Branch 4: Dungeon Idle Manager

The heroes break it. We clean it up.

You are the new administrator at Branch 4 of the Dungeon Facility Management Corporation. Sanitation, maintenance, security, control, restricted research. Five posts, and twenty-one species pass through them.

Building the roster Each member of staff gets three slots a week. Choose training, work, or rest. Training raises stats, work earns output and budget, rest brings stress down. Forty-three assignments in all, and a cap on how many you may approve in one week, so you will not fit everything you want.

Day shift and night shift are a real decision Every slot has a time of day. A vampire cannot stand a day post, and stacking one shift too heavily misses the quorum and costs you. Next week's forecast tells you what hour the heroes arrive, so make sure someone is standing there.

Running the week Give your orders and the week plays out over three real minutes. Watch it or close the app; you get a notification when it ends. Things come up along the way. Pick which of three reports broke a restricted rule, or decide whether to approve an experiment. Wait it out to the end for the on-time bonus.

One meeting a week You sit down with one person per week. An injury, a burnout, a promotion, someone who has been here a long time, or a week where nothing happened. Even in the same situation the opening line depends on who they are. One apologizes for leaving the crew a person short. Another says you will send them out anyway, so they bandaged it on the way in. Your three replies trade goodwill and stress against output and budget.

Grow close enough and a story belonging to that species opens in four stages. All twenty-one have their own.

Messages after the shift ends When the work is done, your staff write to you first. One spent fifteen minutes at the vending machine unable to choose. One found their own handwriting in the margin of a three-hundred-year-old record. A reply costs one approval stamp.

Dungeon patrol Once a week you walk the lower levels with one of them. Send them to handle it alone and you get more done; handle it together and you keep the person. You turn up lost ID cards and old belongings down there.

The trait tree Every stat gain earns trait points. Three branches, eighteen nodes, and you choose which way to climb. Once approved it is locked for the run, and nobody gets all of them. The administrator has a tree of their own.

Twenty-one species Gamble on corporate recruitment, or read the three resumes from the agency and pick. Resumes sometimes come in a grade above the truth. When someone leaves, they pass on a keepsake and the track they walked. The species index and the ghost stories survive the end of a run, and former staff sometimes apply again.

Every twelfth week, the Director arrives Hero parties come every week, but the end of each quarter brings the Director's surprise inspection. All staff. Rebuild the roster for that one.

The dungeon runs another day. Someone has to clean it.