Dungeon Day 144 to 186 – Continues

  The fort had been a nice little creation back when he had felt exposed, but in the end, he never ended up using it. This was a good thing since it meant nothing was strong enough to steamroll him. Thinking about that, Dan wasn’t sure if he had just been able to deal with things incredibly well or if Mother Infinity had just challenged him enough to keep him on his toes but never actually put him in any real danger. And the more Dan thought about it, the more it was definitely the second thing. After all, this area was supposed to be his starting zone, so taking it easy on him made sense.

  Either way, it was time to get rid of the fort and the enchantments he had set up around it. Removing the fort and the enchantments didn’t take long, and it was only a matter of slightly flexing his dungeon power. However, this brought the question of what exactly he was going to do with his body. Dan still wanted to keep the crystal safe, and after thinking about the issue for a few minutes, Dan decided to place his crystal in the big dome under the town area. The place was underground and entirely out of sight for adventurers. On top of that, it had reinforced walls, and more importantly, the underground dome was the respawn point for his beasts in the town area, which gave him a never-ending security force.

  With the location picked out, Dan quickly moved his crystal there and returned to work on the Beast Lands.

  Next on the creation chopping block were three things.

  The first was going to be the spawn points for his minions. At first, Dan wanted to do another big underground dome for beasts, but he remembered that he needed to make sure beasts showed up in the rest of the dungeon, not just in the Beast Lands and town area. To that end, Dan decided to use spawn nodes and ended up spreading spawn nodes for beasts everywhere on the map except for three locations.

  These three exceptions were the Druids Domain, The Tainted Lands, and the town area. For the Druid's Domain, he placed the spawn nodes rather far apart and in very low quantities. Dan wanted to keep the domain full of nature beasts since the regular ranked beasts would be able to attack adventurers freely due to not being part of Dena’s faction. And since Dan didn’t want to ruin the balance of that area, keeping regular beast spawns to a minimum was key.

  Meanwhile, for the Tainted Lands, all regular ranked beast spawn nodes were kept in the outer area. In this case, it didn’t make sense for regular beasts to spawn inside the tainted lands, and it made even less sense for beasts to head into the tainted lands. As such, Dan would make sure the normal ranked beasts that spawn in that area kept to the outer perimeter.

  Finally, the town area. For this area, Dan wanted to keep the type of beasts there contained to a certain type. Aka, the old ones he had, and not the new beasts he was going to make. The reason for this design was to help adventurers. After all, the town was supposed to be their starting area, and he wanted the area to be as simplistic and straightforward as possible. So, if he had a bunch of different beasts with all sorts of power, it would be overwhelming and leave no surprises. Thus, Dan didn’t place any new spawn nodes there.

  As for the rest of the areas, Dan had no issue throwing all sorts of beasts in different areas, and he made sure to make thousands of spawn locations in all sorts of places, going so far as to create new caves and slightly hidden areas. After all, birds would have it much easier resting-wise since many would spawn in the air. However, ground creatures were limited, and Dan wanted to randomize their spawns so they would spawn in decently hidden areas where they could rest. Naturally, the Beast Lands had as many spawn nodes as the rest of the map since that was the main beast area. Plus, it helped that his beasts could still choose to travel around.

  The next thing Dan did was create the home base for Ingot, which would be the castle for his kingdom. It wasn’t an actual castle, in fact, an actual castle would have probably been cheaper to make. However, it wouldn’t have made sense to have beasts living in a castle, not unless there was a princess involved. Instead, Dan decided to create a small god damn mountain range.

  He created the small mountain range in the bottom left-hand corner of the floor around the area where he had initially come in. The mountains were arranged in a U shape to create a valley, and Dan made sure to create plenty of caves in which beasts and Beast Lords could reside. Dan also placed some spawn points for beasts in there but only activated some, while the rest would activate based on the number of Beast Lords recruited. The mechanic was to make it so the mountain range and valley went from barely lived in at the start of the dungeon month to heavily lived in by the end, well, as long as plenty of lords were recruited.

