Innearth didn’t bother designing any rewards – in fact, he was concerned with it being strip-mined from his floor and set a group of some of his strongest “facility super soldiers” to pop out if anyone took too much at a time.

Content but not ecstatic with the setup Innearth tweaked things here and there. A laser mana beam shot from one side through several walls each that altered the in-flight spell in different ways. A second mob type – nearly invisible and slow-moving turtles with strong single-shot skills more likely to be “different” feeling when altered than anything else. Finally deciding he was as satisfied as he would ever be he moved on to what he was more excited about working on.

For his hardmode ice caverns – Instead of three completely separate floors – Innearth designed a single truly massive floor filled with thin ice bridges and towering columns.

He then began building the focal point of the floor – a weather system.

This wasn’t a regular weather system instead it was a dense mess of interlocking skills chained together into something dangerous.

An array of mana-dense traps with skills and “water crystals” spent all their mana creating magical water which travelled through a series of pipes into a vast sprinkler system.

Around each “Sprinkler” over a dozen separate skills worked to shape hold and freeze the water into giant 20m tall icicles. Innearth even got FED to provide him with a bunch of eternity cores to facilitate this setup – the icicles falling slowly as they were being created.

After all these interlocking skills were finished creating their tree-sized icicle of doom. And – after the icicle fell past the section they were “responsible for” –a third stage worked to quickly accelerate and randomly shift the icicle about slightly as it fell.

The final result was an open area with incredibly deadly hail falling nearly constantly.

At the very bottom of the cavern, shattered icicles were pooling so Innearth created a huge vat of void liquid to melt it all down when it was done – to prevent the room from slowly filling with ice.

Innearth then outsourced some work buying snow cores and creating skills to fill the whole area with a thin snowstorm-like effect – reducing visibility and letting clumps of snow form on open areas.

To be honest, at this point the zone was essentially done… but Innearth worked to create a more insidious group of snowmen to populate it.

Some of the coldest Ice materials Innearth could make with frozen liquid to increase the spell's effect.

Clinging hands with gnarled black void branches for the top...and a dozen tentacle-like legs for the bottom let the snowmen climb about the pillars and shoot needles of ice from random angles.

Innearth gave each snowman a mouth of razor sharp teeth and made a note to see if any wintery essence could be recovered in a few months – he had been getting springtime mana from one pipe at a steady drip but that had dried up and a separate pipe was outputting summer mana/essence potion instead.

It only made sense as the seasons changed Innearth would be able to finish these monsters off with a wintery essence.

Around the mouth, Innearth stained the snow red with blood and the occasional cave in the cavern was decorated to look like the snowmen had recently finished eating humanoids.

The zone as Innearth had initially imagined it was essentially done…except now that he was “finishing things up” he realized this was going to be the last combat-related zone he wanted to make in his dungeon for a long time.

It had to be good, he hadn’t done enough.

The icicle hail was dangerous but other than that it didn’t feel like a transcendent area…not really. And that was the goal Innearth was working towards. A place for the 0.1% of his delvers that high of a level.

Innearth wanted to up the anty so he started designing the zone boss with this “increase the danger” in mind.

A massive lurking presence at the bottom of the chasm. Sitting in the void gunk surveying all above it.

Innearth realized he was plating it with Cosmic void. This…wouldn’t be a killable monster. This would be an immortal obstacle. The final boss of his dungeon.

Its shape twisted multiple times, first a giant snake than a massive turtle.

Finally, Innearth shifted to a humanoid design. Shaped similar to a massive ogre – 15 meters tall with two squat legs and two massive arms. Every visible part of the monster was covered in interlocking scales of cosmic void tempered into invincibility. That clunky chainmail-like skin was covered in a thin outer layer of white fur.

At this point, Innearth had the name for his boss – the yeti king of the cannibal snowmen above.

Because Innearth was building for permanency he threw everything at this monster. A Tier 20 core in its center with custom circuits travelling throughout its whole body. All the tricks he had learned for making dense muscles and offsetting all of the size constraints with kinetic and gravity-based materials.

Instead of placing the face near the top of the figure, Innearth designed it in the stomach. Two beedy black eyes peeked through the white fur while a gnarled mouth of twisted teeth smiled below.

One of the biggest “hacks” Innearth was using to increase its power however was to not care. Not care about efficiency – he wouldn’t have to remake this after all – just about increasing its power in the shape he wanted not the one that was strongest.

Instead of tier 1 level circuits running through tier 0 level flesh, the inside was on average Tier 8 inside of tier 4 flesh. The entire inner section could be considered a core the only “normal” flesh the outer fur.

…Innearth really would have to wait till he got some winter essence to finalize this monster to its true potential… Leaving it in “development hell” he moved on to figuring out how to communicate this was the end of his dungeon.

Deciding not to have the end simply be the bottom of the hard mode ice caverns, Innearth started making a bonus floor at the bottom.

Peaceful.

Calm.

A reward more than anything Innearth made a massive lake with a simple island in the center containing a single tree.

No monsters lurked in the water, no traps were laid on the island. It was essentially a vacation spot and Innearth tried his very best to sculpt it to reflect that. A distant laser mana sun shone warm light across the whole cavern. The top was coated in a blue crystal and given a few “mist plants” to give the effect of clouds.

The dreaded sky was contained and rendered safe by the mighty dungeon.

Heh.

Innearth made several boats with easy-to-use controls and slowly came to realize what he wanted to really finish it off.

He wanted to infuse the lake with a sense of serenity – of calmness.

What he really wanted was to fill the whole thing with pure mana but he wasn’t sure how likely that was to work how he wanted it to.

Moving nearly all his filters down past his hard mode ice floors, Innearth set up all the final “taps” near his lake pumping their pure mana straight into the water.

He then set looping filtration systems about the whole place – constantly scrubbing the water mana out of the lake – and hoped for the best.

...sadly without churning the whole thing constantly in a decidedly not "calm" way Innearth was finding the filters were overwhelmed with the size of the lake barely making a dent in it.

Really, he knew what he wanted but had no way of creating it. It was an idle thought really the goal of a lake of calm purity that adventurers could swim in but the one hiccup at the end kept getting in the way of that.

Innearth really just wanted to create a liquid that stored pure mana like pure materials did. He wanted to somehow perform alchemy on his lake to transmute it towards that goal ... but had no clue where to start. Nothing on the internet or market had a core with the same goal – and dungeons were not naturally good at making potions.

Innearth tried a few concoctions spinning pure mana into liquids in giant stone or crystal bowls…but they kept making either harmless or annoying diseases not calm liquids.

Finally, almost by accident, he found out how to cheat. He had gone down a huge rabbit hole of pure mana materials and finally figured out two dungeons crafting a dual mana material with their "own personal pure mana" was an old experiment that had functioned correctly...as far as spells were concerned they were different types of mana. At the time that experiment had been deemed useless.

It was perfect for what Innearth wanted right now however.

Innearth bugged his friends to help – a bemused Amy performing the ritual with him excitedly watching his water+pure mana+pure mana become “pure water”.

Slowly they created and dumped the nearly unmagical result into his lake – waiting till a certain saturation was reached that let his filters do the rest. The filters were still needed after all to clean up anything adventurers did in the lake.

Now all Innearth had to do was wait till winter to finish his ice caverns and open up the last bit of his dungeon.

That shouldn’t take too long – with his estimate it was nearly fall.

What to do next?