Up next was that purple area in the center of the new region. Starting off with the lighter of the two shades.

“A forest of mushrooms?” I said out loud to myself. “Well, as long as nobody tries to replace a burger patty with a mushroom, I’m happy.”

Now, I didn’t exactly agree with vegetarians on many things, but we did at least agree on one thing.

Mushrooms were delicious.

Just, so long as nobody tried serving a giant mushroom in place of a beef patty for a burger.

Moving on, next was the darker purple tile with a feature.

That biome sounded dangerous, but useful. Potentially incredibly useful. If those three tiles were home to toxic plants and mushrooms… what if they could be gathered and weaponized?

Now, I wasn’t a fan of chemical warfare. It was horrible tactic meant for cowards to use.

Even in the context of a game where Earth’s and other worlds’ fates were dependent on my success, I struggled to justify using them as weapons. It just didn’t feel right to me. Especially considering that anybody we used it against would realistically suffer from it until they died and returned to their original worlds.

But I couldn’t deny how incredibly effective it might be. If it was a normal game, I wouldn’t feel bad about using units that spread poison in some way. For example, having rat people influenced by chaotic powers spreading poison and nuking cities. That was plenty of fun in a video game.

But here? I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do something like that.

Regardless, it wasn’t like I would be reaching those toxins anytime soon. They could be saved for later.

Next.

To the northeast of the toxic forest was a pair of biomes that reminded me of the arctic region, so I assumed it would be similar to that. Surely enough, I was right.

I also checked on one of the tiles with an upward pointing arrow above its feature.

After checking a few more of the surrounding tiles with arrows on them, I noticed that they all meant those tiles had hills. It also looked like hills caused a movement penalty of 20% seeing as how the boreal tiles without them had a movement of 70%.

As for the feature, I figured it was just flavor text. Considering that the world was basically created for the game, I doubted there was any meaningful, ancient civilization that once lived on it.

Now, only one biome was left to check on.

Probably another biome that would be more useful later on.

With that, the new region was checked out and I had some more orders to queue up.

First was sending the Volcano Hounds to explore more of the surrounding regions.

Next was going to queue up a new Settler unit at New Liberty… but I couldn’t. Despite having two units of population there now, one of them was the one automatically assigned to the Hounds’ Hunting Grounds that got built.

New Liberty was set to get more population in a day, but I would rather unassign the Volcano Hounds from the Hounds’ Hunting Grounds to get a Settler underway to finish in two days instead of waiting for a new population unit and then queueing up Settlers.

Only, as soon as I removed the Volcano Hounds from the Hounds’ Hunting Grounds, the happiness for both settlements dropped by twenty. Examining why, it said because at least twenty percent of Volcano Hounds in the faction need to be stationed at Hounds’ Hunting Grounds or else they get restless and start causing issues. Fortunately, the ones who were turned into military units didn’t seem to contribute toward that total. And a penalty of twenty wasn’t too bad, so I committed to turning them into Settlers. The new Volcano Hounds arriving the next day could be assigned to the now-vacant Hounds’ Hunting Grounds.

But that still meant we would need to find more wildlife tiles to build more of those camps if we wanted to keep everybody happy. Both of our military groups were going to have to start using their [Track] ability at the end of every day just to find more creatures to hunt.

That being said, the Volcano Hounds were a great race to have with us and responsible for keeping us in the game, but I was only just beginning to learn how needy they could be.