The Mad Rat’s Lab

“Heeeello everyoooone! It’s your favorite crazy rat’s comeback! How are you? Ready for more action!?” I say while raising my arms.

Nothing happens, and nobody shouts in response.

“I can’t hear you!! I’ll ask again! Ready for more action!?”

Still no response.

“Better.” I nod, satisfied with the audience’s clamor.

Why am I doing this? Because a week has passed since the last time we talked, and I was worried you were starting to miss me and my monologues.

I’ve done a lot of things this last week, but they are of little interest by themselves, so a resume is going to be enough. Otherwise it would have been booooooring!

So, let’s start from the end because it’s the most logical way to explain things. I’ve managed to reach level 3!

*Furious clapping sounds*

“Thank you! Thank you, everyone! I am glad to see you so enthusiastic!” I say while continuing the furious clapping.

This is the window that popped yesterday in front of me after reaching the new level.

“It seems like the game makes sure you don’t get too far behind the other players by giving you some free Stasis chambers each level up. Which makes sense, because it’s difficult enough to obtain the bodies, and then find after the dungeon invasion that you can’t bring them back because you don’t have enough storage for them…”

Now let’s go back in time (no, not literally) and start with a flashback! Because everyone loves flashbacks!

“No, I don’t!” I complain.

You don’t? Well, me neither… but I’ll still make a flashback here…

 

After the talk with Ricard about playing together, this past week I’ve been focussed in upgrading the dungeon and playing as much as possible. Homework? Who cares about that thing?

Now I’m going to explain the changes in no particular order!

I’m going to start with the dungeon layout and new dungeon zones. At least for now, I’ve kept the parts that I already created more or less the same. The only thing that I added was a mix of glowing mushrooms and giant mushrooms into the big cave area, as well as some into the tunnels.

Oh, and I also unlocked a new type of hazardous mushrooms, the ‘Sleeping mushrooms’. Guess where I put them? Yep, you are right! I put them near the already placed poison mushrooms.

Well, to be exact I put two types of them in two different places. I put a kind that only activates once but the sleep is 100% guaranteed in a very small area around itself in the tunnels. This sleep isn’t dispelled by taking damage and only lasts for 2 seconds, but with them, when the enemies fall asleep, they are going to do so inside the cloud of poison. “Hahaha, isn't it good? I call it ‘bad sleep’.”

And then I put another type that creates a similar effect to the cloud of poison but with sleep inside the ‘resting room’. These mushrooms only have a 10% chance to inflict sleep each second and the sleep can be dispelled by taking damage. But if the enemies dare to stop inside the ‘resting room’, they might fall into an infinite cycle of falling asleep. And since there are no dangers inside the room, they would never wake up. I’ve baptized it with the name ‘the eternal resting room’.

Don't worry about their mental health... Even if the Champion is asleep, the player is still awake, only that it can’t move the Champion, and can still surrender and abandon the dungeon. Only that they will be considered as killed, and lose a lot of the reward, increasing my own reward.

*Slurp!* I start drooling thinking about it. “I can already taste the huge amount of cp and xp this area is going to give me.”

And more importantly, since sleep is one of the status effects that allows for capturing the units, I can make it into an easy way to get free bodies. Not from the Champions themselves, which cannot be captured, but from the support mobs.

Regarding the new zones, I extended a tunnel from the current Laboratory. Then I created a series of small rooms connected between themselves with several corridors. Both the rooms and corridors are irregular, with parts that look like natural caves and tunnels, and parts that are clearly man-made. The rock, dirt and stone blend with the paved and metal plated surfaces in a random and disturbing way.

Then I added to this zone a Field effect. What are field effects? They are special rules that affect a Room, and every unit inside the field suffers from its effects regardless of ally or enemy. The field effect is called ‘Freezing Cold’.

And then I put both Corpse warehouses in the area and called this room ‘The Freezer’. Yes, freezer as in ‘the place where corpses are kept in good conditions’. I also put some lab equipment in the area and, most importantly, the machine to create the Stitched: the Reanimation machine.

And the last change that I made to the dungeon layout is the creation of another laboratory zone, connected to The Freezer room. If you look at the map, it’s actually right next to the original laboratory room, but they aren’t connected.

