[D'sP] Finishing Fifteen - Chapter 349 (Patreon)

So with all that new information in mind, Doyle begins to figure out the ratio he wants between the various monsters. After all, 73,000 points isn’t going to spend itself. This meant going back to the hexku as they had the fewest living spaces. Doyle had only placed a few of their trees because of wanting to limit the number of treasure chests and three seemed like a good number.

The question now is what percentage of his points does he want to invest and how much is too much? The thirteenth floor has an absolute ton of the birds, but it was manageable since only a handful attacked the party at a time. With these trees, every bird in it would attack those who get too close, though focus on anyone trying to loot the chest.

With the number of points he has to spend, Doyle could easily drop a hundred hexku to a tree. That seemed excessive, though. Of course, since they are all bunched up, that makes them vulnerable to area of effect damage, unlike on thirteenth. Still, the ability to hit even more of them at once isn’t quite enough of an equalizer to make up for using so many more.

On the other hand, the trees are meant to be optional challenges to earn cash prizes. Even though the kobolds will be further off the path, they’ll actually sally forth to attack delvers. The birds are mostly going to just sit in their trees and if the thirteenth is anything to go by, make semi-elaborate nests.

This reminder of what the birds are doing, turns his attention to the thirteenth floor to check in. Doyle hadn’t really been paying attention since they were just bird nests with a little pizzazz to them. Stuff like placing green sprigs around the outside in a geometric pattern.

Though as Doyle looks in on them, things have gone a good bit further. While the nests aren’t even verging on what Doyle would refer to as proper houses, they’ve spread around and connected to each other. There were even what looked like proper paths that the hexku could be seen walking around on. Their second pair of wings being dexterous enough to allow fine manipulation and thus this nest village was formed. Doyle couldn’t wait to see what they would be capable of when placed on a deeper floor with an even greater suit of mental stats.

Of course, their nests are just a side distraction. The important part was figuring out numbers.

25, 50, 75.

Doyle mentally blinks. Those numbers had just sort of popped out. Now, this wasn’t some sort of mystical thing or anything, just his subconscious spitting out numbers, but he likes it. They add up to 150 and create a gradient of danger people would have to face to get to the treasure chests. While it would guarantee it, this pattern would likely end up with the rewards being split up as well. The first tree being raided the most and each after getting looted less and less often.

However, at the same time delvers will always have at the back of their mind that the 75 bird chest could have even less money than the 25 bird chest. It would likely discourage a lot of people, however, the gamblers out there would be drawn even more to them. Which feels a bit sleezy to Doyle. To take advantage of what are basically gambling addicts isn’t exactly a nice thing to do, but on a certain level, all delvers are like that. Well, except maybe the farmers on the sixth. They’re there for the sure bet. Doyle puts that out of his mind and marks off 7,500 points for the birds, leaving 65,500 for the kobolds and friends.

And speaking of the kobolds, even including the goats and axebeaks, there were quite a few he could place. With the regular axebeaks being the most expensive at 60 each, he could have well over a thousand of the things strutting around if he wanted to. In fact, these numbers were getting a little absurd to handle on an individual basis.

Doyle mentally frowns as another little thing that was at the back of his mind filters to the front. ‘That is right, things are getting too big to handle individually and I don’t think I have been.’

He thinks back on making the last floor and all he can remember is placing the monsters, not actually applying the loot or the gear. Yet there they were, all geared up and with loot sensibly distributed. Doyle turns to Ally and asks her about this.

Ally, however, can only shrug. ‘I have not heard of that sort of thing. I presume you can still set that stuff yourself if you want?’

Doyle gives it a quick try on the fifteenth and it does seem like he can customize his monsters just as much as he ever could.

Ally, ‘Well, in that case, we might be bumping up against one difference between a regular dungeon core and once created from a pre-existing sapient. I have to assume that your subconscious mind is filling in the blanks for you. Sort of like how if you say the word “cat”, your mind automatically conjures an image of a cat despite not having actually put any details into it.

‘Here you’re saying kobold and the leather armor and weapons are all being filled in. Sure, you could specify that it is an orange cat, just as much as you could specify a kobold mage, but even then? It isn’t like your saying orange cat with four legs, stubby ears, long fluffy tail, and so on and so forth. All the other details just are. If anything, this should help you quite a bit.’

Doyle nods, ‘True, it is just I was a little worried about things happening without my direct input. Though I guess in this case, it had my direct input, I just didn’t realize I was giving it.’

Ally, ‘Yeah, having your body react without you meaning it to can be disturbing. Something you expect, like how your doctors would test reflexes or whatever it was by tapping a rubber hammer on a person’s knee. Though this sounds more like how eyes automatically dilate as needed. Same sort of uncontrolled action, but with much less of a “hit you in the knee with a hammer” trigger to it.’

Doyle, ‘Whatever the case, not like I can stop it from allowing me to make floors.’

Ally nods, ‘Yeah, you sorta need to do that. Oh, by the way, the town has managed to handle the whole “progression reset” thing you dumped on them. Someone has even already fallen afoul with it.’

Doyle tilts to the side, ‘The hey? Already?’

