The Mad Rat’s Lab

Today's afternoon I’m going to upgrade the dungeon. But there are a few things I did yesterday, before leaving the game, that you don’t know.

The first is about the dungeon invasion rewards. I decided to take with me the body of the butterfly and the chameleon. I had a nice idea for a new monster, so I picked them. The other three bodies I picked were the High Elf’s body, of course, and two of the elvish Scouts.

Then I took a look at the Technology screen. In the technology screen, there are three technology trees: Units, Buildings and Decorations. As you can expect from the names, the Unit tree unlocks new unit types, the Buildings tree unlocks new buildings and infrastructure elements, and the Decorations tree unlocks new elements to add into the dungeon. They are called decorations but traps, hazardous terrain and such things are also included in this tree. In each tree, you can only see the details of the tech you can currently research. The only thing you know about the other techs is if there will be another tech unlocked after researching it or not.

Obviously, the first tree I looked at is the Units tree. It had only two options to research: ‘Creepy’ and ‘Siamese’.

I already knew about the Creepy one, but the Siamese was new for me. In fact, the reason I took the butterfly and chameleon bodies was for creating a Creepy. So I immediately started researching the Creepy while looking at the rest of the tech trees.

The Siamese can be a very powerful unit, but I think it’s a waste to use good units to create them. Because the most powerful aspect of the siamese is the double skills per level up and the shared passives. Imagine giving one the Strength increase passive, and the other the Spirit passive… you get two units that are good at both magic and physical attacks, and with extremely low cp cost. You can literally make an army of them that costs almost the same as the stitched but are more than twice as powerful! On the other side, the added stats for the Hybrids make them a very good elite unit. Twice the stats make the units more than twice as powerful, because of the increase on damage and reduced damage taken when the stats are higher than the opponent.

In the Buildings tree, there were a lot more technologies than in the Units tree. But the most important ones right now for the dungeon were the ‘Corpse cart’ and the ‘Collectionist’ techs. Oh, and the ‘Small operation table’! I almost forgot about this one.

I REALLY wanted to get the Collectionist one, but my purpose this time was to get the Small operation table. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to create the Creepy. So I researched the small operation table too. Two days of passive income from the Mine and Farm were enough to pay for both the Creepy and Small operation table.

Then I spent 20 cp to build the Small operation table. It is very cheap because it’s mostly for the creation of non-combat units like the Creepy. With everything added, 70 cp went away.

I also took a look at the Decorations tree, not expecting to get any tech from there, but found a nice one that only cost me 20 food to research. It was called ‘Mushrooms’. This unlocked the possibility to use basic and small mushrooms during the dungeon creation. It also unlocked three new technologies called: ‘Glowing mushrooms’, ‘Giant mushrooms’ and ‘Poisonous mushrooms’. And I already have plans for the three of those new mushroom types in the future.

The last thing I did yesterday was… the creation of the first Creepy! Since the critters are very cheap in this game, the sum of the cp cost from the butterfly and chameleon was only 2 cp. But I didn’t simply create a Creepy... I also upgraded it to level 2 and added a very special skill to it.

“I took the idea from some of the videos I’ve seen, where players add passive or triggered skills to critters. The funniest one was a sheep with a sleeping aura… when the enemy Champion fell asleep, the surrounding mobs attacked and killed it. Hahaha!”

Critters aren’t supposed to be used in combat. They have very low stats, start with no skill points, and the basic AI doesn’t include any Combat state. You can still level them, but the stat increase is negligible… But! If you give them skills that don’t need the critter to enter combat… You can obtain very nasty combinations!

So what I did was use the butterfly as the base for the Creepy, and then add the chameleon’s innate skill. The butterfly’s basic AI makes it fly towards a random surface, stay there for some time, and move towards the next surface. It basically tries to imitate what real butterflies do. Then I added the node called ‘move towards X’ to the AI and reconnect the nodes. I set the X, of course, to the closest enemy. Then I saved the butterfly’s template name as ‘Death Butterfly’. And these are the two skills that the butterfly has.

“You can more or less imagine the rest, right? The butterfly flies towards the enemy, lands on top of them, and deals a stupid amout of damage simply by staying still. Everyone wins! Hahaha! Well, except the victim! Hahaha!” I start laughing. I can’t stop myself, after imagining the other players trying to find ‘why’ their HP is getting lower all the time… only to find after death that a camouflaged butterfly killed them!

Oh, and I also filmed a small video of myself acting crazy and faking to create the butterfly, then running away from it. I had to enable friendly fire to be able to do the filming. I’m going to edit it later, and share it for everyone to see. The video’s title is going to be ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’

And this finishes yesterday’s explanation! Returning to the present… 

Today, I talked with Ricard about the unexpected critter bodies I got as rewards, and we both agreed that the Kidnapper must have been capturing critters that were unlucky to get close enough for my Chain Lightning to hit them. So I decided I’m going to keep using the Kidnapper for a veeeery long time. “It brings me a lot of happiness to finally see a Stitched doing better than what I expected! Instead of worse, as everything until now…” I say, remembering the mass of flesh and limbs. I shudder.

There's been two players that invaded my dungeon since yesterday. “My first two customers!” I say while making a fist pose. They stomped my dungeon, not a single of their support units died. It’s a shame, because you get better rewards the more invaders you kill. “But I got 20 cp and 1 xp for each invasion, so it’s something good!”

