Dungeon Core Chat Room.

Dear Mayor:

Please Fix the infrastructure in your fine town. I pay taxes like everyone else and I demand safety in my own home.

Yesterday a pipe burst in the mana sewer and my basement has quickly become poluted. I woke up in the middle of the night to shrieking noises and after heading down to investigate found my pots and pans were fighting horrid slug monsters. My lamp started burning my skin and my ManaCorp portable cleaner exploded.

This is an outrage. Please send help immediately I've been staying at my friends house for the past 4 hours but am worried the polution is not good for my baby.

Excerpt from a nameless homeowner petitioning the mayor of her town directly for help.

Phantasmal Patterns: Ah! We have some winners to announce! For the Tier 4 group – SPEED! HAH. What a fitting name for our race winner. In the Tier 5 group. Abe! What a STRANGE NAME! Tier 6 actually has a 2 time contender for the games a core with the moniker of XxZ. I remember them from the last games! And finally. The Core who won for the Tier 7 group. THE GREATEST PEBBLE. Now there's a controversial name. Maybe the next event "the streamcast" will let them explain why they decided to go for that unflattering persona.

Phantasmal Patterns: The next event should show up for participants soon and unlike the race, this bad boy is spread between all 4 tiers.

Phantasmal Patterns: This year's stream cast is sponsored by Honest Calcium's BONE EMPORIUM! Among other things, the lucky WINNER will receive a year-long 50% discount for all undead merchandise at this ENTERPRISING CORE'S store!

Innearth checked the event tab. It displayed the next 2 events in a nice orderly format. From today onwards cores participating in the streamcast set up countless "streams" that other cores may peruse. 24 hours after that was the "unique monster battle royal".

Rules: Streamcast.

A stream can only be made upon sign up.

To signup you must provide a constant mana cost of [0, 1/4amu/second, 1amu/second, 4amu/second] (depending on your tier) for the duration of the event (from signup till +3 days from the creation of this panel. Time Left [71hrs 54min]. This mana cost exists both to even the playing field slightly as well as to aid in the creation of the next game. It's mana well spent.

Cores may donate cores to their favorite streams for the duration of the event.

Scores are calculated using 3 variables: Unique views lasting more than 20s, Viewer retention, Donations. Exact formula will remain undisclosed and takes into account a few more invisible data points.

Final Description and sign-up.

The streamcast is designed around sharing and entertaining one another. A high tradition the streamcast is designed around a part of many dungeons lives.

Enter? Y/N? Current participants [50]

Converting Innearth's regen to "amu" as well as checking for any gains he had...3.6amu/second. 0.25 of that wouldn't be the end of the world if it was only 3 days – but it would still be a lot.

That is...seconds in 3 days...divided by 4... 64800amu or using the t1 core stat... that is 324 t1 cores! Just to participate!

...this drives home again just how insane the Cores trading that for years are. I'm hesitant to use just under 7% of my revenue for 3 days...and thats only 7%! I can't even imagine what it would be like to go years like that.

But looking towards the general chat for in the event group he saw people were already discussing it.

TheCoreiestCoreThereEverWas: This is always a fight between the popular streamers. Non of us plebians without an established fan base ever win. I call hacks.

Adventurers will die: Hah. Just cause they have practice means nothing. I have something special planned. Has the event started yet?

Amethyst: Anyone know what the formula is? How can I game this event. Tips and tricks please I've already started losing out on mana.

Kripple: Lol.

Demald: Git guy. That's how you win the event.

Finest Dungeon: Why do you think the formula is undisclosed? So you can't game it. All I can tell you is that it takes into account different cores as weights. That way someone's friend can't donate 1000 core and get alot of points. It much prefers when donations are spread out.

Amethyst: So get the one friend to spread their cores out between a dozen people that donate separately? Got it. Thanks for the help!

...

Demald: ...is she gone? No one tell her it's being judged by the system which likes putting invisible penalties on anything it deems an attempt to cheat. It's less a static formula and more the system being a neutral voting party that's not the host.

Finest Dungeon: Nice.

Breaking Stone: Guys! Come join my stream right now! You won't regret it.

Humble Cellar: ...seems like a trick.

BlogCave: Didn't you read the rules? We can join and dip after 20s and won't give him any points.

Kripple: Sus. Don't trust.

Slightly curious Innearth joined "Breaking Stone's" stream. It cost him nothing after all and large group chats kind of put him off.

