So the min-maxing begins...

If he was to give a reason why developing his economy as early as possible is essential for his success, it would be because this way he would have more time to get value out of it.

He has 10 days to get his dungeon up and running, so the easier he solves this the greater the number of resources he will have at the end of this period.

Among his resources, he was able, thanks to having explored all the functions already, to establish an hierarchy when it comes to their importance at this present moment.

In it would be: Mana crystals >>> Wood = Food > Stone >>> Metal > Other exotic resources.

Mana crystals are used for basically everything from buying to building, expanding and summoning, so they get the highest priority out of all of them.

Food and Wood come next since they are used for setting the basic infrastructure and getting the labor necessary to keep everything running.

Stone is next, since it is used only for defense and fortifications, it is not as crucial to start gathering it immediately.

Metal is a resource that he found almost no use for, at least for now. So he isn't sure if he even needs to worry about gathering it at the start, the 1000 units he has might already be enough for his needs.

And considering that he doesn't even have a single unit of any of the other resources, he isn't that worried about them.

Getting out of his thoughts, he opened the building menu and started going to work.

He created another room that was connected from the side to the one he had created previously, and after paying another 10 crystals he went to the store and searched for the blueprint he needed.

[Crystallized Mana mine: This building can have workers assigned to it and then will generate mana crystals proportionally to it, the Mined resources will be automatically collected at the start of each day. Max capacity: 20 workers]

A not very detailed description was given to him, but by now he is already gotten used to the system's 'We'll not give you all the information, experiment and find out yourself' attitude when it comes to explanations.

After buying the blueprint for 150 crystals, he then went to the construction tab and used 100 mana crystals and 120 wood to build it in the newest room he created.

He then went to the room to check the changes that happened, reaching there he saw that the entire room had gone through many changes. Instead of an old ruin, the room looked like a cave with many wooden supports on the walls and ceiling and a few wooden structures. One was completely empty which led him to believe that this was a resource deposit while the other had a few mining tool inside.

But the main feature of the room wasn't that, but the tunnel that was now connected to this room. Even from the outside he could see thanks to his dark vision that there were already many purplish crystals hanging close to the wall. Opening the map of the dungeon now showed that there was a symbol of a pickaxe and a crystal on the room and the tunnel connected to it was quite long.

But now that he's done with the easy part which is the construction, then comes the hard part which is the labor.

There were close to a hundred options when it came to deciding on which worker he would summon to work the mines, so it would be very time consuming and require lots of experimentation until he found the most cost-efficient one.

But, he could separate the presented workers in a few categories to make his work in deciding them a bit easier.

The first would be the workers which had some combat abilities. For now he isn't interested in this feature because he isn't under any threat and since this is included in their price, then he would avoid such such workers as they would certainly not be the most cost effective.

This included the Orcs which despite being workers with 140% work efficiency still had high combat abilities and were very expensive on food as a price, the golems which had an unmatched 210% work efficiency but because they are so good at so many things including combat, they are so expensive that he can't afford many of them without jeopardizing the rest of the dungeon.

The second group were those that had interesting abilities but didn't necessarily help them in their work, despite some of them having potential, what he needed the most at the moment was an extremely efficient worker on his primary job and nothing else.

The dark elf serf could also be considered to be in this group since, if they have a similar stat distribution and abilities to him, that means they sacrifice important attributes such as strength, endurance and vitality for other stats that aren't particularly as needed for workers and the dark vision although nice doesn't completely make up for it as shown by their effectiveness being at 60%. But he's willing to make an exception since they are much cheaper then the others at their effectiveness.

Other examples could be the many insectoids and arachnids that passively produce some other products such as venom or silk and the kobolds that have very good hearing and smell, but nothing that helps them as workers.

This considerably shortened the list of workers he had to look through, so for the next few minutes he would continually compare them to each other and in the meantime, he decided to already start preparing the buildings for the next resources he would need.

After mana crystals, the next resources he wanted to get would be both wood and food, those materials were deemed by him to be of equal importance since the wood was necessary for constructing buildings and the food was necessary for acquiring labor making the two resources intertwined with each other.

Building another room opposite to where he previously placed the mine, he then branched it off into two other rooms where he planned to place the next two economic buildings.

Expending another 300 crystals to buy the blueprints for the lumbercamp and hunting lodge, he then moved to place both of them. But as he did, a message was suddenly sent to him.

[Warning! No suitable trees detected in the immediate vicinity, the building won't be able to perform its primary function. Do you wish to proceed? [Y] [N] ]

[Warning! No suitable prey detected in the immediate vicinity, the building won't be able to perform its primary function. Do you wish to proceed? [Y] [N] ]

Those, were very confusing messages that left him with his head scratching.

"Well... When I placed the mine there also wasn't a mana ore vein just randomly there, since I know the dungeon is in a pocket dimension, so why could they just created it in one situation but not the other?"

This seemingly arbitrary behavior of the resource buildings had just thrown a wrench on his plans, as far as he searched there was no way to add any sort of vegetation to the dungeon save for a few glowing mushrooms that only served as illumination and decoration and the closest thing to a tree he has seen was a dryad in the Summoning panel, so he decided to check with the other resources to see if they followed this behavior.

After another quick purchase that caused him to already have spent almost 10% of his total crystals so far, he was able to confirm that both the ore mine and the stone quarry could also be placed in the dungeon without a problem, so he quickly dismantled all four buildings and returned the blueprints for all the money he spent.

So for the next few minutes he tried to think of some logical reason for such an odd peculiarity.

'Maybe it's the absence of sunlight and the rocky terrain inside the dungeon that doesn't allow for anything other than mushrooms to grow inside? In my previous life plants could be grown indoors but that's thanks to technology such as electric lights and considering that this dungeon is illuminated by torches, then this probably can't be replicated here unless there's some kind of magic based lighting later.'

