A pause for introspection

At this point, he would have moved on to the next resource until all those he found important were being produced, but unfortunately that can't be the case with food and Wood being unavailable while stone and metal are not that high in his priority list.

Speaking of the two current conventionally unobtainable resources, now that he thinks about it, he is pretty sure that they being unavailable inside the dungeon isn't an oversight but something that has been arranged intentionally.

Till now, he has been wondering why at least half of the workers in the summoning list either have some combat strength or some means of defense. But if this is intentional, then it makes more sense as those workers would have to go out into the world and face many dangers while harvesting resources.

And looking at the minions he's currently using, it is clear to him that the slow, lumbering, weak and combat incapable skeleton thrall would be completely useless in such a role, they're just useless sacks of potato in this context.

Which means that despite their excellent cost-efficiency, he will have to think of another minion to be the ones he'll send out, but he still has a lot of time to come to a decision.

Which brought him straight to planning the defense of the dungeon.

Currently, he saw two paths he could possibly take when planning his defenses, one was to make the dungeon into an impenetrable fortress and the other was to turn it into a trap labyrinth.

A better way to see it, is to imagine this as deciding in which aspect you're competing with your opponents. Might or cunning.

If he decides to build his own dungeon as a fortress, that means favoring walls and watchtowers and committing to face intruders head on and subdue them with pure might. From then on, he'll be on a constant arms race to try and remain one step ahead of his opponents. It's a simple aproach but by no means easy.

The other alternative would be to build his dungeon a labyrinth, favoring traps and hazards while trying to instead of directly defeating them, using his resources to slowly whittle invaders down until they eventually can't proceed any longer.

But while choosing, he must remain aware of the greatest disadvantage that his current position brings him.

And it is that as the Dungeon Master and the defending party, he has no initiative whatsoever when it comes to the conflicts he'll get into.

This can be made much easier to understand with an example. He'll use one from video games since the system that he has resembles one so much.

What is the reason that bosses can always be defeated by the players no matter how much the odds are stacked in their favor? They can have very high stats that exceed the player many times, have the terrain advantage, have minions to support them and sometimes are even be given cheats but they can still be overcome.

One can present many answers for this question, but in his opinion the ones that best answers it is that: one party has all the initiative while the other has none.

Bosses are almost always completely passive and treated as obstacles that need to be overcome instead of true foes. They are predictable and will almost always be encountered in the players terms and only when the players choose to progress.

Meanwhile the players are adaptable and ever evolving, they will learn their foes characteristics and when defeated, will return better prepared when they discover their opponents weakness and change their strategy to better exploit it.

If there was a boss that hunted down players to fight in his own terms and could properly adapt themselves to anything that's presented to them, then they would be the closest thing to unbeatable while remaining fair. But until then, the rigid thinking of machines will always be exploited and beaten by the wit of living beings and that's why the dungeon core needs Dungeon Masters.

So what he was trying to explain is: The heroes that will appear in 10 days have the initiative to enter the dungeon whenever they want, therefore they can prepare and try to discover the best method to clear the dungeon, meanwhile the Dungeon Masters can't feasibly prepare himself the same way because he has no control over who can enter his dungeon save for the single block token he has.

So long story short: He will need to face them at their own terms and win despite that. So he will have to use other means in order to make up for this disadvantage.

So that brings him back to his choice of either trying building an impenetrable fortress or a labyrinth filled with traps, since both options interact differently with this limitation.

The advantage of building a strong defense is that as long as you're stronger than the invaders by a large enough margin, they absolutely can't break through the dungeon which means some safety for a time. But as was mentioned previously, a flaw will eventually revealed in your defense as in all the best defenses, so when that time comes you will be in an enormous disadvantage.

Meanwhile the advantage of building the dungeon as a labyrinth is that, as long as you manage to keep your cards hidden, you can take down invaders much stronger than you would otherwise be able to handle. But of course, this makes having knowledge about trap locations and pathways being leaked equivalent to a death sentence. All you can do at that point is to use the emergency block token and completely remake the dungeon.

Of course, he is well aware that this isn't an absolute since the dungeon, from what he's seen, is divided into floors and he could always mix them up later. But since currently he has only access to one, deciding the direction he's going in the start is very important.

