[D'sP] Oh, That's What Was Missing - Chapter 490

The answer was automation! Doyle even has something to work from.

Admittedly, the “kobold rock fall” pattern wasn’t enough. That was designed to, at most, drop five or six human head-sized rocks on something. What Doyle needed had to work on the entire ceiling.

Besides, the trap needed a less manufactured trigger. Or rather, he wanted it to have a less manufactured trigger. This is a bear den after all. Not going to have many strings, carved stone plates, or loose wooden rods. Err, at least not unless it was a mineshaft.

Which was filed away for later. It wasn’t a bad idea to have a proper mineshaft with wooden braces and whatnot. At the very least, this section of the cave was going to be “natural”. People generally stayed out of a bear’s den.

Doyle paused, it could be a cave the bear moved into after the mining was done? The wood braces and such would make sense, as well as why the den itself could fall down. Doyle could simply have the braces in the den all torn apart by a bear.

Was this him once against sidestepping the project to decorate? Yes. But at least it would make the place interesting. Though it necessitated all of the tunnels, at least up to this point, to be filled with wooden braces.

And fair enough, you didn’t want to drop the ceiling on people without notice. At least not if you want those people to take you seriously. Any dungeon can make a “rock falls, everybody dies” sort of situation. It isn’t hard. What is hard, is a trap that people can notice and yet don’t always.

So Doyle rigs up some wooden braces in the den and a bit of tunnel. Then, with them set up, turns back to the rock fall pattern. Because now they would be supremely useful.

At least on this planet, kobolds are seen as being trap savants. So while the concept of a rock fall trap is simple enough. Doyle remembered seeing a few examples in a scout book once. What a kobold can do with it is quite spectacular in some aspects.

For this particular case, kobolds are excellent at stacking rocks. Doyle could only shake his core as he reviewed the knowledge. He swore the buggers could probably stack a reverse pyramid of pebbles on top of a stick and have it stay solid until the stick is hit by something. Specifically, the stick. No hitting the rocks themselves to start them falling.

Anyway, with that knowledge, Doyle manages to carve up the ceiling into a large selection of rocks and boulders, all held up by the wooden brace at the entrance of the den room. Then, just for some added fun, extended the rock fall back into the tunnel a few meters. That way if someone gets the clever idea of collapsing it from the outside, they’re in for a rude awakening.

And with that, he had a nice way to drop rocks on someone’s head. Doyle trips the trap and watches as the rocks all fall down in sequence. It actually looks pretty spectacular as the ceiling falls. And the tunnel. And further back into the tunnel. And more of the roof.

Okay, Doyle flexes his will and freezes all the rocks in place. That got out of hand. Bit of a chain reaction there!

Doyle had already been planning on putting everything back up, but the extra fallen material meant this took longer, but eventually it was time to figure out why it happened. So Doyle follows the various jagged pieces and confers with the pattern. And there it was.

The reason Doyle had missed it was because he didn’t actually know how to set up a trap like this. What he got from the trap pattern wasn’t a proper guide. It simply has the pattern to stock the rocks correctly. There is nothing on how to actually check the stability of the rock around it.

Which made sense once Doyle thought about it. A regular dungeon would simply spam the pattern down. That would make for an unrealistic-looking trap, but the rest of the area would be a dungeon creation and so pretty solid.

And that ended up being Doyle’s solution. He isn’t a trap specialist, quarry expert, or miner. He is a dungeon. So while it isn’t in his wheelhouse to figure out how to keep the rest of the ceiling up. It is easy for him to once again return the area around the rock fall to one single piece of stone.

So with that fix in place, Doyle activates the rock fall once and this time it works as planned. The ceiling and part of the tunnel fall down in sequence, but nothing else comes down with it. Perfect!

Doyle hums to himself as he puts the rocks back up. And yep, there they are, packed right. The trap so ready, except it isn’t a trap yet, not a dungeon trap. A proper dungeon trap resets itself.

Which is a convenient feature that would be needed to evolve the bears. Because while Doyle can’t sit around and reset the trap every time it falls, especially once the time begins to pass faster on the floor. A dungeon trap is more than capable of keeping up with it!

Is what Doyle thinks will happen. He asked Ally, but she wasn’t certain if it would work exactly like that. However, the vibe the kobold trap patterns give him seem to hint at it being the case.

Now how was he supposed to anchor this? If he had just used a pattern, this would have been easy. The trap comes pre-set and already attached to the dungeon so that it would re-set.

Doyle plays around until his instincts kick in. Almost like something snapped into place. ‘Ah! I see, it’s like setting up spawn automation, except simplified. There’s no Wisdom cost because the trap isn’t alive and also isn’t loot. Plus something else? Seems a dungeon is meant to have traps that can reset.’

Satisfied with his discovery, Doyle easily implements the falling roof as a trap. Which leads to a few more tests to see exactly how the reset works. Which thankfully it does.

