Carl's build develops from improvised unarmed fighting into a combination of exceptional skill training, demolition, information gathering, and command. His first two floors determine the choices he receives when race and class selection opens: he has learned to fight with his fists and bare feet, built explosives from scavenged materials, and attracted an enormous audience. As a Primal Compensated Anarchist, he accepts an immediate loss of base statistics for the chance to train skills beyond their ordinary ceiling. His later Agent Provocateur specialty strengthens bomb making, while his role in Princess Donut's army requires him to apply the same preparation and attention to rules across an entire battlefield. These developments accumulate; no later choice replaces his early close-combat skills.
Skills earned before class selection
Carl enters the dungeon poorly equipped, and his first fights make repeated physical attacks a matter of survival. After reaching crawler level two, he sees that Pugilism has reached level four. The skill increases damage from bare-knuckle blows, while the level-up grants stat points he cannot yet allocate. His crawler level and his trained abilities therefore advance on different schedules. By level three, fighting without shoes has also produced Foot Soldier, which improves kicks, and Smush, which enhances attacks made by pressing a bare foot onto an enemy. The system's description of Smush makes its fixation on Carl's feet apparent to him, but the skill still changes what he can do in a fight.
His early demolition ability arises from a specific problem rather than a class description. The Goblin Chieftain is waiting in a room that will lock when the fight begins. Carl loads a cart with explosive barrels, leaves one detonator visible, and hides others so that removing the obvious one will not save the target. The blast defeats the boss, but it also reaches noncombatants in the goblin settlement. Afterward, his explosives-related skills rise, including Explosives Handling and an improvised-device skill; the system also records the civilian deaths in its achievements. The episode gives Carl both a qualification that will matter at class selection and direct evidence that a technically successful device can have an unacceptable reach.
Even the new crafting options have a physical requirement. When Carl tries to inspect an explosives workshop menu after the goblin fight, the interface tells him he must stand at a Sapper's Table. Knowledge and skill do not by themselves supply a workbench, materials, or a place to test a device. This distinction remains important as his arsenal grows: an explosive he can imagine is not necessarily one he can safely construct or deploy.
Other early rewards broaden his defensive role without turning him into a conventional armored fighter. Enchanted boxers grant Protective Shell, a stationary barrier against physical intrusion on a long cooldown. Carl uses it during the encounter with the level-93 Rage Elemental to create a brief opening for the Meadow Lark survivors. The elemental can still manipulate gravity, so the shell does not make a stronger monster harmless. It lets Carl protect people and manage distance while the group reaches safety. His developing build is already defined by timing and terrain as much as raw damage.
The Primal commitment
At Third Floor selection, Carl examines races that would immediately reinforce what he has been doing. Hobgoblin rewards explosives work, while Sasquatch is available because of his Smush training. He instead selects Primal, whose description preserves his appearance but subtracts one point from every base statistic. The attraction is the ability to train higher-tier skills as far as level twenty. The loss is immediate and broad; the advantage depends on surviving and continuing to practice long after the selection room. Primal gives Carl a ceiling, not a level-twenty skill on the day he chooses it.
The race choice matters because his existing skills are already concentrated in a few usable activities. He has relied on punches and foot attacks through repeated encounters, while explosives offer a way to engage enemies he cannot safely approach. Concentration may eventually make Primal valuable, but it also creates a tension: time spent learning more devices, spells, and utility skills is time he is not spending on a single exceptional skill. Mordecai's warning that very few Primal crawlers reach the extraordinary range makes the gamble more precise than a simple promise of future power.
His class decision formalizes the same mixture. Carl's leading choices include Bomb Squad Tech, Prizefighter, and Compensated Anarchist. The last requires both sufficient Explosives Handling and a vast number of views. Its availability records two kinds of prior success: dangerous technical practice and the audience generated by Carl and Donut's survival. Compensated Anarchist improves Unarmed Combat, Bomb Surgeon, and Trap Engineer, accelerates the development of bomb and trap skills, and adds abilities useful for stealth, navigation, and misdirection. Penalties to bladed-weapon damage and damaging-spell costs make an ordinary sword or offensive casting less attractive as a fallback. The class supports several methods of solving an encounter, but each still needs separate training and equipment.
This is also where audience attention becomes part of Carl's mechanical progression. Views do not strike an enemy or assemble a bomb. In this case, however, they help unlock the class that will affect his later skill growth. Carl's public visibility has a practical value alongside its danger: the same broadcasts that expose his plans and personality to outsiders can open options unavailable to an unseen crawler. He cannot control every way the audience or producers use that visibility, so it is a qualification rather than a dependable combat resource.
Inherited methods and deliberate preparation
On the Fourth Floor, Carl chooses an apparently poor game-show prize and receives The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook. The book contains technical notes and observations left by earlier crawlers. It does not grant him their abilities. It gives him a way to compare their experiments with his current problems, including the behavior of portals and the requirements of particular devices. Carl also has to keep its true contents concealed. The resource changes his build by expanding the information available to its user, while making secrecy part of the cost of using that information.