As the panel opens the first thing Innearth sees is what appear to be a human standing in a huge cavern. The camera pulled back slowly as they battled huge monstrous purple ogre like monsters. With a further distance and more context the scene clicks into place. The adventurer was incredibly tiny. A sense of scale proved they weren’t even half the size of a dwarf. They would barely reach a dwarf’s stubby knees.

The tiny adventurer looked strangely comical as it sliced a purple leg off with a wild swing and a spray of gore. Its tiny face was set in a determined little grimace and sweat clung to its cotton tunic. The whole event was, if anything, a novel experience.

Dunjinx: Awww!

BlogCave: Yo. This dude wasn't joking. I've never seen a gnome adventurer before. Jackpot.

Advengeon: Hey, that's pretty neat. I'll try and get some interested Cores to join if you can manage to keep them excited.

BlogCave: Anyone else wonder how they make them that small? My small monsters don’t seem nearly as impressive as that.

...I want a gnome adventurer…I bet one could fit through my snakeways...damn that might be an unwitting shortcut for the little creatures.

...but then again maybe something that small needs a bonus. I might try making small little lootrooms in some of my snakeways and reward the little buggers.

How is it holding its own?

The incredibly small person continued to swing their metal sword the size of a toothpick. The instrument blazed with green flowing light that grew the more purple monsters were slain. At the end of each massively small swing, small drops of an acidic green liquid flicked out and dealt damage to the surroundings. Minimal damage but damage all the same.

Each miniature drop would make a small pinpoint of a hole in the ground, but it was against the monsters that this magical acid shone. When aiming and swinging at an ogre, the liquid seemed to elongate out –extending the gnomes blade by a factor of 10x.

3cm became 30cm…which was still painfully small but now long enough to actually damage the monsters they were fighting.

Reaching the end of a hallway the small creature dropped to a crouch and after checking to make sure the hall was clear leaned its back against a wall and pulled out a large hunk of bread the size of their head.

Taking a small bite and chewing for a bit, then placing it once more into some sort of special storage the gnome sat for a minute breathing deeply.

Taking a large breath the gnome stood up and slapped both sides of their face before marching confidently onwards.

The boss room was a perfectly circular dome with small green bobbles hanging across the top. The boss itself was an amalgamation of 12 of the previous ogre things melted together into a giant blob with legs and arms and rolls of fat that hid more legs and arms.

Rushing forwards into this room the tiny adventurer sliced with all of its small might while a slightly wooden thump sounded out signalling the start of the boss fight.

Dashing under 8 of its legs, the small adventurer raised its sword upwards grasping it tightly with two hands. A long gash accompanied the small yell as the gnome ran faster than its size would suggest it could. Thick Purple blood flew out and dropped behind it while the wound healed over as if it had never been made.

…and that was the next 40 minutes of the fight. The steadily slower moving adventurer dug huge gashes that healed in seconds and lines of acid that sizzled and slowly closed. The flesh ogre stomped around attempting to step on the bug while constantly healing its own wounds. The initial underneath dash was repeated over a dozen more times and the boss room quickly grew covered in a thin film of purple while both fighters began slipping about.

As the fight progressed more and more Cores joined the stream – all enjoying the novelty of the situation, then leaving to see what else the event had to offer. In comparison, Innearth stayed far longer than most with over an hour of watching this small creature struggle with everything stacked against them. Dungeon instincts flared and he wanted to reward them. He wished he was overseeing this dungeon for he would have long since prematurely made them armour or more weapons. There was something about an underdog that made Innearth root for them.

Finally, when the ogre slipped on its own blood and fell in a vulnerable position the tide swayed. The gnome leapt up onto its side feet digging into the flesh while its sword cut off multiple heads. Each stump was seared with acid to prevent them from regrowing and while the lumpy faces weren’t technically important, they each contained a life core. The vitality dropped with each head lost and its insane regeneration dropped to a more manageable level.

A disgusted look flashed across the gnome’s face before it dug down and into the purple flesh –disappearing fully into the body before finally managed to crack its main core.

YES!!! YOU DID IT LITTLE GUY!!!

Innearth celebrated for a bit and then – after making sure the gnome was properly rewarded for beating the boss – decided to drop a single core into the metaphorical tip bucket and move on.

The next few hours and over 50 shows were a mixed lot as Innearth tried stream after stream – ignoring the recruiting cores and preferring to hit rooms at random as he fully explored the server.

One core had made a time-based mechanism they were showing off. A giant spinning sideways wheel moving with Kinetic mana was set into the wall. On one side of the wheel, a huge and thick plate of eternal mana lay and the speed at which the wheel spun was constant. The result was a room – to be accurate multiple rooms but as only one was focused on – that slowed down to nearly a stop each time the plate was spun past.

