The next few hours featured Max slapping down dozens of basic residence en-grams along with hundreds of village road segments made of the same stars and mist.

At first, Max had been only practical in the layout, giving the area around Commander’s Residence a good village square and branching out in a grid pattern from there. He figured that the Commander’s Residence would naturally become the focal point for the settlement, so it made sense to give the area around it a wide open area for public events.

Then Wildflower had gotten in on the action. To her, the glowing blue lines of streets and lanes harkened back to the artwork she’d seen on her travels. Of mountain dwarves who painted hunting scenes on cave walls or halflings who bent field grasses into wonderful circle patterns.

And it was certainly true that the cliff top over the river would give an amazing view out over the village.

The result was several village districts shaped with far more creativity than just straight lines at nintey degrees.

Daisy District now lay on the east side, shaped like the petals of a flower surrounding whatever that round middle bit was called.

Just up from the river bank played host to The Fish Market, a tight inweave of streets formed like interlocking carp — or at least, so assured Wildflower. Max honestly had no idea. He barely knew the difference between salmon and tuna when it came in a can — let alone swimming free.

And finally, their last joint project of the night before Max really insisted that they needed to get on — a massive ass spider, taken from the likeness of Thorax, now sat on the far west.

Max called this piece of literal street art, ‘Grump Zone,’ and if ever they had any heavy industry or sanitation dedicated engrams, he knew exactly where it was all going.

Of course, for the foreseeable future, all these were only outlines. The number of deity engrams Max had access to was extremely limited. It really brung home just how important finding more dungeons would be to growing his civilization.

He finished off their work session by placing down the teashop engram opposite the Commander’s Residence on the other side of Swarm Central’s Village Square, the shipyard engram down by the river bank, and the watch tower engram, right at the very top of the cliff on the other side of the river.

Fording the river again and making their way all around the hill to the south—past the dungeon mouth—through the forest and up the hill to the cliff top, took far longer than he would have liked.

So much so, in fact, that he was half regretting not choosing the bridge deity engram when he’d been given the chance.

All those thoughts were left behind though when the deed was done. The now very much night time view from the top of the cliff looking down over his and Wildflower’s efforts was well worth it.