But putting aside the reasons, he now had to deal with this new circumstances and properly adapt to it.

'Both food and Wood cannot be collected until the dungeon entrance is opened and I can then maybe send workers outside to gather them there. So until then, the only way I have to obtain them is to directly buy them at the store at a very high price.'

This has slightly shifted his previous hierarchy of importance when it comes to the resources with Food and Wood now being higher than even Mana crystals due to their great scarcity.

And this conclusion, has inadvertently helped him to come to a final conclusion when it came to which Minion would be chosen as his main work force.

From the few minions that he was weighting, the worker which was winning in his mind until then was the Dark elf serf with 60% efficiency for their low price and only 1 unit of food as upkeep were the ones that seemed the best despite not being the best optimized for the job.

But now there's a much more enticing option: The skeleton thrall. They have 45% work efficiency and cost 100 crystals which is both more expensive and less efficient than the former. But they have one big advantage over it, that they don't cost any food to recruit or upkeep.

So if you consider that the Dark elf serf is 75/45, that means that they're actually 120 resources total plus upkeep, 20 more than the skeleton, before he valued their crystal price more so he considered paying extra food a better deal but now it's the contrary, so these factors made him look towards them in a much more favorable light.

There's also the matter of skeletons working at the crystal mine being able to completely pay for themselves since they only require one resource, while for most other minions, you would need to have a certain portion of your workforce assigned onto food just to pay the upkeep of the rest.

So, having made his mind he decided to give a day for them to work and see their performance in reality, he opened the Summoning tab and as 100 crystals vanished, his first summoning had commenced.

In front of him, a pitch black puddle suddenly appeared on the ground that was initially as small as a finger but it quickly expanded. As he stared expectantly at it, he started to feel some nostalgia as he gazed at that completely black and viscous liquid.

"This feeling, it reminds me of the empty void I traversed before reaching here. Do the summons also come from there?"

As he continued in this line of thought, the puddle suddenly stirred, catching his attention. The strange liquid started to rise up and slowly reveal what was inside it.

As all the liquid fell from the figure within and started to disappear as quickly as it had appeared, he was able to properly see it and discern its features.

It was a skeleton, that's it. The only unusual features it has is the black energy emanating deep from within its eye sockets and the pieces of cloth clinging to it that might one day have been its clothes.

It was just standing there idly as if waiting for orders so it can follow.

"You" He says pointing at the summon, "work on the mine." He then points at the mining shaft at the end of the room.

*Clack*

The skeleton rapidly opens and closes its jaw creating a clanking sound in what he could only assume as being a form of acknowledgment to his order.

The skeleton then turned towards one of the wooden buildings and very slowly shambled towards it, soon after it entered, it exited with a pickaxe in hand, so it shambled while dragging a pickaxe to the ground towards the tunnel, the whole process was very slow and awkward.

'Now I see why their efficiency is so low.'

Following this he went to the habitation tab to buy the building necessary for him to properly maintain his undead workers, just because they don't cost upkeep doesn't mean they don't require any additional cost.

There, he quickly found the building that he had he was looking for. It was one that he had already seen when he was looking through the list before.

[Bone totem: This small monument can be placed into a room and it will radiate necromantic power, reinvigorating any undead units in its effective radius. This building requires 10 crystals a day to remain functional.]

Undead are product of the defiance of the natural order of life, as having corpses rise up after death is something that cannot happen naturally to no one's surprise, so especially lower undead need a constant supply of the power that created them in order to continue their cursed existence.

Normally, that would mean that the necromancer that raised them had to constantly use their power to maintain their army lest it all crumble to dust.

But since he didn't raise them using necromancy as he doesn't wield this power, he needs this totem to act as a substitute to convert mana into the same necromantic power utilized by necromancers.

All this information was what he managed to piece together using the information he was given and supplemented by his own guesses.

This building is quite special when compared to others since it doesn't require a blueprint and the cost of it isn't any of his resources, but something quite different.

The bone totem uses summons as building material, as 5 skeletons are necessary to build it, which translates to 500 crystals. Expensive, but not so much when you consider the following: skeletons only cost 10 crystals as upkeep for however many he can fit in the radius, which is large enough to fit the entire mine.

It is a big initial investment, but it will be very cheap on the long term.

So with pain in his heart, he spent 5% of his total crystals in a single building, summoning 5 skeletons then sacrificing them.

The totem them appeared in his storage space, which he quickly placed at the entrance of the mine to ensure the radius would cover even deep in the tunnel.

The totem looked like a spire made of various different bones fused together in a upwards spiral and from the eyesockets and mouths of the skulls present there was the same black energy he found inside the skeleton he had sent to work on the mine.

[This building is currently inactive, do you wish to spend 10 mana crystals in order to activate it?]

[Yes] [No]

He accepted the price and as soon as he confirmed the activation, the totem started to have its eerie energy spread into the whole room and into the tunnel.

With his preparation done, he didn't waste any more time and hired 19 more skeletons to send to the mine to join the first one, which marked that more than 25% of his crystal funds were now gone.

One very curious thing he noticed is that after placing the bone totem, the effectiveness of the skeleton thrall went from 45% to 50% and he quickly came up with a few explanations for this change.

'Maybe increasing the performance of undead nearby is just an effect of the totem that wasn't in the description, this wouldn't be the first time it happened. Or maybe that's a result of the totem having made this place more 'suitable' for the undead thanks to the spread of necromantic energy, which in turn allows his minions that are suitable for the terrain to be more effective. It's something worth looking into.'

With his crystal production more or less sorted, he decided to move on into the next step on his mental list:

Deciding which type of Dungeon he will build.