After meeting the volcano hounds, I had Enna explain to me exactly what I needed to do as there was a bit of confusion.

A creature tile within our territory needed to be offered to the volcano hounds.

Now, there were basically three different types of tiles that could have creatures.

The leviathan hunting grounds didn’t count as a creature tile. It was a biome. Even though it was very clearly implied to have creatures, it didn’t actually count as a creature tile. It was just a biome tile with creature flavor text that could have special events pop up when passing through it.

Then there were the tiles like the black crabs and snow lice. Those were tile features. In a way, they were similar to creature tiles, but a bit more complex than that. They could be researched later on and have special buildings placed on them, and they generally gave better materials upon exploiting them. Or in other words, simple hunters on their own couldn’t handle those creatures.

And then there were the actual creature tiles. They were the ones that could only be found by hunters. They required tracking and searching to find, and then they could have the basic Hunting Camps built on top of them to exploit them.

In terms of power scaling, the leviathan hunting grounds were home to massive, boss-level threats. Then there were the tile features that were home to exceptionally strong beasts that would require an actual military force rather than some hunters to defeat. Then there were the creature tiles, which would be home to things like deer, bears, and boars going by Earth standards.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t exactly anything else that I could do for the day since the hunters wouldn’t be done until the next day, so we ended up sitting around talking for most of the day. Talking about our past lives, talking about our cultures, about where we might think some creatures were hiding on the map, and so on.

Now, on a new day, it was time to get to work.

I would normally start off the new day by claiming a new tile, but we needed to save our influence for grabbing that creature tile wherever it would pop up at.

So, while waking up still in my bed, I checked on the settlement instead to see if there was anything I could do about our building queue.

I wanted to spawn more hunters, but that wasn’t an option for the time being. So, I looked at what options I did have.

The Crafters’ Tent was the obvious choice. I forgot that would even be there since I wasn’t considering that the latest research would be done.

But it was only one building and it would be done in a day, so I still needed to queue up more than it.

Thankfully, it looked like I could build Gathering Camps and Hunting Camps even without the population to staff them right away. That was good. It meant our labor production wouldn’t be going to waste.

Well, the Hunting Camp was still unavailable, but that was because we had no creature tiles discovered to build it on.

That meant the Gathering Camp was the only real thing that I could build after the Crafters’ Tent. So, I chose it and looked for a good spot to place it on the map.

Seeing as how it needed to be placed in our territory, there weren’t exactly many options for where to place it. It couldn’t be placed on the lava lakes which meant it needed placed on the ash fields or basalt plains. Considering the ash fields were food-focused tiles rather than labor-focused tiles, that ruled those out. Though, I did notice that, when I hovered over the ash fields, it said we would get one unit of ash per day. That meant it might be a useful resource for something, but I wanted something that would boost our labor some more to start with. Not to mention that I didn’t think there was really anything we could use ash for at the moment.

Next were the basalt plains. Hovering it over a normal basalt plain tile showed that it would boost its production from four to nine while bringing in a unit of basalt chunks per day. That was something else I wasn’t sure we would be able to use right away, but it sounded like it might be useful as a building material later. Maybe we would be able to build stone buildings out of basalt, for example.

Hovering it over the hot springs and volcanic soil didn’t allow placement, so I figured those required something else such as special buildings in the future to build on top of.

So, for the time being, I placed a Gathering Camp to the right of the hot springs. Between the Crafters’ Tent and Gathering Camp, our labor would have at least a couple of days of things to make rather than disappearing into the void.

Deciding on the next research option could wait. I just wanted to get the building out of the way with.

There was something more important to focus on now that I was fully awake, and that was going on a hunt.