Starting with the creature packs I immediately discounted elemental, humanoid, undead and construct as I didn’t believe any of them would be considered ‘eligible’ or ‘compatible’ with my skills, that left me with vermin or beasts as my choices. To take the most advantage of Tyx assimilation I want a diverse range of creatures with unique abilities that the Tyx can make use of and I don’t know how my monsters handle food so I want to try and prepare for establishing a food chain so with that in mind I think the diversity of such a vague category like ‘beasts’ has the most potential;

Creature pack chosen! Beasts:

Monsters

Wolves

Vipers

Stag

Creatures

Hogs

Rabbits

Pigeons

Flora

Fern

Grass

Pine trees

‘Okayyy so that brings a lot of questions, sucks about the plants since I doubt I can plant them on pure webbing but the presence of a rudimentary ecosystem in the creature pack makes me feel that my creatures do need to eat somehow but what’s the difference between monsters and creatures? I have a stat block for any of them unlike the creatures so it’s probably that? Though it’s not the best to just take an assumption at face value, it does make the most sense… and it can’t be to do with predators or prey since a stag is considered a monster, it can’t be based on something arbitrary like ‘strong enough to kill an unarmed person’ since boars can very easily kill people if I remember correctly, maybe it’s based on size? But a hog is bigger than a wolf… well putting that aside for now’

Next was the spell pack, as a dungeon I’d say that divination would probably be the most valuable since I’m unlikely be directly fighting intruders but instead planning against them so information would be most important however the help function seems better than what a spell could provide and I want to avoid redundancies as much as possible; for the same reason I’d rather not take Conjuration since I think I can cover that with the production utility which seemed the most useful out of the options available there: ‘magic’ seemed resources intensive; ‘livelihood’ would probably only be useful to humans/humanoids; ‘hostile’ probably referred to traps and since I’d rather have my defences be monster based so they can grow naturally and thus, production. So elemental, enchantment, alteration. Elemental sticks out to me for 2 reasons, all the other magics seem to be centred around a central purpose; something that the magic didwhereas elemental seemed to be focused on how you did it and the effects tab mentioned infusing the elements so theoretically I could learn an effect by using elemental magic, it did say ‘Experiment and discover’ so surely that means I can unlock more through trial and error right? And elemental magic seems to be the best option in that regard, in addition, as I mentioned earlier as a dungeon my magic won’t really be getting used against invaders so my magic being able to buff the dungeon as a whole seems to be the most valuable option

Spell pack chosen! Elemental:

Skills

4 elements magic

Elemental fusion

Elemental control

Spells

Fireball

Earth-bind

Ice-wall

Wind-blade

Elemental charging

Elemental weapon

4 elements magic:

Grants the ability to cast magic of the four base elements; discounts mana costs when using these spells in areas with plentiful mana of the chosen element; can, very inefficiently, convert elemental phenomena into mana (large fires, mudslides, hurricanes etc)

Elemental fusion:

Grants the ability to fuse elemental magics to create a spell that mimics the effect of the base spell but with a fusion element (fire+water=steam, air+water=cloud, earth+water=mud, air+fire=plasma/lightning, earth+fire=magma, air+earth=poison)

Elemental control:

Grants the ability to control the 4 elements passively in your surroundings, able to slowly move a volume of 1m^3 of earth by 1m every minute, able to quell or strengthen flames, generate a faint breeze or clean dirty water.

Fireball:

Cast time: 3s

Generate a basketball sized ball of flames and hurl it at a target within 10m after which the fireball peters out.

Mana cost: 5

Range: 10m

Earth-bind:

Cast time: 10s

Channel mana through the ground to control tendrils of earth that wrap themselves around their target.

Mana cost: 10

Range: 3m

Ice-wall:

Cast time: 1s

Create a 0.1m thick, 2 meter tall, 1m wide wall of ice that can be shaped as a flat or curved surface or instead, at the cost of reducing the walls height by half, make a 1m diameter circular wall.

Mana cost: 15

Range: 1m

Wind-blade:

Cast time: 1s

Fire out a 0.3m long blade of wind that rapidly covers a distance of 5m before dispersing.