From the perspective of the occupants in this room they were moving normally, however due to the introduction of several eternal materials that blocked them from being affected, strange results were manifested. The Core had a slowly ticking faceless clock that spun around constantly but from the point of view of the occupants would jump ahead every 6 seconds. There was a puzzle built into this room that heavily leveraged all the materials and needed a good sense of timing as well as the ability to both figure out the room's secret and then apply that knowledge in several ways.

For example, throwing rocks that weren’t affected into a spinning contraption at the time the clock appeared to pulse forward let them pass through the barrier.

Innearth was entranced by what was possible and felt like he needed to step up his own puzzle-making skills after being walked through the explanation.

After tipping them 10 cores he told FED he might get ideas from this stream and moved on.

Most of the streams were of adventurers and as excited as they made him…they were also bittersweet. Most of the adventurers in other Core’s dungeon just existed to remind him he didn’t have his own and having what you were missing out on shoved in your face made it hard to enjoy the streams.

This was a strange event. A lot of Cores were streaming constantly and for many, this act of having others make shows for them to watch was normal. Innearth however didn't join many big servers or ones set up solely for specific cores. He had only used the streaming portion of the system to –1 learn about his friend’s dungeons or show his off and – 2 quickly sent a view of something when he was talking to his friends. The second was done as a way of making it so he didn't have to describe stuff himself and was mostly him being lazy. Useful…but not necessarily game changing.

…in that regard. Maybe the race was kind of the same for some dungeons. I bet there’s at least one dungeon who has a huge race track with monsters crashing around. They might even make it so adventurers have to cross or travel through the race track without being stampeded…Maybe the fact that I haven’t really been exposed to these streams is why this event exists? I’m enjoying myself but I don’t know if I’ll start wanting to follow others and just watch them when I could be doing the same things myself!

Finally, after a full day of flipping between various sights, Innearth found a relatively quiet stream being presented by a Core with a simple name. Bob Ross.

Bob Ross: When crafting loot I like to think of practical things an adventurer might like. Many times, I start a loot creation without a clear idea of what I'm making and just let the materials guide me. The next creation I'm going to try is to use this red crystal a fan sent me. They said it conducted heat pretty well? Okay! I already know how to start. Let's shave this crystal into thin slices! Let the material guide you.

Slowly calmly and yet with decisive strokes the Core shaved off thin slices of the crystal making a haphazard pile of red scales. Several pieces chipped but the Bob Ross just continued on happily.

Bob Ross: There are no mistakes. Just some happy little accidents. I can use those pieces on the smaller areas.

Bob Ross: Now! I'm going to recombine them into a solid plate.

A quick burst of fire mana made a flat board of hot metal the Core started laying crystal slices onto. The slices were simply pushed into the metal and each crystal grew slightly hot after a few seconds of contact. Small shavings were cut into easier to handle slivers and soon the plate looked almost like a mosaic of shards.

Splitting the board in half the Core deftly started weaving a set of hinges into the metal. Adding small dials to change the distance or lock the press in place Bob Ross worked with practiced skill that made all of his actions look easy to emulate.

Simultaneously a back was added. A thick layer of insulating earth with a thin pocket of air and finally the product was shown off.

Bob Ross: It's a portable stove! Useful. Practical. An adventurer could do a lot with this in their arsenal. Doesn't it look nice?

Innearth: do you not make weapons? Isn’t that more fun?

Bob Ross: Of course! I make whatever the material draws me to the most. I find non-combat related devices to be much more calming however. It's also less common and makes me stand out. Thanks for the question! Stick around and I'm going to make a whole kitchen set for adventurers. You also don’t need to make practical items. You can make toys! Or sculptures. What matters in the end is that you are having fun.

As dumb as it sounded Innearth was strangely hooked, watching this slightly strange Core smoothly weave together both common and uncommon materials into mundane but magical devices. Most were designed for adventures or were "portable" but some grew and grew into huge contraptions the Core would laugh and exclaim he didn't mean to make but that he was glad he did.

Bob Ross: No mistakes remember. My fans, I have a secret for you all. The system pays well for these all the same when randomizing loot. Even if the device would be useless for an adventurer the system is able to transmute it into an item they might like and in that sense, everything worked perfectly.

Innearth was so inspired by the process he started making similar devices at the same time as he watched Bob Ross work.

His first few attempts went...alright but after deciding he did not at all work in the same manner as Bob Ross it started to go better.

