Dungeon Core Chat Room.

Rank 4 mana types and how they work for dungeons.

You probably saw a greyed-out affinity when you last ascended and thought “what was that”.

That my friend, is the mana type afforded to those lucky cores who chose “non-elemental” and started off this game of life on hardmode.

The incredibly small number of them that made that choice and then made it all the way to Tier 8 have shown us what they are and what is possible.

Essentially all 4 of these mana types are “meta mana types”. They don’t typically work like normal manas and they are different enough…I'd argue they aren’t even mana as we know it.

Going through the list:

Natural law mana. This mana and its corresponding affinity let cores vaguely see the rules that make up reality and change them. They can create spells and effects that are impossible to create otherwise…but as a core with a low racial percentage that’s less exciting then it sounds. Typical uses have been cheating some spell effects that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, making magic or physics operate differently inside their dungeon…or creating rules that operate across the entire world like system messages/events that work outside of their own dungeon.

Divine mana. Weirdest one. It makes…a material that can be used inside of spells instead of matter. All spells need matter to function? Boom this mana breaks that rule. Use divine mana as glue instead "solves all your problems".

As a bonus it seems to vastly vastly increase the strength of any spells made with it…and if I’m being honest we don’t fully know all the things it does. This is just the simplest use that divine dungeons can use.

Non-continuous mana. Sometimes your status calls it “discontinuity mana” instead…the system seems confused and changes the name a lot based on who is ascending or how it was analyzed... This mana or more accurately spells affected by this mana can…break that which can’t be broken. It can do some really crazy effects like ripping part of a mana affinity out or ripping the madness out of someone or making a sword that cuts through anything…again dungeons don’t seem to be able to utilize it to its maximum efficiency I know for a fact gods have used it to time travel somehow – how else do you think [resurrection] works? They use discontinuity on either entropy or eternal mana.. and somehow use it to break a hole in time itself…or maybe they just control paradox mana so well it doesn’t break everything in madness. If you’re interested in a more in-depth answer look up the door to the past, now that’s a fun artifact.

Karma & luck mana types. Similar to gravity and kinetic luck mana seems to be an offshoot of kinetic mana despite being the only known rank 4 alteration.

Having this affinity lets you see the web of fate and change it. Simple enough. Don’t want to deal with how limited and “safe” SYSTEM_LUCK is? Luck mana has you covered. Want to change the fate of something? Karma mana has you covered.

Thanks for reading my first blog post! I hope I’ve explained rank 4 mana sufficiently please tell me if you have any questions in the comments below!

Excerpt obtained from the dungeon site "My_Awsome_Guides.dcs/rank4mana"

It seemed like as soon as Innearth oriented himself around a goal – and decided to talk to his friends – a cascading series of events happened.

Like they were all just lining up and waiting for him to stop being bored to show up they slammed into him one by one.

As an example – focusing on a minor event that really should have made Innearth sad and snubbed…but instead just made him want to laugh. Onyx showed up and immediately bypassed his dungeon. He walked into Innearth’s influence without any forwarning…dragged a young-looking dwarf on a speedrun to the nearest portal…and then disappeared on a mission to Abe’s dungeon.

Essentially Abe and Rutile were heavily experimenting with alcoholic mana and creating a massive number of boozes. Onyx had heard from his distant relative of this “development” and immediately packed up his bags – and his new son – before “investigating” this very important abnormality. For dwarven kind!

Innearth laughed at how singlemindedly they had rushed through his dungeon to reach the portal… but hoped they would stop in and give him some attention on the way back.

A second “minor event” was a huge group of slightly traumatized adventurers who arrived from outside of the silver town above.

They all wore Innearth’s cursed armbands and moved with obsession towards finding his dungeon.

…oops?

Innearth was somewhat happy to know that even if he hadn’t gotten adventurers through the portal system he would have eventually gained some delvers…but as is this group deserved something anything for making the trip.

It was trivial to find out they had chartered a boat between continents and killed a massive number of sea monsters to get to this point.

Innearth immediately went through damage control mode, directing them all to a room where their cursed bracers were broken and a “[True adventurers – Pilgramage to the crossroads]” title was given and a “free” T8 random loot item gifted.

