She had no desire to earn AP from killing sentient races, nor any more from eradicating creatures – unless they attacked her first with the intent of destroying her Core. She wasn’t opposed to defending herself, but she wasn’t about to go out and start a fight. Honestly, she just wanted to be left alone to craft in peace, without having to watch her back every moment in case something else was aiming to destroy her.
The Unique Dungeon Fixtures category was a surprise, however. Apparently, her Dragon Glass Forge was a one-of-a-kind build that earned her some AP; she briefly wondered what else she could think of that might qualify for its uniqueness as well.
The three ?????’s toward the bottom were confusing, though when she looked at them closer, she could’ve sworn that she could almost understand what they were. She told Winxa about them after pondering them for a moment, and the Dungeon Fairy appeared confused as well.
“I’ve never heard of that before, though those other sources of Advancement Points are familiar. If what you said about their description is true, they might be sources that are only accessible to you. Whatever plans the Creator has for you—” Winxa abruptly stopped and put her hands up in surrender when her voice started to choke up. “Ok, ok – I won’t say any more about that.”
Sandra wasn’t going to stress about the unknown right now, as there wasn’t any point in worrying about something that she had no control over. What she did have control over, though, was what she could eventually do with her Advancement Points. After concentrating on the Available Advancement Options, she got a small glance of what was possible.
Advancement Options (Purchasable at Core Size 20)
Current Advancement Points
14
Advancement:
Cost:
Choose 1 Dungeon Monster from another available Classification (Repeatable)
5
Give your Dungeon Monsters the option of having a chosen accessible elemental attribute in addition to their base element – Cost increases with each purchase (only works on Monsters capable of using/applying their element) (Repeatable)
10
Reduce the Mana cost of Dungeon Seeds by 15% – Cost increases with each purchase (Advancement 0/4)
15
Reduce the Mana cost of Dungeon Monsters by 15% – Cost increases with each purchase (Advancement 0/4)
15
Reduce the Raw Material cost of Dungeon Seeds by 15% – Cost increases with each purchase (Advancement 0/4)
15
Reduce the Mana cost of Dungeon Traps by 15% – Cost increases with each purchase (Advancement 0/4)
15
Extend your Area of Influence by 10% – Cost increases with each purchase (Advancement 0/10)
50
Advance a current Classification 1 level to acquire access to stronger and larger Dungeon Monsters – this also includes any “Advancement Unlocked” Monsters – Cost increases with each purchase (Advancement 0/3)
75
Select a second available Classification to hybridize your Core (This option is only available once)
150
Sandra looked at the options she would have access to eventually and started to understand why the Creator wanted to keep the Advancement system a bit of a secret. With enough AP, a dungeon could potentially become so powerful that it could take the combined armies of…multiple…races…
Aren’t you afraid that I’ll become like that Core you were talking about earlier? I can see the potential of this Advancement stuff. It’s…quite overwhelming, actually.
“No…and yes. It’s always a risk if a Dungeon Core learns of the existence of Advancements, but I…believe that you are here for a reason other than to destroy everyone. I have a feeling that if the Creator really didn’t want you to use it, you would’ve been subjected to a contract in the first place,” Winxa said slowly and deliberately, as if she was testing the words in her head before they came out.
Well, you were right – this changes things dramatically. For now, since I can’t purchase anything until Core Size 20, I’ll just keep these things in the back of my mind and hold off on changing my Classification – and I can always change my mind later. In the meantime, I’ve got some expansion to do, as well as practice.
“Practice? What do you need to practice?”
Crafting, of course.
Chapter 19
New Monster Seed and Origination Material found!
Iron Ore
While Iron Ore can be directly used as a Monster Seed, it can also be combined with specific other materials to create a whole new Monster Seed.
You now have access to:
Tiny Iron Orb
Origination Raw Material Cost: 500
Origination Mana Cost: 50
Monster Min. Mana: 50
Monster Max. Mana: 400
Less than a day after learning about the Advancement system, Sandra found a small pocket of Iron Ore while she was excavating her fifth room. The fourth room had easily been finished the day before, and the progress she was able to make with a higher Mana and RM capacity being Core Size 7 was significant. When she was able to stock her fourth room with more of her constructs to absorb the ambient Mana, the constant stream of Mana increased – but not as much as she would’ve expected.
She remembered that Winxa had mentioned that there was a threshold of how much her dungeon could supply in terms of ambient Mana; she wasn’t sure if she was hitting that point yet, but she was definitely seeing diminishing returns as she expanded. Nevertheless, the influx of Mana was still great enough to do almost anything she wanted – including crafting.