First, he would pick a topic. He would quickly research or think up a need that an adventurer might have. Or – if he couldn’t think of anything that way. He would research how humans and other races lived normally. After reading about what they did while not delving dungeons, he started getting an idea about problems they had. Many times, he simply needed to pick devices dungeons had found out they used around their cities and emulate them. Other times he saw a generic need and tried to fill it.

An icebox was the first such device worked towards and one he was reasonably proud of. Similar to his biome, a layer of ice followed by the warm crystal ice and finally an insulating layer of Earth, made a freezing device sapients could use to store food.

Another iteration on the design split 3 compartments into varying degrees of "coldness” with one being ice that was then covered in a thin layer of insulation, another being pure ice and a 3rd being spiked with the "super ice" he was using to keep his biomes cold.

Add on a nice lightly kinetic sealed door and the system tagged his "stacked ice box" as a tier 4 device and set him up with a nice high random loot seed. “[Tier 4 ice box]”. Refusing to elaborate the system had just claimed some value without giving stats…

Is making devices like this more profitable than weapons? I feel like if I just made a sword of ice the system would have given random damage values and then spat out some lower number than that…

Continuing to follow Bob Ross obsessively, Innearth made a magical hovering transportation device. He tried remembering the disk the Golden goddess had flown through Doc’s dungeon with and made a similar free-flowing plate.

A frying pan with an endlessly burning bottom was made along with a "really hot" variant that had a spiral of endless lava embedded deep within. That one was much stronger but had a chance of burning food too quickly and was almost worse of a device.

Countless utility knives designed around cutting stuff easily or sawing different materials were made next.

A cup with a water crystal at the bottom made a glass that would fill with pure water when injected with mana and a similar one with a magma/fire plate at the bottom could make boiling water with some time and effort. Innearth couldn't figure out how to add flavouring to these devices but he assumed an adventurer who wanted his magic kettle would have their own tea.

…

Before Innearth knew it the 3 days were up. He had spent 2 of them watching Bob Ross and hesitating just a bit at the end he gave them 100 cores as a tip.

Innearth: I had a lot of fun. Thanks for illuminating me to a whole new kind of creation.

Bob Ross: Anytime Innearth. Happy item making my friend.

Happily moving to prepare for the next event, Innearth re checked the rules for the unique monster battle royal.

Rules: Monster Battle Royal.

Due to wanting the focus to be on unique materials and designs, there's a hard limit of tier 2 for the max strength of a core inside.

The size of the monster must fit inside a 1m diameter circle and cannot exceed 1m in height before the fight begins.

There is a restriction on madness-based unique materials and you must agree that any unique monster you submit cannot somehow harm the host of this games.

It is nearly a given that some of these monsters will ascend during the battle due to the incredible amount of varied stimuli. Thus, a recall system has been set in place where at any point if you wish to disqualify yourself from the running you can system trade your monster to the safety of your own dungeon. All other fights are to the death and the event lasts until there is one remaining monster.

This battle royal runs until there is a winner, but after extended periods of time without fighting I will shrink the area allowed by the monsters. Additionally, if it runs longer than a week the next event shall start simultaneously. It is the SO YOU WANT TO BE AN ADVENTURER. event. Exciting!

The Winner receives most of the body parts of a dragon which will make potent items or unique monsters.

Final Description and sign-up.

This is a event designed partly around luck. As such due to the wide variety of strength offered by unique materials I'm happy to anyone this event is also joined between all 4 tiers.

Enter? Y/N? Current participants [921]

...That was quite a bit more participants than Innearth was expecting...Is everyone in this rank joining this event? Battles Royal are pretty popular...

Innearth already knew what he was using for the contest. His invisible optional mini boss the shifting snake.

It was strong – met all the requirements easily and Innearth thought he had a solid shot of doing well.

Signing up and confirming through all the system prompts Innearth sent the illusion snake off and flipped through a dozen cameras before he found the screen that showed his contribution.

A large round stage surrounded by a shifting mist of swirls was covered in several round red rings. Periodically a new monster was blipped into its ring. The monsters that kept being added were varied. Most looked like normal monsters – a praying mantis-like silver pole, with a hundred blades and instruments of torture was located directly to the side of Innearth’s snake.

Behind it there a four-legged, fuzzy, headless pill-shaped monster was curled up, just barely sticking in its ring.

The vast majority of the monsters were more esoteric looking however. A voxelated ring of bricks sat at the far end of the room just barely meeting the size requirement in all directions and just in front of Innearth’s snake was a…folded thing that looked like an origami creation of wood with two googly eyes on its side.