One of the invaders even left a comment: ‘The dungeon style isn’t bad, but the dungeon is too easy.’

“Yes, I already know! This is why today is a dungeon improvement day!”

Right now, I have 128 cp. The first thing I’m going to do is improve the dungeon mobs. Aka: the Stitched. But simply adding more of them isn’t really going to make too much of a difference, so I instead decide to upgrade a few of them.

“I have five squads, so what I’m going to do is upgrade the Braindead Leaders into level 2.” With five level 2 units, the dungeon is going to be a lot harder. I also add the active skill ‘Toxic Spit’ with the skill point they got for reaching level 2.

With this skill, the Leaders will have a ranged attack. I hope that by including a ranged attack they will turn a lot more dangerous. At least, the enemies will take some damage even if they stay at range. Unlike what happens now. They are so slow that they can be kited indefinitely.

“These are the Braindead Leader’s current stats, huh? As I was expecting, neither the Intelligence nor the Command/Communicate increase with level ups.” I already knew about the Speed not increasing, because I leveled up my Champion and the Speed didn’t increase either. The upgrades cost a total of 50 cp, leaving me with 78 cp.

“Now to the next element to improve my dungeon: Traps!” Currently, I have only one trap available. I can research more through the technology trees, but I don’t have the luxury to spend resources to unlock them yet. The trap I can use is ‘Falling corpse’.

“Sooo… yes. A falling corpse. Literally. I’m not sure if the enemies are going to die from the damage, but at least their sanity is going to take a hit for sure.” An interesting fact is that the damage from traps cannot be reduced or prevented with skills. If the trap hits you, you take damage. That’s it. This way the players can’t simply ignore them by putting a ‘tank’ unit in front or something similar. Instead, almost all traps can be spotted, avoided or deactivated, rewarding players that properly pay attention to the dungeon.

“I don’t want to spend too much on the traps, so I’m going to buy only three, for 30 cp and 3 corpses. This is going to leave 48 cp for upgrading the dungeon rooms and decorations, which is more than enough for now.” 

“Now the dungeon layout changes.” I start the dungeon renovation by adding a small rocky passage between the Cave room and the dungeon entrance portal. I make it straight while keeping it as natural-looking as possible. Now, from the entrance the players can see the cave at the end of the tunnel. I also put one of the Falling corpse traps here, just before the cave opening. “The first enemy, when about to reach the cave, will have a corpse fall on top. Hahaha! A very nice way to start a dungeon invasion! At least for me, hehehe!”

Then, I add several more tunnel entrances to the cave. Instead of being like before, where there was a single entrance to the tunnels zone, now there are four of them distributed through the cave.

I also add a fifth tunnel, but this one leads to a small rock cavern with only one entrance. This cavern is a ‘resting place’ where none of my units will appear. And I add the second trap here. I set the trigger of the trap to only when an enemy exits the room. “Aha! You dared to take a rest in MY dungeon!? Have a corpse fall on top of you as you exit the ‘resting room’!”

Returning to the tunnels, I now have enough cp to add the underground river that I wanted before. I make some of the tunnels partially inundated, and it is possible for the units to fall into the river. If they fall inside the river, the river current will move them in the direction of the big cave, where the river ends in a lake. I’ve turned a part of the big cavern into an underground lake for this reason. I also added lots of mushrooms in the areas closest to the water.

I keep the laboratory in the same way as before except for… the last trap, which I put just in front of the dungeon core. “You wanted to destroy my dungeon core? Take a corpse to your face!” I don’t think this trap will accomplish anything except making people angry. But I want the invaders to not underestimate my dungeon.

For the mob distribution, I only need to set the butterfly into one of the rooms, so I put it into the Cave room. This way, the butterfly has a higher chance to find a ‘victim’, because all invaders must walk through the big cave.

I create a solitary and inaccessible room, where I put the Followers and the Kidnapper. They don’t have skills for defending the dungeon, the AI needs me close for working properly, and I prefer that they don’t wander around. Otherwise, players can rate the dungeon worse because a few of the stitched are doing weird things. “The only requirement in a dungeon is that there’s a path between the entrance and the dungeon core. If you like doing so, you can create as many inaccessible areas as you want.”

I end spending all of the cp that I had into improving the dungeon. But I don’t regret it. I don’t add or remove any Rooms, only expand the Tunnels room to encompass all the new tunnels and the underground river.

I have three plans for the future: add more Death Butterflies, upgrade the Braindead Mob to level 2, and add a few more Falling corpse traps. “Well, and finally create my first Hybrid… So let’s make it four! I have four plans for the future!”

“Oh, oh! And research the Collectionist tech! So this makes it five plans… And then also…” I keep adding more and more plans for a while, before leaving the game. The list is currently veeeery long.

“You MUST take a close look at your HP all the time. Seriously! It is VERY important because of the f*****g butterflies! If your HP starts to decrease and you can’t see enemies that are attacking you, you probably have a Death Butterfly attached! Immediately activate some damaging aura, or blast yourself with an AoE skill. I’m not joking here! The little bugs are deadly, and one of the worst nightmares in this DAMNED dungeon! You don’t want to believe me? Then you’ll find yourself dead. And it’s going to be soon.”

- Extract from the Chapter ‘Important things to look out for’ from ‘How to Stay Sane in The Mad Rat’s Lab’.

Radosh

Here's an image of the Death Butterfly (when not camouflaged):

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And you can also imagine the cave zone to be something like this:

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