With the story just cresting the two week mark (time flies!), I’d like to take a breather and catch up with everyone in terms of how the story is going as well as doing a bit of strategic planning for future chapters and direction.

Since I’m sure you all love numbers, just wanted to give an update on how the polling for the story content has changed since the last time.

Crafting (21.27%, +0.26%) Dungeon construction (20.14%, +0.33%) Mob spawning/evolution (17.52%, -1.32%) Biome exploration (13.6%, -0.89%) Kingdom building (12.99%, +1.4%) War/fighting/conflict (8.98%, +1.01%) Harem (5.49%, -0.79%)

Biggest change was less mob spawning, but more kingdom building. Beyond that, the order has stayed exactly the same.

With regards to story response, you guys have been amazing so far! I love reading all the comments, and I’ve been trying to reply to as many as I can. Hopefully I didn’t miss any!

Looking at the future of the story, I do have a few (by which I mean a lot of) questions I’d like to hear your thoughts on. I think all my commenters have been very nice to one another, so feel free to post, or send me a PM. You don’t have to answer all, or any, but every response helps!

Questions

Harem. I got a lot of questions/comments/concerns about this. So, here is what my plan is. I have three female side characters I want in the story (all introduced already...hm). They will each have significant, but different roles in the plot, as well as actual personalities and motivations. Their love of MC will… vary, as well as MC’s love for them, if any. So, my question is, is that “harem”? Should I keep the harem tag? Remove it? Also, this is more lack of foresight on my part, but when the poll says 5.49% harem, I don’t know if that means 5% of the story chapters should be about harem, or only 5% of total readers want harem. Let me know which! Regarding the sexual content tag, only vanilla!

OPness. So, I’m not sure how OP the system should be. There are quite a few exploits that could be done, but would break the plot. So, I’ve just… ignored them or blocked them. For example, I don’t know if anyone noticed the composition of Cy’s slime, it contains Boron (B) which is worth a sweet 56,145 O-Points, or about 30x carbon’s. It’d kind of break progression though, so I added in the restriction that you can’t decompose “living” things. Another example is there is a “certain” poison that is very potent and very easy to construct using Imbue. Won’t give it away, but also kind of plot breaking. So, not really a question, but more a comment that if you notice something is VERY OP, it might be initially avoided or not mentioned because then there wouldn’t be a story anymore. Thoughts?

Descriptiveness. So, I have no idea how familiar people are with the tech/science that’s being used in the story. Sounds, from the comments, that some of you know way more than I do! So, I’m wondering for things like smelting iron with a bloomery, or whatnot, how much should I be describing the process? As I have? Less? More? Does everyone know what a bloomery is, what it looks like? Is it redundant?

Expectations. Is the story meeting your expectations based on the synopsis? Based on what a dungeon core story is? I know dungeon construction has been a bit lacking, but that’s because MC lacks tools to do it. I think this was implied in-world that dungeons live a really long time, so construction happens at a slow pace, over decades. MC has been in the world for less than a month, so it’s only natural his dungeon looks raw. Regarding other expectations, is this what crafting looks like? Mob stuff? Kingdom building? Let me know if anything should be focused on more or less.

Pace. The story is not fast and action packed, I don’t think. But that’s because I’ve been trying to show the exploratory, experimental part of crafting. Also, trying to follow the adage of show-don’t-tell, so things will be wordier, take longer than otherwise. Hopefully, that’s fine with everyone. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Improvements. So, as of this writing, the story is sitting at about 4.4/5 rating, which means it has about 0.6 points worth of room for improvement. I don’t think a perfect story is obtainable, but being a mild perfectionist, I’d like to hear your thoughts on where the story is lacking and how it can be made more enjoyable in the future. Obviously, if you don’t like dungeon core stories or science… there’s not much I can do there. But if there’s some way to improve the story, let me know. Perhaps it’d be illustrative if you give an example of what scene you loved the most or which part you hated.

Well… that turned out to be more rambling than I thought… so… I think that’s about it for now. Again, thanks for all the support, everyone! Here’s to hoping for many more chapters together!