…I totally forgot about them…I hope not too many died trying to cross the ocean?

…I’ll give them a notification to reach the facility and pretend they weren’t forgotten.

However, of the events coming to distract him from his new goal of elevating a god the most important and “noteworthy” was Queen asking for help.

Queen would never ask for help! She was much too prideful! It had to be important!

Brutality Queen: Okay, Guys I…asfk why is this so hard.

Brutality Queen: I can’t do it. I can’t make a stupid tree.

Abe: whats up?

Brutality Queen: Okay. Give me a moment to type this up.

Amy: We can help you with anything! What do you need?

Brutality Queen: Okay, So Yggdrasil heartwood. Great material. Super great wood. It bends, its stronger than steel but supple and unbreakable, it channels and holds mana like crazy. Just including a twig of it in a mud monster makes them like 10x as strong. Actually, using it as flesh and making bones of it or something? Yeah, It’s a complete hack. If used outside of a monster and given some time to sit it pulls a bit of life mana into it and becomes a living thing even if it doesn’t grow – I can make living walls of it and it works great as dungeon flesh with my affinity towards it. Honestly? I should be happy with all that and say it's enough…the problem is that…well I can’t use it to make a tree. Heartwood. It’s a wood-like material I should be able to use it to make a tree right? Grow myself one of these Yggdrasils?

Brutality Queen: So. Take a tiny flake of Yggdrasil heartwood as the base of the seed mana seed right? Sounds simple enough? Well, my first problem is that the seed lay dormant for ages. It just straight up refused to grow properly unlike basically every other tree I’ve made.

Brutality Queen: so I watered it right? I gave it some nice fertilizer and pumped a huge amount of first life and then pure mana towards it. Finally, it sprouted and rapidly began to grow all over the place in a messy twisted shape.

Brutality Queen: It sucked all the nutrients out of the soil in several floors of my dungeon and that wasn’t enough. Hundreds of trees over those floors withered as Yggdrasil attempted to grow roots, almost cannibalized a bunch of them digging in and sucking the life force and mana and matter and who knows what else out of them.

Brutality Queen: Tree even ate all the monster corpses I had and killed some of the weaker ones to try and grow.

Abe: Hungry boi.

Brutality Queen: yeah the hungriest. Anyways it ran out of easily accessible fertilizer and quickly withered condensing down into a super-dense blackish-brown [withered yggdrasil-wood] that…well. It makes okay unique materials but they aren’t even as good as the regular Yggdrasil heartwood and it trashed my dungeon so it’s a failed result.

Innearth: Ouch.

Brutality Queen: SO. I went onto the internet, found a database of known triplet mana types…found my material and other cores who had made Yggdrasil mana…found none of them had the actual affinity for it they just made it as a triplet in small quantities so that’s fun I’m special.

Brutality Queen: Found that many cores had tried to make a Yggdrasil tree and some had even managed to get it to slightly grow but in insane circumstances. So like there's one alive right now in a dungeon somewhere but it's only a hundred meters or so tall and is called the [stunted world tree]. You want to know how that one was grown? They planted it on a dead dragon they just so happen to find. Do you know what kind of fertilizer a dragon is? I don’t have access to that sort of thing! And a dragon only made a stunted one! And it grew in a broken fashion – as if the spell to make it wasn’t enough!

Amy: Okay, calm down Queen. We get it. no one else has managed this yet. But hey? You have the affinity so you’ll know more than most – AND! Even more importantly you have us! I’m sure if we all work together we can figure something out I’d love to help you out!

Innearth: She’s right. This is a great goal you found. It's important to find goals to work towards. Personal projects are fun but so are group projects! Lay out the problems we need to solve I’m sure we can figure something out!

Brutality Queen: Thanks…I still want to do a lot of this I don’t want it to be taken over but…yes I’d like help.

Innearth: Hey, triplet affinities are rare right? We cheated because FED reminded/hinted we should make them back in tier 7 and now we have what. Three between us? I’m sure we can figure it out.

Abe: Hey, don’t make it sound like only the cores with triplet affinities can do anything I have a certain dwarf sitting here claiming I’m the best dungeon in the world. :3<

Innearth: You know what I mean. Friendship!