But this isn’t enough. I wanted to mess with the player’s minds, so I added a little trick. On the side where both laboratories are closer, I created a door in both laboratories, as if there was a passage connecting the two laboratories. But there isn’t any passage, only the two doors facing each other.

The doors look like those high-security doors from biological laboratories, and they even have a small keyboard to input a password. Of course, they don’t work and it’s completely impossible for a player to go from one laboratory to the other except through The Freezer.

The last thing I did was move most of the laboratory stuff and the dungeon core to the new laboratory zone. Then I renamed the old laboratory room as ‘Laboratory Annex 1’ and named the new laboratory room as ‘Central Laboratory’.

 

Now moving onto the next topic: traps! I researched a total of two new traps. One weird thing that the Flesh Monstrosities have is that they can ‘decorate’ the dungeons with corpses. And the first trap I unlocked is this one.

What I did was put several corpse decorations mixed with the Exploding corpse traps, so that it’s almost impossible to know which ones are traps that are going to explode and which ones are simply decorations.

I put a total of five Exploding corpse traps mixed with more than 30 normal corpses in the Freezer room. There are no corpses in any other room in the dungeon, only in this room. And I also moved all the stitched groups into the Freezer. Now the room is full of dead bodies, with body parts and limbs spread everywhere. And we can’t forget the abominations of flesh made from several humanoid races that are called ‘stitched’. A truly gross and horrifying spectacle.

What’s even worse, the field effect makes all units move slower. This also affects the Stitched, but since they are already so slow, a 10% less speed is almost nothing, while it can be a significant drawback for the enemies.

“So again, everyone wins except for the enemies!.”

For the second trap to work, I actually needed to create a Horrific generator to supply the traps with electricity. I put the generator in one of the Corpse warehouses and I’m going to make sure that it’s permanently filled with 30 corpses to maximize the amount of electricity provided. This is the second trap that I created.

This is a very funny and simple trap. If the enemy gets close, it is going to be continuously blasted by electricity until the trap is destroyed. The activation cost indicates how much electricity is used by this trap when activated. This means that with a single Horrific generator I can have at most six of these traps. But for now I’ve only built two of them and put one on each of the laboratories.

Of course, the Lightning rod is more effective in large numbers close together. But I don’t want to create a dungeon that focuses on killing everybody. What I want is an unpredictable dungeon full of unexpected turns and stupid gimmicks, so that the invading players’ plans are foiled before they can even make them.

“Hahaha! Suffer the madness contained in this genius mind!” I imagine myself saying to the poor players that dared to enter my dungeon.

Oh, and regarding new technologies, I researched the Collectionist tech to be able to bring 10 bodies with me during invasions. And also built a few more Stasis capsules and Small stasis capsules to compensate, making it a total of 20 normal sized and 10 smaller ones.

 

Now for the last thing that I researched during this week, and also the most important one! The Siamese! You know, the units that were literally half and half units, two units in one, sharing passives.

“Incredible price! It’s 2x1 in units! 2x1! Pick two units, and I will turn them into only one! It’s the best discount ever, pay for 2 and get only 1!” I shout.

Ok, let’s stop fooling and continue with the flashback. So as I was saying, I researched the Siamese, and also created a bunch of them. In fact, I created a total of 8 Siamese, all of them using the same two units: the elvish Scout and the dwarvish Miner. The Scouts have a very interesting innate skill called Nature Attuned.

They have the perfect skill for me, because if I put them in the areas where there are mushrooms… They will be immune! And since they are immune, they can punish the enemies without being affected by the mushrooms!

I also upgraded them to level 3 and used the skill points to add one skill of each type to every half of the siamese. The name of the template is ‘Demonic Swarmer’. Why this name you ask? Take a look at the stats and skills of each half.

The speed is automatically set to the highest of the two, for obvious reasons. Can you imagine half of the unit moving faster than the other? And the 3D model stretching because the halves move away? Hahaha! Also, the Strong skill increases the STR basic value by 5, and the rest of the skills are as follows.

The last thing I did with the Demonic Swarmers is to modify the AI so that, upon entering combat, they release a cry. And if another Demonic Swarmer is close enough to hear the cry, it’ll move towards the direction of that cry at full speed, by using Dash, and then join the combat. For this to work I needed them to have at least a 1 in COM, so I had to add the Commander skill.