While she was expanding her dungeon, she had been working with her Armored Sentinel to produce more Bronze knives. She still wanted to create other items, but she also knew that she should probably master one of the simplest items first before she moved on to other things. With essentially unlimited materials, a vessel that could craft non-stop without tiring, and hours of constant practice, Sandra became much more efficient at using the limited mobility of her construct. Whereas the first Bronze knife took at least an hour to heat up and shape into a crude representation of a weapon, she was soon churning out nearly a dozen in that same time.
That was her limit for the moment, however. While she could make more, it was a waste of resources to have hundreds of Bronze knives just sitting around doing nothing. So, after building a dozen molds that would help her cast the basic shape of the knife, Sandra would then heat them up again and use her hammer to refine them further. Once they had taken on the basic form she wanted, she set them aside for finishing.
Now that she had another room to play with – namely, the third room that was finished earlier (she wanted to leave the fourth room as a kind of buffer between what she was excavating and the rest of her dungeon) – Sandra made what she imagined to be a finishing and refining station. A low stone table lined one wall, where she would be able to place her tools and unfinished/finished crafts. Within easy reach of the table, she utilized a “trap” to create multiple grinding wheels to help with the crafting process.
With her experience she had making her forge, the process of making the grinding wheels was quite simple in comparison. Using her significantly larger store of Mana, she created a metal pole just over eight feet long, with seven varying degrees of small coarse stone wheels attached to them with a foot distance in between them. It was set up horizontally on two stone pillars that she created independent of the trap, with smooth polished holes a foot off the floor, allowing the pole to fit inside and able to rotate.
Sandra placed invisible activation triggers in front of each wheel, which would turn the entire trap at the same time. She wanted to create each wheel independent of each other at first, but in order for the whole thing to be considered as a single trap, she had to live with them all going at the same time. Which was fine, as it didn’t really matter in the long run.
In front of the grinding wheels, she also made a low stone wall wi
th a Bronze top that butted up almost against the line of grinding wheels, which would allow her to hold whatever she was grinding steady. The top ended just under the halfway point of each wheel, and when the grinders were rotating towards her, they would effectively hold the weapon or other item she was grinding down while she worked.
Normally, these grinding wheels were operated by foot petals, where the blacksmith or other crafter would have to constantly keep it rotating as they worked. Sandra’s Mana that was infused in her trap fortunately made that unnecessary, as it could rotate indefinitely without anything other than a trigger from her. Also, grinding wheels normally wore down over time and had to be replaced, but she didn’t need to worry about that. Just like her constructs, her Mana would keep them in proper working condition no matter how much they were used.
Now that she had this finishing station set up, she could use it to work on her Bronze knives when they were done with the forging process. It took some creative thinking and a little experimentation with how to hold the knives while they were grinding because she didn’t have wrists. Eventually, she discovered that with a little patience and by moving her entire construct’s body, she could do a fairly good job. With a bit of practice, she was able to smooth them out and sharpen the edges with the grinding wheels.
When she was done with all of her knives…she melted them down and started over again, this time with a new material.
Sandra already knew that Iron was a good metal for certain applications, but it was nearly the same in terms of material strength as Bronze when it came to weapons. The major difference was that Iron would be more likely to bend and chip when subjected to stress, while Bronze was more likely to shatter. It was for this reason that there weren’t as many Bronze swords (without enchantment, of course) as there were Iron, because they were more likely to break the longer that they were used. The scarcity of materials in comparison was a factor as well, as Iron was more prevalent and dropped as Dungeon Loot more often.
However, there was something that could change that all significantly – but she just had to find it. She wasn’t an expert on materials in their natural shape; while she could “see” through all of the dirt and rock around her, if there was anything different about what she was looking at, she couldn’t tell right away what it was. Things that she had already identified and could use, like Iron or Tin, she recognized whenever she came across it, but anything else was a bit more difficult.
Given that, she knew in general what she was looking for and what it looked like; that, and she could see things that were “unrecognizable”, so that she could pinpoint anomalies. Therefore, after a few hours of searching, she finally found a good prospect – about 150 feet underneath her Home. Fortunately, she didn’t need to dig out a huge tunnel, as she only needed to make a small hole towards what she was looking for; she tried to directly “mine” it, but she apparently needed to have direct access to it in order to touch it. Less than an hour later, she got to her destination and found exactly what she was looking for.
New Origination Material found!
Coal
While Coal cannot be used directly as a Monster Seed, it can be combined with specific other materials to create a whole new Monster Seed.
Perfect! With the addition of Coal, Sandra was able to make something that would make all the difference in the strength of her materials: Steel. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as she had expected.
By melting Iron inside her forge – which took a whopping 9 of her flame-jets to accomplish, since the melting point for Iron was much higher than even Copper – she needed to add a very small amount of Coal to the melted dark-grey metal. The precise amount was unknown to her, as she had never had the chance to see Steel being made in all her time learning about crafting; nevertheless, she knew it was only a small amount of the substance inside the Coal that was needed to accomplish the change.