The Iron Tangle makes this distinction visible. Carl establishes a work area with both engineering and sapper equipment and uses recipes, supplies, and floor-specific observations to prepare devices. After a powerful bundle seals a route, he realizes that assembly at the Sapper's Table would have shown and allowed adjustment of its total yield. He plans to make bundles of different sizes. That is a practical refinement: the strongest explosion is not always the most useful one, particularly when a charge must close a passage without destroying the people or route it is meant to protect. His earlier goblin blast has already demonstrated why the radius of an effect belongs in the plan.
The Cookbook also leads him to treat existing dungeon systems as things to study rather than fixed obstacles. On the Fifth Floor, the Gate of the Feral Gods presents an unusually dangerous version of that problem. Its paired watches designate destinations through their settings, and the winding box opens the resulting portal. Carl and Katia examine notes and coordinates before using it, because opening a gate can move hostile creatures and destructive forces along with the people they hope to save. Carl's technical advantage here is not a new attack statistic. It is the capacity to combine inherited warnings, teammates' observations, and the device's rules under pressure. The consequences of a mistaken destination can be much larger than those of a failed punch.
Carl's Doomsday Scenario is the opposite of a routine addition to his inventory. Formed at the end of the Third Floor from an overloaded soul crystal and its protective case, it is an unstable explosive described as capable of devastating a city and its surroundings. Possessing it does not give him a safe, repeatable attack. It is too destructive for ordinary encounters and remains an extreme contingency. Its existence illustrates how the apparent strength of a build can be misleading when an item cannot be used without placing allies and bystanders in its radius.
Agent Provocateur and controlled demolition
The next permanent class decision arrives on descent to the Sixth Floor. Carl must select a specialty for Compensated Anarchist within a time limit. Revolutionary would favor direct melee development, while Guerilla emphasizes traps and other field tactics. Carl chooses Agent Provocateur. The specialty adds Intelligence with future level-ups, improves Explosives Handling and the Sapper's Table, speeds explosives training, and provides access to an advanced bomb-making workspace. He wants that workspace in part because recipes already in the Cookbook require it. The decision strengthens a branch he has used since the first floor without removing his trained fist and foot attacks.
The new Advanced Bomber's Studio gives Carl a way to inspect an existing design and run virtual detonations. He can vary a bomb's placement, delivery, and expected yield without setting off a real charge. The studio can also model devices he has not yet built, subject to the materials and interface available to him. Its predictions are not guarantees: environmental details can make a real explosion behave differently. Carl's work still depends on the Sapper's Table and physical supplies. The studio improves planning and reduces blind experimentation; it does not make demolition safe by definition.
Carl places the Doomsday Scenario on the studio bench to copy its design into the simulator, then returns the real object to his inventory. The moment is a revealing limit on his growing expertise. He can examine and model the bomb, but he cannot stabilize it, and handling it still frightens him. His specialty has expanded the number of choices he can evaluate before acting, not erased the consequences of choosing the wrong one.
From individual fighting to collective action
Later floors repeatedly place Carl in situations where his own attacks are only one component of survival. On the Eighth Floor, deck and totem rules temporarily change the shape of combat; other crawlers command summoned fighters while Carl continues to use traps, movement, and information to reach objectives. In the operation against Astrid, for example, he prepares teleport beacons and directional charges in access areas while Katia positions her own deck. The plan depends on their abilities working together and on knowledge of the building's concealed passages. No single class benefit supplies the whole result.
By the end of that floor, Donut speaks as a warlord of the Princess Posse, and both of them face the Ninth Floor's larger contest. Carl's build now has a command dimension created by allies and responsibilities rather than a character-screen upgrade. During the war, he directs a bombing run while Donut issues instructions to troops in the trenches. Their plan uses fog, protective magic, timing, ear protection, and a coordinated advance. Carl's explosives remain part of the attack, but they work because other people can prepare for them and act when the opening appears. A blast whose position or timing is wrong would endanger his own soldiers.
The Ninth Floor also shows that personal skill growth has not stopped. A reward potion raises Carl's Pugilism to level fifteen, bringing his oldest fighting skill to the threshold Mordecai identified as exceptionally difficult to exceed. Yet the war's decisive problems cannot be solved by a stronger fist alone. Carl must consider a temporary ban on offensive magic, the placement of artillery and defenses, battalion strength, allied NPCs, and rival warlords. The shift in scale changes how his abilities are used: he can still fight at close range, but he increasingly chooses where specialists and soldiers can apply their own strengths.
The final victory in Faction Wars depends on that collective structure. The Princess Posse's campaign includes former crawlers, present crawlers, and the people of Larracos. When Zerzura transfers Larracos and Shanty Town toward the Twelfth Floor, Juice Box and Ferdinand leave the realm and forfeit their warlord positions; the system declares the Princess Posse the winner. This outcome is not a higher level of Explosives Handling or a newly selected class. It is the result of Carl and Donut coordinating people, exploiting the contest's rules, and preserving an allied population while ending the war. Carl's build remains rooted in practiced physical and technical skills, but its reach has grown to depend on trust, delegation, and accurate knowledge of what the dungeon will recognize as a victory.