“You don’t really understand how good and easy it is to have units with decent basic AI, until you have to go back to modify something on the level of the Stitched…”

The Demonic Revenge is the tip of the cake. If you kill one of the halfs, the other gets empowered by a crazy amount until it dies. I’m sure that this, paired with the cry for help and the incredible speed they can reach thanks to the Dash, is going to get more than one player killed.

Furthermore, if the Bash stun activates… “Nice try, player! Better luck next time!”

I ‘liberated’ three Demonic Swarmers into the Cave room, and the other five into the Tunnels. But this time they can leave the assigned room in case they are close enough to hear a cry for help coming from the other room.

The Demonic Swarmers are very hilarious. Because they are half elf and half dwarf (excluding the heads, each half has its own head), one half is significantly shorter than the other half. Guess how they walk and stand? They do so by inclining themselves into a close to a 70º angle towards the dwarf side. Let’s say that they ‘can’t walk straight’ even if they want to.

And when they run, there are moments that the dwarf half is flying and not touching the ground, while the elf half is jumping on one foot. I think the invading players are going to laugh at them… at the start… because after entering combat, they might want to cry instead.

 

For the other mob changes… While getting the bodies to create so many Demonic Swarmers, I managed to get another High Elf and Runesmith bodies, and created a second Lab Assistant. Which is currently stationed in the new laboratory, so one assistant in each lab.

I also managed to obtain the bodies to create two more Death Butterflies. Currently there is one of them assigned to the Cave, one to the Tunnels and one to the Freezer.

“Why put them all together when I can make the players more paranoid if they are spread out?”

And now that we are talking about the Creepy, I also created a new Creepy type. I used a Fly and a Fire Spark to create it. The Fire Spark is a critter from the Primordials faction, a faction that basically uses elementals. Elementals are considered living units, so I can actually use them to create my own units.

As with the Death Butterfly, I leveled the Creepy, this time to level 3, and added special skills to annoy the players. I called the new unit ‘Fiery Fly’ and managed to get enough bodies to create four of them. These are the skills that the Fiery Fly has. The Fire Elemental comes from the Fire Spark’s innate skill.

It’s funny how almost all the damage the flies are going to do is from the basic values of the skills. Because they have the lowest possible SPI value, a 1. And the In Flames will deal no damage to themselves, because of the Fire Elemental passive.

This time I didn’t modify the AI, because I simply wanted to annoy the players with them. And you know that flies are already pretty annoying by themselves, so they’re going to do a peeeeerfect job without me having to touch anything from the AI.

I put all the Fiery Flies into the Cave. I’m sure they are going to be the first thing that the invading players get annoyed with.

The funniest part is that if the fireflies get close enough to each other, they can create a devastating chain of Death Burst explosions as one explosion makes the other flies explode.

 

And these are more or less all the changes in the dungeon in this past week. Returning to the present….

Oh! And I almost forgot! One of the level 3 rewards is the possibility to upgrade the Champion! Though I first need to research it, so I’ll need to wait to be able to do it. The current technology will allow me to add a third body to the original mix with the same conditions as before: keep innate skill and sum all stats.

“What am I going to give to my Champion next? Should I look for only stats? Or for a good innate skill…?”

“Oh, Oh! Wouldn’t it be good to shoot lasers from the eyes? What about invisibility?”

“....It’s a shame that I can only use humanoid bodies, because it would be awesome to add a spider into the mix… You know, all that shooting spiderwebs and climbing walls thing… Though I’m not sure if it’d work in the game.”

 

“BEWARE the eternal sleep zones. I’ve already said before, but NO zone is safe in this damned dungeon! If you see a place where there’s literally nothing other than mushrooms and plants, meaning: no traps, no mobs, no critters, no boss, no lab equipment… NOTHING! Don’t enter. Simply DO NOT ENTER! Unless you want to stare at your champion while it sleeps for all eternity, that is. If you want to do so, feel free to ignore my warning.”

- Extract from the Chapter ‘Unexpected Dangers’ from ‘How to Stay Sane in The Mad Rat’s Lab’.