Innearth checked up and played around with the event controls. Slightly different than normal streams this event was set up with over a hundred cameras. Innearth wasn’t quite sure if “Phantasmal Patterns” Had 100 floors or not but it was still impressive.

These cameras were currently set to 113 rooms identical to the one Innearth’s snake was in and whoever was watching could pick cameras to follow.

Innearth: What rooms are everyone in? Is everyone participating? There’s already over a 1000 cores in this game! That must be nearly everyone in this rank how popular are battles royal???

Abe: uh. Room 13. Mines the red ball with little legs and “BOMB <3” Written on the side.

ZeMadDoctor: Room 14. Monster #42

Amy: Room 81, I’m in the same room as Brutality Queen and I’m getting scared for babby.

Fated Eternal Design: Room 14. Mines the robed one.

Abyss: Room 1. I’m the pile of black bones. I love this event so much!

Innearth: …well I’m room 69. Mines the normal looking snake – I think I showed you my illusion snake right?

Abe: Nice, When’s this going start? I feel like I’ve been waiting for ages.

As if listening to him all the rings pulsed and a small box appeared.

[10 minute] countdown until game start.

Watching the last few monsters blip In, Innearth located each of his friends monsters and set up 5 streams...hesitating half a second he added one for Abyss as well. Sure they took a hands-off attitude but they might as well be friends by now.

Finally the event started and each of the rings disappeared. Quite a few things happened at once. Monsters lunged, cast spells, or dodged each other. Innearth's snake seemed to flicker as it started projecting itself far away from the group. A new box appeared.

[5 minute] countdown until barriers drop.

The circle of bricks started flipping about as bricks shifted in different directions and expanded out and up into a more useful form. And Abe's monster exploded. Not 10s into the event and a thundering roar was pushed out with a flash of light so bright it blocked the camera from seeing what was happening. Stone melted and the barrier surrounding the 13th room was broken. Molten stone and metal flowed and flung out of the cage while every single monster in it was killed.

Abe: ...so that's what that material did.

Amy: Abe what did you do! That was crazy.

Abe: Uh... I made first place? That's what I did.

The camera had flashed a second of the surrounding area before being hastily blackened and switched to other rooms.

Checking the group Innearth saw plenty of angry cores claiming that was cheating and to check the scoreboard.

Looking through all the event controls Innearth found what they were talking about.

Battle Royal ScoreBoard.

#1. Abe. Kills [84], Time lasted, [14.3s]

#2. CoreFlipper. Kills [2],

#3. KipplingCore. Kills [2],

....

Innearth: Brooo!

Abyss: Don't worry, Survival time is counted for higher than kills and he'll be surpassed pretty soon. By my Abyssal Knight! Mwahahahahaa.

Abyss's pile of black bones floated up through the air, a strange heavy weight in the area around it. As each bone connected, a feeling of strength was formed and by the time his undead was formed a pillar of unearthly light had formed around them. While monsters battled on all sides of it the skeleton simply stood unearthly still. Slowly, as more and more monsters around it died, it grew more and more animated. Finally, as if the amount of death around it had passed a threshold, the undead strode forwards.

Reaching out, a whisp of itself was pushed into the corpse of a giant beetle that still flashed with a pink lightning. A few seconds later the beetle roared to life its eyes a sickly red and its pink lightning turning blood red. Charging forward, the pseudo lich moved and continued reanimating minions growing stronger as more died.

Innearth's snake moved about finding vulnerable monsters. Strolling up and stabbing them before continuing on. Like a phantom it moved about, leaving a trail of bodies that fell a few seconds after they had actually died with no indication they had done so.

And then it was over.

5 minutes had passed the barrier had lifted and just over 500 unique monsters moved out into the biomes around them. To the east lay a jungle of ashen trees connected to a section of burning forest that didn't go out. To the north lay a huge circular lake with 3 large rivers spreading out from it and snaking throughout the floor. To the west lay a rocky craig of chasms and pillars of stone and to the south lay a carnival-like abandoned fairground covered in broken buildings and peeling posters. Periodically spread throughout the floor were giant pillars that pushed out various affinities and as the floor opened the cameras redistributed evenly throughout the floor.

...The "floor" itself was several kilometres in diameter and there was a swirling mist around the sides and ceilings full of spiralling smoke and a hypnotic magic.

Some monsters stayed to fight on the stages but most left immediately seeking out a place that could bring out their true abilities.

Watching monsters slip into the lake or start prowling through the brightly coloured city or hiding in the jungle the battle royal started for real.

Other than the initial slaughter this event was looking to turn out to be a long one.