IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.8

To their right was my Spider Lair, the upgrade building for spiders. Although I had resisted the urge to check ant upgrades, I actually had a reason to check for spiders'; namely, how damn useful spider web could be, and what the villagers could use it for. I knew from experience that weaving armor from spider silk was a time-consuming process, so the earlier they started with it, the better equipped these people would be once the war started again. I thought maybe I'd even be able to help out by making the equipment and handing it over to the soldiers myself. For two impurities, some mana and one upkeep per day, it was, I had decided, a good tradeoff.

Well, it would have been, if the upgrades in question had included spider webs. Which they had not. Instead, buying this building had given me a set of expensive combat-oriented upgrades that weren’t all that useful for me currently. I hadn't selected any of them so far, either. Buying this room had unlocked the spider evolution room, the Spider Hatchery, so it hadn't been a total waste, and it had also decreased the upkeep cost for “all normal spiders” by one. That last bit wasn’t all that good considering I had effectively free spiders, but if the same logic applied to higher cost minions, then buying their upgrade rooms could effectively grant me an infinite number of them.

The room itself was about what one would expect of a spider-themed grotto. The walls and ceiling had lost their bug holes and instead turned into smooth stone, which was covered by a thin sheet of webs. The floor was remarkably cleaner and the party seemed to enjoy not having their feet sink into inches of sand and bugs as they stepped on its cobblestones. The main points of attraction of the room were web cocoons that hung from the ceiling or lay against the sides of the room. These were spider webs, certainly, but the silk that made up these cocoons wasn’t the insanely tough dragline silk I’d made costumes and nets from. It was instead tubuliform silk, the stiff and weak web female spiders made egg sacks from. Which really made no sense, because these weren’t egg pods. The webs on the wall weren’t in a usable form, being a mix of several web types both fragile and strong.

"Spider Hatchery... no," Gwen corrected herself. "No egg pods. A Spider Lair, then. Expect upgraded versions of various spider species."