[D'sP] The Lakes Are Too Small - Chapter 395 (Patreon)

Doyle went over the math a few times before he believed it. This floor could have four digits in kobolds on it. Even if split evenly between the five lakes, there would be hundreds in each group.

It started to make sense why a dungeon would pay the cost to have some monsters at a higher level. Yes, each level higher costs the same as placing another of the monsters, but it seems you’re going to have points to spare if you stick to the cheap ones. Which turned his mind to something else.

The math was easy, but the number felt absurd. Almost 2k kobolds was one thing. However, if instead he placed goats? That would mean over 23k of them! Doyle wasn’t even sure what that would look like. The floor was big and technically he wasn’t even using it all. After all, it was bigger than the last floor, but he had mirrored the last floor.

Doyle pulled back and got a feeling for how much space the two elder kobolds take up in the floor as a whole and it doesn’t look good. He hadn’t really paid attention on the last floor, but what he is calling islands is actually kind of small. Without moving space around, the actual space a floor has isn’t that big.

In fact, Doyle goes back down to the 16th floor. The so-called islands? They fit the monsters. It looks fine, but it shouldn’t. ‘Hey, Ally, what’s up with the size of my 16th and 17th floor? I shouldn’t have the space that it seems to have.’

Ally pops over and Doyle pulls up a screen. She frowns as she looks over what he is showing her. ‘Hmm, yeah, we kind of just went to it with the islands, but the math doesn’t add up? Throw up a cross section of the floor.’

Doyle pulls that up and reveals part of the answer.

Ally nods, ‘Okay, looks like even if you didn’t intend to, you stretched the floor a bit. Instead of a sphere, the actual shape is a squashed sphere. That gave you quite a bit of extra space.’

Doyle is about to nod, but something still feels off. ‘My instincts still say the math isn’t adding up.’

Ally turns back to the screen and manipulates it to un-squash the thing. ‘Hmm, you’re right. Though that is easy to answer as well. We’ve been ignoring the slow growth of your floors. Quick, take a look at the first floor and see how much space it has now.’

Doyle pulls up the top down view of the first floor and starts adding more markers for small rooms. The floor had originally fit a square of small rooms with 17 rooms to a side, then he had noticed the point at which it fully fit another room to a side. Now, however, he had missed the last couple and it was already onto 21 small rooms to a side.

Of course, adding three extra rooms doesn’t seem like much, except for two things. The first is obvious, it is two extra rooms to the side of a square. That means it actually went from fitting 324 small rooms to 441. An increase of 117 total small rooms.

More important is that this increase was just for the first floor. Doyle wasn’t sure what the exact math was, but it wasn’t an even growth each floor. The growth increases floor after floor and so all the way down at floor 16 and 17, the actual increase was much more.

Now, that still isn’t all that big for an island. Without the squishing, the island floor is still quite small, just not as claustrophobic as it would have been. Once you do squish it down though, while the “islands” aren’t island size, they are reasonably big enough for the job.

Though this also answered why floor 17 wasn’t math-ing right. On 16, besides the volcano, it could spread out quite a bit. However, on floor 17 Doyle had placed that plateau. While not the tallest, it prevented the floor from squishing down as much.

When Doyle realized this, he could only sigh and reduce its height. It had been majestic! But also, if laid on its side, a fourth of the floor’s length. Highly impractical and would have been more obvious if there wasn’t some adaptive squishing going on. Which was also a problem.

He turns to Ally, ‘Why did I not realize this was happening? And nothing against you, but why didn’t you notice either? This feels like when I went into debt all over again. In fact, I haven’t added more to my debt, have I?’

Ally shakes her head, ‘No extra debt. I. I might know what is happening. Just that, you’re coming at this whole thing from a third angle compared to how basically every other dungeon does. They’re all either coming from X or Y, natural or transformed core. And here you are, coming from Z.’

Doyle, ‘Last time I checked, I’m strictly in the transformed category.’

Ally shakes her head, ‘Not anymore. Remember, you unlocked your instincts. If I’m right, this is like when a doctor hits a human’s knee with a plastic hammer. Natural dungeons don’t warp their floors like you normally do, that’s a trait seen in sapients who have been turned into a dungeon.

‘What natural cores will do is exactly this. They need more space? The floor will stretch out, sacrificing height. It isn’t a conscious effort, after all, they aren’t awakened.

‘And so you come along and break out of your limited instincts, unlocking the full scope of what a natural dungeon would have along with the mind of a humanoid enlightened sapient. So when you reached the limit of the floor, your leg kicked.’

Doyle, ‘So I can’t control it?’