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  On top of regular spawn nodes, Dan also placed spawn nodes inside Beast Lord caves. These nodes would be claimed by the first lord who entered it, setting their respawn point there. Of course, Dan manually set the spawn points for the lords already serving Ingot, and he even made an especially big cave that could act as a king's hall with a large throne and everything for Ingot.

  Now, the mountains had taken a shit load of mana to create, but Dan was far from done in the valley. See, his ground monsters had a place to live in the mountain range, and technically, some bird monsters could live there too. However, Dan also wanted to create a special spot for his birds. So, on top of creating a bunch of trees in the valley, he created an insanely massive one whose top reached almost the edge of the mountain tops. The tree was massive, and so were its many branches, which Dan filled with a bunch of different spawn nodes for birds, along with special nodes for the Beast Lords that would dominate the sky.

  On that note, Dan had to point out that if a Beast Lord died while not having joined the Beast Kingdom, they could not respawn. This was why it was important for adventurers to either kill or safely capture them, depending on which Beast Lands faction they joined.

  Having spent an incredible amount of mana on the mountains and tree creation, Dan was glad that the next part of the Beast Land creation arc would be incredibly cheap. This arc consisted of creating the base for the monstrosities.

  Creating the base wouldn’t be hard because it would just be a big chasm in the ground, and since removing dirt was free, making the base would also be relatively free. So, Dan quickly got to making the most chasm-looking chasm he could.

  He began digging in the northwest area of the Beast Lands, though only after claiming a bunch of lands from the gnolls, which made him regret leaving them for last. That claiming spree alone had taken like six day’s worth of mana, but it was something he had to do since he didn’t want the two faction bases too close to each other.

  Could he have waited until the end to dig the trench and stuff? Sure, but honestly, Dan wanted to get each area mostly done and gone in one go.

  Anyways, after spending that ridiculous amount of mana, he created the chasm, which went as deep as he could take it, making it about four to five miles deep but only a few miles wide in the widest spots. As for its length, well, that was also a couple of miles of land from one tip of the crack-like chasm to the other. Honestly, he had created his own grand-canyon, at least a junior edition. Either way, it did take him a while to make the canyon, though most of the time spent there was making it look legit and scary. Finally, once the chasm was done, Dan created large caves that connected to it. The caves would be where the boss monstrosities were located, along with an especially large cave for the big bad monstrosity itself.

  On top of these boss caves, Dan also made tunnels that went outwards from the chasm and into the Beast Lands. These tunnels headed towards the surface and would be the main way for the monstrosities to head into the rest of the area. Dan had thought about just scattering spawn nodes all over the Beast Lands, but he wanted to make the area feel like it really belonged to the beasts; hence, they could spawn and be found everywhere. In contrast, the monstrosities were the invading force and only came from one general area.

  Now, Dan still created spawn points for the monstrosities, but these were in the caves where their bosses spawned or random places around the ravine depths, with some even respawning at the very top. Then, once they respawned, they could either chill at the ravine, take a tunnel out and deeper into the forest, or slowly make their way above land.

  Having created the areas and spawn nodes for the creatures of the Beast Lands, Dan had to make the paths they would take, and in this case, things would be slightly different. See, the monstrosities were going to be stuck in the Beast Lands, so their paths snaked through the area in whichever way Dan felt. He even improved on the concept of making paths by creating sets of paths and having the monsters randomly assigned a set of paths based on the day—an improvement he also quickly brought to the previous areas.

  As for the beasts, well, they would be able to roam around the map on top of the Beast Lands, so Dan had to account for this next level of freedom. He did make paths for the beasts in their main area, making sure plenty of them ran into monstrosity paths. However, he also set plenty of paths out into the rest of the dungeon floor, connecting them to already existing paths but mainly creating even more in the areas he had yet to touch.

  It took a while to get the entire beast path working right since Dan also had to calculate having them team up, run solo, or assign whether they could even roam in the first place. After all, he couldn’t have all his beasts roaming the rest of the map and leaving the Beast Lands empty. In fact, as he worked on that, he also had to go back and adjust the monstrosities so they would travel in groups, run solo, or with one of their boss monsters.

  Eventually, Dan felt like he had the paths and spawn points for monsters under control, and he looked at his to-do list to see what needed his attention next.

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