Mana cost: 3

Range: 5m

Elemental charging :

Cast time: 1m

Spend a minute to infuse a person with elemental mana to strengthen them, more SPD for wind, more DUR for earth, more END for water, more POW for fire.

Mana cost: 30

Duration : 10m

Elemental weapon:

Cast time: 10s

Wreath a weapon in an element to strengthen attacks with it.

Mana cost: 5

Range: 1m

‘Well if elemental charging can be used on monsters that would be fantastic but I doubt it since it says ‘person’ though that might just be because system definitions of spells are written both the creator or something, or maybe based on the majorities understanding of a spell. Though if it was the second one surely some kind of monster tamer class should have made it common knowledge by now, right? Elemental weapon is probably going to be useless which sucks, then elemental fusion as well; that seems to have the most potential of all these abilities by far. Though some combinations seem quite… strange. Poison blade? Either useless or very, very powerful depending on whether or not it can still cut’

‘If we assume that average intelligence is 10; mages have slightly better intelligence, let’s say 12; standard mana for beginning mages is 1:1; then ice-wall should be some kind of last resort, panic button type spell. Used right when there’s no options left to block a fatal blow and escape rather than it being used more generally as a defensive tool. Wind-blade seems to be the spell most designed for general use: cheap, quick, single target. Earth-bind seems to be support focused, I can imagine if you have an ally in melee combat it would be a lot more powerful than it seems, probably the most user for me by far since I could use it to support my monsters since they’re all melee combatants… wait wouldn’t it be even better if I have ranged monsters since they couldn’t dodge? Nice. It doesn’t make it clear in the description but just from the way that all the spells seem to have their own niche it would be a crowd-control/area attack type spell which makes sense as long as the fireball explodes on contact. No idea on how to ‘infuse’ an area with an element though, I suppose using the channeling from earth-bind or elemental-charging to try and figure it out since they try and channel magic through the ground and elemental-charging fills something with elemental magic to achieve buff like effects which is what I assume the elemental effects are since we already have debuffs in the mental effects tab.’

‘Next is the utilities, it seems a bit strange I have a starter pack for them when they’re level locked though. Are you meant to not have access to the starter packs till then or are most dungeons level 3+ to start? But starting at a high level doesn’t make sense isn’t it just a fancy, high value level 1 at that point? Well anyway, I’ve already decided on production so let’s just get it over with’

Utilities pack chosen! Production:

Ore vein

Forge

Casting

Lumber mill

Carving

Carpentry

Crystallisation

Embedding

Powdering

‘Right, all mainly self-evident except that third row… well, time to see if we can check it ye- UTILITIES LOCKED TILL LEVEL 3, okay so that’s a no. Time to finalise the other choices,

Free creatures chosen!

Monsters

Tyx Swarmer

Tyx Burrowers

Reavers

Creatures

Cockroach

Borer beetles

Shade bats

Flora

Pop Lichen

Panstip Fungi

Shade phlox

From my free creature choices I got some far stranger creatures and flora than I did with the starter pack, the cockroaches and borer beetles where fairly similar to what you’d find on earth but the shade bats where completely alien. These bats had bodies only 0.1m long but a staggering 2m wingspan tip to tip and was pitch black with ears that where each the size of its entire head, it almost looked like a caricature of what a bat should be like. They seemed to have evolved to make long, gliding flights with minimal noise to avoid detection. Just one part of the knowledge I gained from unlocking the things. They fed of shade phlox and made their nests as high up in whatever cave systems they inhabited, natural fliers and with a tendency to raise their young on a perch many never touch the ground their entire lives and their number one predator is, you guessed it, reavers. The plants where also fascinating: the panstip fungi are large, flat mushrooms that are bioluminescence and will basically be my number 1 light source in these caves, the lichen seems mundane but when bloated with water, diced into a powder and then dried out properly it creates a strange sort of rudimentary gun powder: though it isn’t used that way; or at all really, after discovery it was pretty quickly discovered that it could be weaponised into a sort of grenade like weapon however compared to say, a fireball spell, the power was disappointing for all the time, resources, risk and effort put into its creation; the resources where simply too sparse for mass production to ever be practical and while more powerful alternatives where found their problems where more of the same to an exponential degree for a minimal increase in strength and while it was used in the mining and constructing industry for a while increased educational standards led to a proliferation of young, poor, low skill earth mages willing to take on such odd jobs for a good wage and therefore they, once again, where made redundant. When growing if it’s stepped on it will create small explosions which are the source of the ‘pop’ in its name. The shade phlox however, is an entrancing purple flower that hangs from the ceiling in order to get the most advantage of the lowdown bioluminescent fungi, usually not panstip’s in their natural environment but something similar, they are a thin hanging vine adorned with far too many small, three leaved flowers too count and have been found to have slightly hallucinogenic properties that some avid users claim to open the path to enlightenment and power beyond what even an archmage could comprehend however no such results have made themselves public as of yet though there may be more to the claims than just drug influenced rambling as a small excerpt in the shade bats information mentions that the bats can become a type of monster called a ‘Seer Bat’ with enough shade phlox of high enough potency consumed.

