Jacob finished his designs for the ants in his head. A big question that he needed to ask was where the food for the ants was going to come from. He entertained the idea of having the ants be self-sufficient, but he decided against it. Otherwise, why would the ants want to go outside of the nest when they already have everything.

  Water was another concern. The dungeon fairy could manually pump water but that wasn’t a long term solution. He debated whether the ants should provide themselves with water or not, but decided that he didn’t need to think about it yet.

  The ants were going to have several different types, from normal worker ants to royal guards. The ones with the valuable exoskeletons were the various castes of magic users and soldiers, who will be both rarer in an ant colony and much stronger than the average ants.

  Previously for the ants, he had left out the larva stage. Counterintuitively, having a larva stage cost soul points as it allowed for the young to take the time to grow stronger. The only reason why his ants hadn’t been torn to pieces in the fifth wave was due to the boss and the remaining minions being completely exhausted and panicking.

  The level of the ants without the stronger characteristics were at level one, and it would be a miracle for any of these to reach level two. They all were fragile and weak with their only strength being their numbers. Even those with the stronger characteristics were weaker than normal.

  This larva stage had many more uses than that. Back on earth, insects sometimes developed differently depending on how they were fed. For example, queen bees were created by feeding larva royal jelly. Using this mechanism, the ant hive would be able to create several different ants in a way that was cost-effective and not overpowered.

  The first step to creating a species was the name. He thought about it for a little bit and decided to call them {Shiny Ants}. He had thought about using the name “Gemstone Ants,” but the name made him think that the ant’s exoskeletons were made of gemstones instead of just being shiny. The name was boring, but boring names were best when he was managing over fifty different species that were all ‘creatively named.’

  The basic worker ant would have very basic forms of earth magic to allow for them to dig and destroy tunnels. Jacob kept the earth magic intentionally weak as earth magic was dangerous in the dungeon, even from its denizens. They would only have two spells, one to tear away the stone into large pebbles and another to fuse bits of stone together.

  The other ants will be more interesting. There will be nurse ants, who will feed and manage larva and heal injured ants by having life magic. There will be a tank type and soldier type ants that will help defend the nest. Finally there will be the queen ant, who will lay the eggs, and the royal guards to protect her.

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  For ants with other types of magic, he wasn’t sure yet. Ice magic was a good idea for food storage, but he wasn’t sure about the others.

  Most of this was something for him to add later though. Due to the unique reproduction of ants, it was much cheaper for him to make modifications later as the only thing that he needed to change was the queen ant. All that mattered at this stage were the worker ants and the queen ants.

  He had been purposely distracting himself from the problem of food. {Scarlet Teeth} were never meant to be used after the five waves were finished. The issue was that creating a good food source was never easy, especially at lower levels. Now, he had no choice but to fix this issue.

  The bottom of the food chain in the dungeon were generators, which could be just a power source like a magic circle or an organism with a strong enough magic to become a perpetual energy machine. {Scarlet Teeth} used corpses and the remnant mana within as a starting point to expand. However, it can only generate enough mana to prolong itself, eventually they would die.

  This was a countermeasure to prevent this layer of the dungeon from being renamed to the fungal wastes. It was also because extending this was too costly at the time.

  Now he needed to come up with a solution. He didn’t think there would be enough corpses for it; he couldn’t use ant corpses as they didn’t have enough mana. Even then, fungus were notorious for mutations.

  The usual solution to this was by increasing the mana density of a level. As the layer was next to the surface, this wasn’t as difficult as it could be, but even then mana recovery was still an issue. Jacob assumed that the plants on the Overworld didn’t need to use their mana to feed themselves.

  Jacob calmed his thoughts and closed his eyes. He wanted the first layer to be a mine setting. What kind of generator would help him achieve this aesthetic?

  What kind of generator would help him attract adventurers while making this layer look like a mine? The best thing that Jacob could think of were magic crystals. Large, glowing crystals growing out of stone walls was iconic, even more so than magic, glowing mushrooms.

  However, he didn’t want to incentivize actual mining from the surface dwellers. So the magic crystals needed to grow on the surface of the stone walls and not within.

  That could be used to incentivize the ants to build tunnels, because they aren’t building tunnels. They would be building farms. So these crystals would be the food for the ants, and this would cause conflict between the adventurers and the ants. This could also be used to cause conflict with the other species that would infect this layer.

  The one issue that he had was the possibility of the ants closing off the dungeon to the surface to protect themselves. While he did have control of them by enthralling their queen, it was more like suggestion then command. All species in the dungeon need to be at least semi-autonomous, which meant that he needed to plan in advance for potentially harmful behaviors.

  For the moment, the mana needed to grow these crystals came from the Overworld. However, he would need to come up with a solution in the future.