Ally laughs, ‘To be fair to them, they were testing it. To be less fair, they weren’t doing it as a part of some town backed test. They just decided to meet up with a group on the sixth floor by hopping to the seventh and back again until they found someone. And interestingly, only they got punished for that.’

Doyle nods, ‘Well, of course, the cattle farmers didn’t purposefully meet up with them. I set it so that people trying to get into groups of more than six people would be targeted. So since only the idiots wanted this outcome, only they got punished.’

Ally sighs, ‘Sometimes the system is such a stick in the mud. You can get it to specifically target people based on intent, but you can’t just let it decide everything based on intent. It would be so much easier if you could just have the reset happen based on bad intent.’

Doyle, ‘Well, I can understand that to some degree. No one wants the thought police. Just because someone wants to do something for a bad reason, it doesn’t mean they will do it or that what they’re going to do is bad. More than enough companies pre-system made donations purely for the tax write off and while some of the rich scammed the system, there were others that did donate to legit charities. Sometimes you just gotta take the good with the bad.

‘Though I’ve always felt those signs some places put up about how they’ve helped get supplies for a school are inherently vile. Not because the business did that, but because it meant there was a need to in the first place. A school or similar should just have what they need! Hell, don’t make children shoulder the “crimes” of their parents either. Give them breakfast and lunch for free. After all, the so-called crimes that cause many a parent to not be able to properly feed their kids will generally trace back to them simply being born in the same situation.’

Ally raises an eyebrow, ‘Got a bit heated there. Touchy subject?’

Doyle’s core dims for a moment before he responds. ‘I was lucky. I never had to go hungry. However, I worked in a grocery store and they would have collections and stuff like that for schools all the time. It’s so heartwarming to see all of the people who come together and donate for those causes. Except for the fact that those causes are self-made. Instead of having people donate off brand pencils and notebooks, just make sure the school is getting enough taxes to cover what is needed. The fact that kids have to show up with anything besides the clothes on their back and maybe a backpack, in my opinion is criminal.’

Doyle pauses and his core pulses between bright and dim. ‘Phew, yeah, hot button topic. I could go on for hours about it.’

Ally nods, ‘I won’t say the rest of the universe is better. However, the systems through which food is made and distributed are fundamentally changed with the introduction of dungeons and magic in general. Not to say people don’t starve, but there is a much better buffer with even minimal effort being put in.’

Ally pauses and grimaces, ‘Though it certainly helps that when times get bad, more people become adventurers. If only because it reduces the number of mouths to feed in a, shall we say, permanent manner. Not the nicest way to go about it, but at least it tends to be on their terms as the Adventurers Guild cracks down super hard on anyone that forces people into being adventurers.’

After that, the conversation died and so Doyle focused back on the new floor. From the thirteenth, he already knew that about 30 kobolds made a really good challenge. The question was how to integrate the other critters into that?

Of course, there was the option to stick them all on axebeaks and call it a day. That wouldn’t even be too out there. However, Doyle wanted a bit of thematic balance going on and so figured a third of the group could have mounts.

That would be ten axebeaks, so for some more balance, Doyle throws in ten goats as well. Seven of which are normal and three being grassen goats. That all adds up to 2,203 points. Though even then, he could place almost 30 such groups around.

So first, Doyle added another ten kobolds. Which added up to 2,703 and just under 25 groups. More reasonable as that doesn’t include the smaller camps. For those, he wants three medium and nine small kobold camps. The small camps are easy. Three kobolds and a grassen goat.

The medium camps, though, take some thought. Does he want axebeaks in those groups? Maybe, but how many? And should they have more grassen goats or simply add on regular ones?

Doyle waffles around with the numbers a bit and settles on 12 kobolds, two axebeaks which if this was out in the world would be used by messengers, two grassen goats, and three normal goats. Now, this was a good start, but Doyle felt there was room to tweak the numbers a good bit.

Though the math from that wasn’t too bad. It allowed for just shy of ten kobold communities. The problem was that to make ten such communities of a settlement, three outposts which was what he had decided to call the medium-sized groups, and nine camps? Yeah, that would take 740 extra points and he only had 332 points of padding.

First, he tried just upping the number of small camps, since he could fit those in easily enough. Though that left over a thousand points on the table if he went down to nine communities, so he tweaked it some more.

First, he gave the outposts more goats so they had a total of three grassen and five normal goats. That was nearly there, with only a couple hundred spare points. So going with the theme, and the fact that goats cost the least amount, he added another grassen goat to the settlement.

Almost, just 43 points floating. An extra goat to the settlement later and there were seven spare on nine communities. Then nine total goats cut into the padding by 29 points, but the number wasn’t satisfying and Doyle upped it to ten goats in a settlement, using only 65 of the padding. Plus, the numbers looked nice. Not the most important metric, but Doyle had to live with them, so they might as well be aesthetic to him.

This meant that all together there would be nine communities which each had a settlement, three outposts, and 12 camps. The settlement would have 40 kobolds, ten axebeaks, four grassen goats, and ten goats. Outposts would be in the middle with 12 kobolds, two axebeaks, three grassen goats, and five goats. Then the camps get only three kobolds and a grassen goat. Plus the 150 hexku for a total of 73,065 points.

Goat Cost Comparison - Chapter 348

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