Abe: <3

Brutality Queen: What do you mean by problems? The only one I can see right now is it won't grow?

Innearth: I mean like… let's split it up. I heard two separate potential problems? One is the fertilizer and the second is the growing funny? Starting it off as a single chip in a seed mana shell seems to be a wash is there a better way to design the tree? One with more control?

Amy: Ohh! That could be fun. Let's all build a tree. We can make it like a monster and then plant it!

Brutality Queen: That… won't make a world tree. It will make a dungeon plant. That’s like a trap it won't exist outside of my influence and won't really grow unless it ascended somehow and even that’s unlikely.

Brutality Queen: I’ll…see about another option but please understand plant mana is fundamentally different. I can make plantable seeds that grow outside my dungeon and the seeds I grow that way can grow outside my dungeon…but not a plant monster or trap.

Innearth: what about the fertilizer problem?

Brutality Queen: that’s…well I don’t see a good option. A dragon was barely enough…

Fated Eternal Design: So we need two dragons! Nothing is impossible my friend!

Brutality Queen: We…can’t just lure two dragons? Let alone kill them? Okay. Sorry, I’m being a downer how should we go about this?

Innearth: Goal: Make a good boy Yirgassle.

Innearth: Obstacles: Tree is hungry and needs lots of food. Obtain some good fertilizer to kick start its growth.

Innearth: Obstacle: We need to engineer it better. Figure out how to better make the seed.

Innearth: Solutions to either of these problems?

Brutality Queen: Well quality seems to be important. A whole bunch of strong monsters as fertilizer might work… but we kind of need a few “really” strong ones to get a good result. The tree needs more than just life mana and some rare elements it needs…rare materials? I think it needs some souls in its food it won’t just work with fake monsters we make.

Brutality Queen: …so unless we are using ascended bodies I don’t think it's enough.

ZeMadDoctor: Does it matter the type of body?

Brutality Queen: Not that I can tell? I can’t really ask the tree but I can kind of tell it just needs them to be strong.

ZeMadDoctor: Would demons work? Is there any madness in that?

Brutality Queen: Shouldn’t be a big deal no.

Abe: Can we not just make a storage pit of all the transcendents that die in the facility? Throw them all in a big body pile? They probably have some juicy souls.

Brutality Queen: Both work.

Innearth: so you two are in charge of finding food? Anyone else want to help them?

Abe: Ai ai! Your wish is my command~

ZeMadDoctor: Yeah I have some ideas. I’ll get back to you if they work.

Amy: So how can we help with the second problem? What exactly do we need to do?

Innearth: Engineering. How do we go about engineering a seed? What do we need to engineer to make it succeed?

Brutality Queen: It's going to sound dumb but I don’t…really know? I just know there isn’t enough with the heartwood. I’m looking at stuff right now and…

Brutality Queen: Okay. One site has a workaround but it's…a doozy

Fated Eternal Design: Solutions! Let's hear em.

Brutality Queen: So two options. A natural law core might be able to mess with a big seed we made to make sure it works…and apparently for incredibly advanced seed design you can make a divine mana seed that’s much bigger.

Amy: …can we do that or is this a dead end in a “we could do this if we only had this impossible to get material”?

Innearth: I just checked the market! No natural law cores but there are divine ones. We can custom design divine mana materials in a shape…they cost a lot and I’m just reading up on it now but it should be fine? Should I go through with this?

Brutality Queen: Okay. So if we go this route we can make a miniature version of what we want the tree to look like, encase it in a divine seed and then put it in the fertilizer.

Innearth: Divine mana is weird I’m reading about it for the first time now. It functions like matter? And any spells using it instead of real matter are stronger? So by divine seed, I’m assuming you mean "make a shell of divine mana" and then material creation seed mana with it afterwards? I can’t find whatever site you are reading it from but that’s how I’m imagining it working.

Brutality Queen: yeah that’s what it says. A divine seed can be about 30ish cm wide and 60ish cm tall and still work…plus it “works” with a more complicated design than otherwise.

Innearth: Is that big enough? Just design the whole tree small like? It seems like plenty of room but I can’t tell.

