Merging Rooms

After the duo left the dungeon, Violet looked over her new tributes. The rabbit and chickweed were interesting and made her wonder if some sort of huntsman was now visiting her dungeon. [Critters] would only unlock from the system menu after completing quests, so the rabbit meat and fur weren't particularly useful to Violet. They couldn't be used to decorate this floor of the dungeon nor were they useful for making the sorts of rewards Violet had in mind for this floor.

The chickweed was more useful as it would give some nice variety to the grass, similar to the clovers, but it would be a bit wasteful to apply it to any of the rooms right now. Having too many plants in a room for no reason made it less likely that adventurers would need to visit the other rooms. Better to save both her mana and some new plants to use later on.

Since there was now 516DP, Violet walked from room to room setting the themes for the rooms.

[Would you like to set the theme for this room? This will cost 150DP. You will no longer be able to change the room's theme and all [Items] added to it in the future must match the set theme, but upgrades will be unlocked for the room.

Yes or No?]

[Is the current theme correct?

Theme: Flower Hunt

Yes or No?]

[Is the current theme correct?

Theme: Garden Meadow

Yes or No?]

[Is the current theme correct?

Theme: Floodplains Meadow

Yes or No?]

One after another, Violet selected [Yes] until all of her rooms had their themes set. She had been putting off setting the room themes for a few of the rooms until she both had sufficient dungeon points and had completed enough of the rooms' interiors. However, there were no longer any rooms without their themes set and Violet felt quite satisfied.

There was now only 66DP left, but that was fine. It would be easy enough to get more. After all, it seemed that each color of a flower was even separately accounted for in the system. That alone would give her the potential to collect hundreds of dungeon points. A lot of the adventurer parties who visited the dungeon seemed to enjoy bringing plant tributes. So, it wouldn't be hard to come across new plant varieties. 

Although Violet did hope to move away from plants one day, she wasn't quite sure what she wanted to collect next. If she wanted to work on fancy accessories and or art, it might be good to collect various paint and textile samples. The dyes were good for a lot of things, but Violet couldn't imagine they'd be good for recreating paintings. The dyes were closer to food dye or the dyes used in clothing than they were paint. There was no texture left over from applying the dye, it just smoothly blended into whatever it was applied to.

Violet sighed as she shook her head, she should get the rest of her building done before she got carried away with her thoughts. She quickly spent 48MP to build a large 16-meter by 32-meter rectangle room just off-center from the long hallway she had recently built. 

From what she had learned from her system, rooms could be combined, but the cost was significantly higher than just building the rooms outright. The same amount of area being created by smaller rooms would cost far more than just building a large room. However, that was hardly all there was to it. There was also a cost of 10% of the room's area to merge the rooms into one large room. That made it quite impractical to build large rooms in this way.

However, Violet wanted her boss room to be extra large and spacious. If she stayed within the limits of her current mana, the boss room would only be as large as the garden meadow or flower hunt rooms. That didn't seem very fitting for what she had in mind, so Violet was planning to build a larger room from the two largest rectangular rooms she could build. A nice 32 meters by 32 meters square room with the boss at the center and obstacles from one end of the room to the next was likely to make for a suitable boss room.

While Violet was musing to herself, Tobias's party once more entered the dungeon. This time, they had brought pancakes with fresh butter, maple syrup, and a ceramic plate as tribute. They had gone out of their way to purchase the ingredients for it when they were buying yesterday's tribute in the nearby city. 

Matthias, despite his gloomy demeanor, was an excellent cook. He had taught himself how to make a good number of dishes that his younger siblings could enjoy. Several times a year, he would make the trip home just to spend time with his family and drop off a portion of his earnings. 

No one in their party ever issued any complaints as they felt sympathy for his difficult situation. Having a bunch of younger siblings and only a one-parent household was already difficult enough. Matthias didn't need to worry about whether he was inconveniencing the rest of them. Besides, it wasn't like it was impossible to explore the dungeons as a party of three and they could always pick up a temporary party member. 

Even when Matthias was with them, they occasionally had to invite a healer or other support class to their party. Some dungeons were more dangerous and others had specialty resources that were easier to collect with the right party members in their party. That was just how life was as an adventurer. People constantly came and went and only those who had particularly good affinity working together ever bothered to party up for the long-term.

Yesterday had been a bust, all of them having failed both the slime parkour challenge and the capture the slime challenge. However, the group was hoping they'd have better success today. The parkour challenge was something they just needed to have more practice at before they could successfully complete it. However, the other challenge was likely to be made easier by having the right equipment. As such, they had bought several sacks from a local farmer.

A net was harder to get access to than the sacks. There were no large bodies of water near here, so it was uncommon for there to be fishing nets available for sale. Besides, there was no guarantee the slimes wouldn't slip right through the holes in the netting. They weren't exactly solid creatures, and they could very easily force their bodies through the netting. The only thing that would stop them was a net with small enough holes for its magic core to not be able to fit through it, but that would require special ordering of a net from a craftsman.

However, Tobias was quite hopeful that the sacks would be sufficient to quickly capture the slippery slimes. It would still be difficult to deal with them slipping down into the rabbit holes, but that couldn't be controlled. The best they could do was to attempt to attack the slimes from within the rabbit holes in hopes that the slimes would come out. For that, Tobias had gotten Matthias to agree to attack the slimes who hid in the rabbit holes with dark magic today.