I considered going into my spells to spend my SP but to be honest at this point I was getting slightly tired of the constant menu navigating and wanted to do something so I started to work on creature creation, I felt that I should start from the ground up so that all the framework is in place immediately so the goals I set for myself where, in order: expand territory (to 3*10^8m^2 hopefully) since even just a single wolf pack would want about the same amount to prowl in however hopefully the geography of a cave system and the fact they wouldn't be roaming would cut that down significantly, then I want to place the flora, then place herbivores/insects before finishing up with placing predators. For now I wanted to place all the flora, creatures and monsters on my free choices; a small amount ferns and grass to see how they adapt; the rabbits and pigeons quite liberally to see if they can actually manage to maintain a population at all here and 3 sets of a dozen wolves with some vipers scattered throughout. The vipers where actually the ones I expected to adapt best to environment but maybe the lack of plant cover would make things difficult for them.

I began expanding my territory pretty much just as a perfect sphere in hopes of finding cave systems below and the surface above while the sides where just for the sake of surface area, after spending most of the day just expanding my territory I had gotten 100m out giving me about 3*10^4m^2 of surface area since it was mostly just a massive clearing at this point with the occasional stone pillar or stalagmite however it was all covered in the ludicrously thick webbing from before; the reason I stopped is because I finally found a change, three passages that where north, south-east and south-west of me respectively each had the web coming to an end less than a meter deep into them. The end of the nest, the east and west where still on going making the entire nest seem to be almost olive shaped with the passages on the long sides. I took a moment to plan what to do from here, I’d half been expecting nothing but webs for the entire distance as stupid as that seems in retrospect, I needed to consider what I’d do upon finding any forms of life. Do I want to try and incorporate it into my dungeon or just kill everything I came across, life unrelated to the dungeon would come at no cost to me unlike natural born dungeon monsters which still have an hourly essence cost but no initial cost however they wouldn’t listen to orders properly… it just doesn’t seem worth it to try and change things to accommodate. Right, that’s settled then, we just ignore them, we won’t hunt them down but worst comes to worst they just become food for our monsters and if we’re lucky they’ll stick around without me wasting resources on trying to force them too. Continuing to expand I found that the caverns where completely barren, markings on the walls seem to indicate that these caves where carved out by water and I doubt they’ve been discovered since the hematite is abundant enough here for it to be a worthwhile resource and I know that the humans of this world at least do mine for things due to the information about the pop lichen, it’s been about 200m and I still see no sign of us being near the surface so it might just be too deep? After all things definitely have to be able to get in here to create that nest. On a more positive note, I’ve found quite a few branching paths by now and they all seem to be large enough for my wolves or bugs to patrol them and I think they’ll serve as the perfect camouflage for Tyx Burrower paths and we’re nearly ready for the next help question. Thinking back on it, there’s no way for the help function to have been able to answer my question with only knowledge of me and how a dungeon functions so it at minimum has to have access to all information about every dungeon in order to get those numbers through an average however, while this sounds ridiculous, it could also be omniscient. I think it’s worth spending this second question checking something that it couldn’t possibly know through dungeon knowledge alone, maybe something to do with human society? But what if there are dungeon masters who have positive relationships with society, I mean we’ve definitely got plenty to trade and some of the dungeon functions of the dungeon master class so far seem to be tailored to a human who controls a dungeon so maybe it would know that way.