Ally shrugs, ‘Do you even want to? I know it feels strange, but so do reflexes and such. Anytime your body does something you didn’t tell it to, you’re going to feel odd about it. Sometimes? You’ll even want to change it so it doesn’t.

‘There is nothing wrong with that and if you do feel like having this happen is too much for you, we’ll work together to stop it from ever happening again. However, you seem more disturbed that you didn’t know it could happen, not that it did. Like not knowing about the knee thing, having the doctor do it to you for the first time.’

Doyle nods, ‘You aren’t wrong. I guess we can run with it for now. Though I guess since I now realize the floor is being warped already, I might as well go full in on it to get the space I need for the kobolds.

‘With the plateau, the kobolds don’t need to mine downward, so I can cut out a lot of space there and move it to the edges. The lakes can stay the same size, there will just be a lot of forest around it. And honestly, the trees will help hide the size. As long as I make the kobolds not too curious, it won’t feel like any mistake calls them all down on you.’

Ally, ‘That should work. And don’t forget, you don’t need all of the space in the plateau. Cut out any space not being used for the faux-mines.’

Doyle nods as he gets to work adjusting things. Though instead of cutting up space like he has been, he tries the squish method his instincts used. This works perfectly fine and in fact, is neither more nor less effective than his other way of doing, simply another path with the same ending.

And once he has filled the extra land with trees and resource nodes, Doyle is satisfied with the space available. This would clearly be a floor that wasn’t meant to be full cleared. However, if someone wants to train against kobolds or harvest herbs, it would be the perfect place.

There was just a question of how many elders to use. Doyle already had it figured out for the last lake up against the plateau. It was pulled out of thin air, but 30 elders, half and half on the genders.

That would be too much for the other lakes. Or as Doyle looks at them, pond, might be the better descriptor. Doyle shakes his core, the lakes are fine.

6, 12, 18, 24

Doyle’s core dims for a second as those numbers come to him. Not because they were bad, but it just popped into his head. Which after the minor bit of panic he had went through, was not how he wanted things to happen for a little.

However, he also recognized where it came from. 30 divided by the number of lakes, 5, results in six. So for an even growth partner, starting with six and adding six more elders to each lake was perfect. 

So he threw that away, while workable he wasn’t going to use it right now. Maybe start with six, that is a nice number and divided by two evenly. Then 9, 13, and 18.

Though they didn’t come to him all at once. Instead, he chose 9 because it was an odd number. 13 was a matter of not wanting to add the same number over and over, so he added the previous difference plus one. Then finally 18 was following the same pattern. So start with 6 and add 3, 4, and 5.

That left the gap between 18 and 30, a total of 12. Which Doyle couldn’t help but notice it fit in its own way. How? Well, if you add together the three numbers that were previously added separately, you get 12. Which was completely by chance, but made him feel better about the non-pattern the numbers formed.

So with that in mind, there would be a total of 76 elder kobolds on the floor. Doyle rounded that up to 80 by adding in four wandering elders out in the forest. And with those out of the way, he still had up to 1,734 kobolds to place on the floor.

That is a bit much and so Doyle stops resisting the urge to round numbers and cut it down to 1,500 kobolds. Then split that in fifths and assigned 300 to each lake. Though that is a bit lopsided.

The first lake is definitely a pond and so Doyle takes a hundred kobolds from it and moves them to the last lake. Still looks crowded, but that’s just because they’re all gathered at the lakes right now. To get a better feel for things, he has the kobolds spread out to mimic a usual day, even if they currently lack tools and such. At which point the floor seems fine, if a little tight.

This meant it was time to gear his kobolds. Except, he liked Ally’s idea and since he already set it up so they had as much ore as they could want, Doyle made it so that metalsmithing was something they could just do non-stop. Sure, they wouldn’t actually get better, but it did mean that every delve had the chance to run into a surprise.

To facilitate this, Doyle also made an area at each lake that would provide infinite wood. That way they can make charcoal. About all Doyle has to provide in theory is the first set of crafting tools.

However, he soon finds a gap. Doyle might have made it so they could turn ore into metal equipment, but metal equipment just metal. The infinite wood spawns already covered wooden handles, but armor and such needs leather.

A simple thing to fix. Doyle was already going to have critters and now the rabbits and such would be providing an extra benefit besides being a prop. Still, it felt like something was missing.

Or rather, something he could fix was missing. The lakes needed fish, but that would have to wait until those were available. No, what was missing was...

Oh right, the skills! Doyle couldn’t help but laugh. No wonder the kobolds were having such a hard time making such trash gear! Should be easy enough to fix.

Rather Not Know - Chapter 394

She Found It - Chapter 396