As for how? Doyle isn’t quite certain. It isn’t exactly one to one. The rocks almost seem to flow back up to the ceiling and replace themselves. Except instead of fitting together like a puzzle, it only bothers with close enough.

Once there, any out of place stone gets absorbed into the mass of the trap. Which leads to the slow warping of the very trap itself. With rocks splitting apart and joining together.

A feature which likely stems from not wanting to waste power on an exact return, when close enough, is good enough. Doyle instead sees it as a method to make sure people don’t get too familiar with the trap. After all, if it reset perfectly every time, they could figure out the exact details of it to mess with the trap.

It is at this point that Ally interrupts him. ‘Uh, Doyle, whatever you just did changed things!’

Doyle turns away from the 21st floor and focuses on Ally. There isn’t anything visibly going wrong, which is nice. ‘What’s happening?’

Ally gestures at the blue screens in front of her, ‘You broke through!’

Doyle looked at the screens, but didn’t see it. ‘What do you mean?’

Ally, ‘Your bottleneck. You just broke through your bottleneck.’

Doyle, ‘How can you tell? My skills are still all at 99. Leastwise, from what I can see.’

Ally nods, ‘Well of course. You don’t magically gain a bunch of levels. Bottlenecks aren’t a matter of being stuck and piling up the experience points until you can spend them. Rather, it is a matter of you being stuck in your understanding.

‘You can integrate, but the spark that would reveal something new? That’s not there. Oh, you might end up going down a rabbit hole that feels like treading new ground. It won’t be though. Just going over information you’ve forgotten or should have known.

‘More than a few people actually enjoy bottlenecks. It gives them a chance to solidify their foundation. Not that anyone purposefully tries to get bottlenecked. If someone really wants to work on their foundation, they can do that. Just stop searching out new stuff and sit around smithing ten thousand screws or some such.’

Doyle, ‘Okay. Sounds like an interesting subject to research. And I have been under the bottleneck for quite a while so mentally, it feels good that I’m finally past it. But, you still haven’t told me how you can tell despite my hiding it all so well. Also, any other benefits for having broken through that I should know of?’

Ally snorts, ‘How can I tell? Simple enough. As your dungeon fae, I got an alert. And the benefit you’ll get from breaking through is that finally your skills will begin to advance again. Which doesn’t sound like much until you add in the fact that more skill levels equals more paths you can travel.

‘But yeah, there isn’t any sort of reward for it. That would be like asking what a young adult gets for finishing puberty. A bottleneck simply represents a slowdown or stop in skill growth until something else grows. And speaking of which, what did you do breakthrough?’

Doyle, ‘I guess it has to be the trap I just made?’

Ally frowns, ‘But you have traps?’

Doyle, ‘No, if you think about it , I don’t actually have any traps of my own. Every place that involves traps? They’re all the result of kobolds laying them down. This is the first trap actually set and maintained by my dungeon.

‘After all, a kobold trap goes away when triggered and even if a kobold does tend to replace it in the same spot? That isn’t the same as a trap that is always there and automatically resets using world energy when the floor is clear of delvers.’

Ally, ‘Huh. I would have sworn we had already used a trap somewhere! Like, not even counting the kobold traps. It just feels like a thing we would have done?’

Doyle, ‘Well, we do have trap-like features? Stuff like how the entire 12th floor is one big maze that acts to trap them. And of course a bunch of general space warping shenanigans that could be considered to act like a trap.

‘For instance, back on floor four, the random wolf encounters could be seen as traps of a sort. But no, there were no actual traps. And I can tell because this trap I set? It takes points to maintain. Besides the monsters, the only other place that used points, is the kobold Mithril smelter down on floor 13. And that is clearly an upkeep based on environmental controls.’

Ally, ‘We have been stuck at this bottleneck for so long. How can I not have noticed our lack of traps?’

Doyle laughs, ‘Well, to be fair, we didn’t lack traps. It was just that until now, we were in a situation like with the trees. Though at least with the traps, we actually had a handful of patterns we could have used. With trees, I had to handcraft my fake ones. Oh, speaking of patterns, I got one for the new trap and it changed the trap groupings name. Take a look.’

{

Kobold trap patterns lv30 has broadened into Trap patterns lv30

You have acquired the Mineshaft Rock Fall trap pattern at lv10

}

Ally, ‘Ooh, a mineshaft trap. A little specialized, but they make use of the repetitive terrain and artificial nature of a mineshaft to better hide triggers. Kind of a trade-off to more free-form traps.’

Doyle, ‘Huh, well that answers some of my questions before I can even ask them.’

Ally nods, ‘While not every trap title will tell you about the trap involved. There are some trap types that at least point towards how to use them. Though in this case, it is more like you specialized the trap and the pattern is following your intent.’

Glowing Berries - Chapter 489

Rock Size - Chapter 491