Brutality Queen: So this has never been attempted with yggdrasil mana but I found one tip about using shrinking mana to get more details? Void mana also works but it tends to mess with a lot of stuff and break some things while shrinking mana will uniformly miniaturize it. Do we commission someone to do that as well?

Innearth: woah woah woah. Before we outsource everything… shrinking mana is related to void mana right? I might be able to do something I’ll get back to you with that.

Brutality Queen: I think…I think this might be doable. I really want to make this tree guys I’m sorry for asking for so much.

Amy: Anytime! I’m here to help~

Brutality Queen: I’m starting the schematic now. How much do you think you can shrink it Innearth?

Innearth: uhh…one sec.

Innearth looked about for standard shrinking guides and found most cores were able to safely shrink things by 4-8x without any loss of details.

Innearth: I’m going to say start it 6x as big? I might be able to get as high as 8x but I don’t want to promise that… I don’t fully understand why we need to design it bigger and shrink it to be honest. Its just a tree right? Block of wood some leaves its good?

Fated Eternal Design: …I feel offended on behalf of Queen. Just dissing her tree like that.

Amy: We could do that…but the less we rely on the spell smoothing stuff over the better we can get the end result to be. The more efficient and stuff. I think that’s what queen was talking about. Like think of your monsters, you probably started off with solid blocks of material for your flesh and slowly worked towards making individual muscles and stuff right?

Innearth: Muscled tree got it.

Abe: lol.

Amy: I think ambrosia would make a nice sap for this tree what do you think?

Brutality Queen: That’s perfect!

Innearth: Cosmic void bark? Just throw all the triplet materials we can at this thing?

Brutality Queen: I like it!

Innearth: Actually give me a bit on that. I don’t know if it will play nice with growing… cosmic void has some issues. The amount of engineering I had to do to make an even slightly movable suit of armour...

Amy: No problem! We’ll be working on the tree while you figure out the tasks you claimed!

Innearth pulled his attention away from the chat excited to help with this goal. It had briefly overwhelmed the one he had just chosen for himself…but in some ways making a world tree would be a good practice for when he tried to engineer a god.

Innearth had mentioned he found a divine core willing to do them the solid of making an egg for the tree…there was actually multiple divine cores on the market it seemed to be a popular R4 type.

Three were alive and offering their services but none were selling them for anything as simple as mana…R4 cores really didn’t like selling things for mana at all which…kind of made sense after a certain level, mana stopped mattering.

Either way, two had insane prices along the lines of “20x dragon scales” but one had a simple…it was relatively cheap but weird and Innearth was a bit hesitant about the whole process.

PM_CORE_PICS: yes? You responded to my listing?

Innearth: yeah I sent you what we want you to do…but I have to ask. Why do you want me to send you pictures of my core in exchange? What do you get out of this?

PM_CORE_PICS: don't worry about it :]

Innearth: …okay, give me a minute.

Innearth was conflicted. On one hand, it was a relatively cheap price to pay. Heck, it was practically free… it just cost him a bit of time.

Now. On the other hand, it felt weird. What were they going to do with it? Why did they want them?

Innearth slowly pried the bottom of his cosmic void box off…he removed his armour and felt exposed.

Stop being weird about this just take the pictures.

He felt like shivering as he quickly but awkwardly snapped off some still scenes of his core room with the streaming camera. He saved and packaged the photos quickly putting his box back on and instantly feeling better as soon as it was welded shut.

Innearth: I sent the payment.

PM_CORE_PICS: mmmmmmm, nice. You look great! I'll send you the shell soon. Just follow the dimensions you gave me?

Innearth: Yes if it's enough? I could make a schematic with earth mana or something and tell you to trace it if you need more?

PM_CORE_PICS: Sent you an outline of my schematic. If that’s fine I’ll start printing it for you. By the way. Are you interested in doing any more modelling for me? Open offer for any repeat designs.

Innearth: Yep. Looks good. And I’m okay for now thanks.

Innearth mentally shivered once more as he accepted the payment – feeling like he had lost more than he had… but unsure exactly why that was.

Next goal is shrinking mana. Hopefully, I can get that working soon?