One thing she had in her favor, though, was the fact that her Iron and Coal materials were pure when she created them; from what she remembered, additional materials were needed to purify natural Iron ore in the Steel-making process – and she didn’t know what they were. Her dungeon-made materials were already as pure as they could get, so it was fortunately unnecessary.
It took nearly a day, and more than 50 attempts, but she finally came upon the right combination of Iron and Coal. Luckily, she didn’t have to remember the exact amount she used, because the new material was now available to her.
New Monster Seed created using your Monster Seed Origination Adaptability skill!
Steel Ore
You now have access to:
Tiny Steel Orb
Origination Raw Material Cost: 2000
Origination Mana Cost: 200
Monster Min. Mana: 500
Monster Max. Mana: 1000
Currently locked:
Small Steel Orb
Average Steel Orb
Large Steel Orb
Success! At her current Core Size, she could barely afford to unlock the Small Steel Orb – which took 400 of her 640 maximum Mana – but she couldn’t even make one afterward. Although she had a RM capacity of 3,200, the cost to make a Small Steel Orb was 4,000 – more than she could currently hold at one time.
Nevertheless, she didn’t care too much about that, as the most important part was that she could now use Steel as a material in her crafting. After mastering the crafting of Bronze knives, followed by Iron – which handled differently than hot Bronze on her anvil – Sandra moved on to making them from Steel. Not only that, but she started to replace each of her tools with her new material, as Steel was much stronger, durable, and less likely to melt when it was up against the hot temperatures near the forge.
She started to experiment with making different weapons but she was limited in size because of the dimensions of her forge; she couldn’t place a longsword in there because of the length alone, and if she couldn’t heat up certain points when she needed it, it was nearly impossible to forge the weapon correctly. She wanted to make a larger one but didn’t want to waste the resources on it quite yet; instead, she settled for making significantly smaller versions that were easily handled by her Armored Sentinel.
While she was doing all of that crafting, she continued her expansion. Rooms five, then six, and then seven were finished in no time at all, so she kept going until she had completed a total of a dozen rooms. Not only was her dungeon almost 400 feet in length now, but Sandra was getting much closer to seeing sunlight again; another dozen rooms would bring her to the surface if she had planned it correctly.
While she went, Sandra also made sure to keep her dungeon and Core safe. She didn’t place any traps in the new rooms, per se; since her goal wasn’t to kill things, and she needed to reserve the trap limit for what were going to be additional workshops. However, she was conscious of the need of some sort of defense, so she kept the tunnel nearest where she was expanding very narrow; she added a trap that utilized the Earth element, which would smash the two sides of the tunnel closed within half a second if anything passed between the walls.
An interesting fact also presented itself when she tested the trap out with a sacrificial Animated Shears construct; when the walls were completely shut during the trap, she couldn’t affect anything beyond it until the trap was either reset or removed completely.
“It’s because – just like you can’t absorb material in your Area of Influence that are not directly connected to your dungeon – when you shut off that next room, it is effectively no longer part of your dungeon. This is the main reason why you need to have an open passageway throughout your entire dungeon, as any of your Dungeon Monsters left outside are instantly destroyed and no Mana can be funneled to you. In addition, the opening needs to be a certain size – which you have done instinctively with your normal tunnels – in order for Mana to be passed through to you,” the Dungeon Fairy answered when Sandra asked her about the strange occurrence.
All that meant was that she
was free to excavate, build rooms, and expand her dungeon – as long as that was the only things she was doing through those narrow tunnels. As soon as a room was complete, she widened the tunnel to normal levels, eliminated the trap, and sent in her constructs to gather more ambient Mana – which was still decreasing in the amount per room as she went on.
Again, that was alright, because Sandra was having the time of her life crafting weapons and building even more workshops. In the fourth room, she created a display area where she could keep her completed crafts – or at least the ones that she was most proud of. She also had plans to store anything she thought she might need larger quantities of, though she wasn’t exactly sure what that was going to be yet.
In the fifth room, she created a Woodworking/Bowyer/Fletcher workshop, which contain a giant, low, flat table with a trap that contained three Steel saw blades connected to a central pole, which would aid in cutting wood planks and sheets for different projects. There was also a small lathe on the extended pole end that would help shape the wood for poles and other cylindrical products.
In the sixth room, she constructed another worktable and a furnace/kiln that used a connected flame trap, though it was on a much smaller scale than the forge. Sandra planned that room for use in alchemical crafting, as well as a Pottery, which would utilize her trapped furnace/kiln to finish off her creations.
The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) Page 15