Once we got the farm was restored it took a bit of research with the core and some more fishing, but we were able to purchase some seeds. Unfortunately, since we didn’t have anyone with levels in farming, the crops would take the same amount of time to grow, as they would back on earth. This meant we would still be eating fish for a while, but hey, we were still alive.

After a week of mass fishing we found out that the more of a specific resource we turned in, the less Dungeon Points we received from it. Three days after this was discovered, the fish trade had depreciated so much that it wasn’t even worth the effort. At that point though we had 75 points to work with.

The night of the great fish market collapse, we were sat around eating dinner, when Kevin had a great idea, “Why don’t we mine out our own cave system, that way we know that nothing else is in them, and we can expand the camp.”

We all agreed that it would be a good idea, one that we thought even better when the core informed me that the dungeon was set in the side of a mountain. If we found some sort of ore down here, we might actually be able to get some more dungeon points flowing in.

The next day, the core, Kevin, and I sat around discussing how to move forward with expanding the dungeon. According to the core, while we couldn’t get access to buying base goblins back, we could still purchase other specialized goblins at their higher price. This meant that we could theoretically get goblins that specialized in farming or mining, but we would need to figure out if the bonuses would be worth it.

It seemed like one of the old chiefs had seen the merit in a sustainable food source, because the option to buy a level one farmer would only be seven points. The miners however, would end up costing us ten a piece, plus another five for the tools they needed to actually work.

I ended up upgrading the rest of the tents from their crude form to Level 1 with two beds, bringing us up to 20 beds in the base. This would give us the space for more goblins in the dungeon and also just be a quality of life upgrade for the current members of the team. That brought me down to 50 points, which I then used to get 2 miners, who, combined with their gear, brought me down to 20 points. Man if this didn’t pan out, we’d need to break the dungeon seal ASAP.

We widened the cave by taking a couple feet off the bottom six feet of the walls. Sam, Sarah, and I helped the miners, picking up whenever the goblins got tired. Just this work took us a couple of days, but we were able to convert the extra stone into dungeon points as soon as it fell, since it all was inside of the main chamber.

After another week we had a twenty foot tunnel carved out, that connected the camp to a cave we made. The cave itself was twenty feet by twenty feet, and just tall enough that us humans wouldn’t have to bend over to walk around. By the time that we had gotten all of that work done we were sore and exhausted, so we decided to take the next day off and just rest.

While the rest of the group went to the lake as soon as they woke up, like normal people would, I decided to take a trip to the dungeon seal and see what could be done about it. When Tamani had originally told me that there was a seal on the dungeon, I had imagined a door that was locked by magic or something. After walking for two hours down a single, unbranching tunnel that Tamani said lead to the surface, I found this wasn’t the case.

The barrier covered what appeared to be the last bend of the tunnel to the surface, light coming from around the bend barely making it through the barriers semi opaque blue. The barrier appeared to be flowing over the opening like water, but when I pressed my hand to it, it was completely solid. Despite my best efforts to interact with the barrier using my mana, all I ever received was a message telling me that I could lower the barrier for 100 dungeon points.

It appeared that once another entity’s spell was in place, I wouldn’t be able to mess with it. At least not at my level.

“Well fuck,” I thought to myself, “we will definantly need a new source of Dungeon Points if we are ever going make it out of here.”

With there being nothing else that I could do, I decided to go ahead and return to camp. My muscles were already screaming at me from the journey I took down the tunnel, so instead of rushing back, I took my time and thought about what we should do moving forward.

Around halfway back, a thought crossed my mind, “Hey core, should we be using some sort of crafting facility to turn all of the extra stone into something more valuable before we hand it to you for points?”

“The more valuable that an item is before I break it down, the more points you will get. So yes, that would probably be wise.”

I could barely keep from bashing my head against the tunnel wall at the thought of all the points we had missed out on by not thinking of this earlier. Oh well, that’s what we got for not asking sooner. We would definitely need to ask more questions moving forward, it’s not like we had a wiki guide that we could go to for answers. Oh wait, we kind of did.

The rest of my walk was rather peaceful, and when I finally got back to camp, I crawled into my bed and took a nap. I awoke only a couple of hours later, all of my joints groaning in protest as I sat up. I still had a decent amount of my day left, so I decided to go to the lake, where everyone else probably still was, and have a nice soak in the cool water.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, mostly spent talking to each other and planning out the days to come. We had dinner around the fire, like we usually did, before heading off to our tents and turning in for the night.