The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (best books to read for students TXT) 📗

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