As far as I can tell, the baby dungeon hasn’t gone nuts. It tried to attack Rhonda and Freddie, but they’re strong enough to deal with anything it might try to pull. Leo’s been sending more wolves to keep an eye on it, and as far as they can tell, it hasn’t really changed its behavior.

It’s still making centipedes and mushrooms, which is interesting. I thought it somehow had the mushrooms as herbalism nodes, but the wolves say the fungus is what’s dealing with the smallest invaders. That’s cool. I want active mushrooms.

Its borders are still slowly expanding, which I think is a sign its a baby dungeon. I could only expand in leaps and bounds, not the slow but steady way this one is going. Maybe different dungeons expand differently? I know not all get the same rooms, but what if not all expand in the same way?

Also: I’m tired of calling it just ‘the baby dungeon’. The kids say the core is purple, so I’m calling it Violet. Violet’s a cool name. I had considered trying to give Violet one of my denizens, but there’s a couple problems with that idea.

For starters, Violet definitely doesn’t have a jail yet, so it’s probably not even an option right now. Beyond that, it might not be a good idea to give it denizens anyway. What if it takes a page out of my book and does something really weird, but it’s not as peaceful as I am?

I wouldn’t mind stealing its denizens, but I need more room for that, and more room is expensive. Coda and the ratlings have been working on helping me use the volume underground, but the going is slow. Plain old rock isn’t the worst building material, but it only really supports stuff when its in compression, rather than tension.

See, different things work under different loads. A string can handle tension, but does nothing if you try to squeeze it. Stone is great for squeezing/compression, but abysmal for tension. Steel is great at both, which is why people build with it. But I don’t have access to that much steel. So Coda has to take things slow and plan to make sure everything stays in compression.

Making everything arched helps, but there’s still only so much that can be done. I think I’ll be able to expand the current caves to be comfortable with slimes, wolves, and spiders, and expand the catacombs to be better able to handle the undead, but I’m going to need more room before I get any more spawners.

Right, I also should make Rocky an actual boss room. He’s pretty much just been hanging out in the central mausoleum, but that’s a temporary solution at best. I want to give him an arena, maybe even a proper squared-circle of a boxing ring, but I also want to have spectator seating. But I don’t have room on the surface for something like that, and building something like that underground will be difficult.

Hmm… magic might be able to help, though. I’ve been meaning to upgrade the hidden alchemy lab seriously for a while now, and Thing’s secret enchanting lab is also in serious need of upgrades, too. I could ask Teemo to pull some spatial shenanigans, but I feel like that’s a bit of a long shot. He’s still having trouble pulling spatial shenanigans besides his shortcuts, and I don’t want to put something this important on his tiny shoulders if he’s still figuring out how to do what I want.

I’ll probably need to settle for Queen using the steel transmutation to weave reinforcements into what will have to be a dome over the ring and stands, and probably have Thing reinforce it with some enchanting stuff, too.

Can I manage an actual boxing ring? The ropes and turnbuckles are relatively simple, but I don’t know how the floor is handled. It has some kind of give to it, but not too much. It’s a ring, not a trampoline, so it has to be more than a thick bit of cloth under a ton of tension.

I make a note in the secret library to brainstorm it a bit later, though. All the ring stuff is in the future. It’s maybe not incredibly far in the future, but still far enough away I have time to plan a bunch. Queen’s going to need her lab upgraded a ton to be able to make the steel transmutation in the quantities I’ll need anyway.

No, the more immediate thing I should probably spend my mana on is in specializing my wolves. In seeing how my delvers deal with my encounters, my lack of magic denizens is becoming more and more obvious. The lightning stuff is nice, but the lab’s level still makes it difficult to produce enough to make it particularly common. But with my wolf spawner making tundra wolves, that’ll not only make my delvers have to think about the ice element too, but give more magical things in general they’ll need to deal with.

Besides, I’m starting to feel the seasons change. From Poe’s expeditions, it’s been plain to me for a while now that I’m in a bit of a temperate forest kind of climate. If we were much more south on Earth, it might count as the kind of thing that makes giant redwood rainforests.

I’m pretty sure I showed up sometime in spring, and the weather has been mostly warm and things have been growing. But now I can tell the leaves are changing colors and the air is getting a bit cooler. I dunno how quickly winter hits around here, but I can tell it’s coming. So if I’m in a cooler climate, my new ground expedition guys should be well-able to handle cold and maybe even deep snow.

And the other wolf options just don’t catch my attention. So I go ahead and spend the mana, and the spawner starts making tundra wolves to go with the normal ones. I wonder if anything interesting would happen if I gave a tundra wolf some of the go juice? Would they have ice and lightning aspects? Or would it just overwrite the ice aspect?

I’ll need to do some experiments once I have more of both wolves and go juice. Or I could experiment with the couple fire ants Queen has gotten from the anthill. She doesn’t have enough yet to just experiment all willy-nilly, but the little ants are more expendable than the wolves. I go ahead and poke her with that as an idea, and let her organize and prioritize it as she wants.

With the lab getting expanded soon, she’ll probably want as many of her fire ants as she can so she can actually make the go juice in the first place. We can’t go and cripple her ability to do her work just for idle curiosity, after all.