'Hmmm... Should I go for the consistency and safety of a strong defense or should I go high risk and high reward with a labyrinth and have to be in an information war with the outside from now on.'

One of the aspects that he took into consideration was where would his unique talents serve him the best, the troops he is most effective with is without a doubt the dark elf ones since they get a discount, for now the skeletons outshine the workers but as he gains access to higher tier summons, this discount will become more and more crucial, so he should try to build a dungeon that best uses them.

'With their low head-on combat stats, they wouldn't perform very well in a defensive siege, so they must ambush and be get the first attack in order to have any real chance.'

One of the changes he can quickly make to turn them more viable is to get rid of all the torches that are scattered around. Not only that gives him almost 150 crystals total after reselling them thanks to the Beginner Protection Period, but if the dark vision is a species characteristic and not just his own characteristic then this will also give them an advantage. Doing this also doesn't affect the skeletons working in the slightest as they don't really use eyes to see.

So in the end, he decided to make his first floor a labyrinth using lots of traps and summons to slowly whittle down their strength rather than facing it head on. This is the style that better suits his unique characteristics and if he's unlucky and he has locals knocking on his door as soon as the protection expires, this would at least give him a very small chance to survive.

And about having information about his dungeon leaked? There's an infallible solution to that.

"Just kill them all, as long as there's no survivors to tell the tale, then there's no way any important information can be retrieved."

It might sound a bit too harsh when you consider that the invaders include people from his old world that were brought here without their consent. But if they're invading his dungeon, then that means that despite also knowing that, they decided to kill him for their own interest, in which case it's just fair that he responds in kind.

He has already come to terms that he won't be able to proceed without getting his hands dirty, he will have a lot of time to reflect who's on the right and who's on the wrong in the end of it all, but above everything else.

He is NOT returning to that empty abyss again, if they want to try and get his sympathy or beg for forgiveness then they should've instead not entered his home at all.

And for the sake of having no one leave his dungeon alive, he will have to turn his dungeon into a place that's designed to trap all those who enter.

Making escape impossible, for him is currently just as important as making the dungeon hard to invade. But another thing that has come to mind is that, he may have to actively lure heroes to his dungeon in order to survive.

As the introductory message clearly stated, both parties need to kill the other one in order to grow stronger, so if he doesn't attract them early on when they're weaker then he'll be left behind and eventually die due to not being able to keep up with his enemies, which consists of basically everyone else. So conflict is not only inevitable but also necessary for his survival.

But he also realized that he can't make his dungeon too deadly either, if he doesn't balance the risk with a suitable reward then the heroes may just start avoiding his dungeon and will continue to grow while he remains stagnant without any way to grow himself, then they'll just return when they're stronger to finish him off.

He hasn't even started building the dungeon, but complications just keep popping up.

'I would assume that almost everyone else is content to just sit tight and think about how to ward off any invaders and protect themselves, meanwhile here I am thinking of how best to lure and trap complete strangers.'

If someone heard this in any other context, they would probably think of him as a psychopath that needs to be put in a mental hospital. But this change of mentality wasn't a product of the shock of being transported to another world, it was something deliberate from his part.

Luiz is well aware that among Dungeon Masters, he doesn't have the highest chance of survival, compared to other people from Earth that might have combat training, studied military tactics, have experience in building or architecture, are knowledgeable about governance or economy, he doesn't really have much going for him aside from having a bit of knowledge from playing video games.

Knowing this, he would have despaired if he hadn't already experienced what it seemed an eternity wandering the void. And although he didn't leave the experience any wiser or more knowledgeable than before, he can confidently say that he gained very high mental fortitude and a redoubled will to live.

So because he recognized his own weakness and inadequacy, he has realized that he simply couldn't afford to also have a weak and outdated mentality on top of that, this change has released many of his burdens and slowly started to give him a clearer picture of the situation.

A lack of skill or knowledge will naturally be fixed with time, so as long as he endures then he will eventually grow and shorten the gap between him and those people, but changing a mentality that has ingrained itself into a person's brain can take much longer and can just as easily result in a complete mental breakdown.

So the person that initially didn't have even a single advantage over anyone else, has become someone who's ahead of almost everyone when it comes to his mentality and psychological stability, the ingredients necessary for someone to rise to greatness.

This is how one of the greatest Dungeon Masters was born.