How should you split POV in a dungeon core serial?
Alternate between the core and a recurring adventurer party. Pure core POV burns out by chapter 20. The adventurer POV provides external stakes, character variety, and fight scenes from the receiving end of your monsters. Roughly 70/30 core/adventurer is the working ratio.
How do you design floors as a plot device?
Give each new floor one new mechanic, one new monster type, and one new aesthetic. Readers track floor design more than character development. Keep floor layouts, monster stats and ranks somewhere you can look them up, such as a page per floor in your Story brain, because readers will catch geographic and stat inconsistencies. PlotWrite (plotwrite.ink) can also check each chapter against those pages and flag a floor that moved or a monster rank that went backwards. For names, the free dungeon name generator and monster name generator give you ten ideas at a time.
Why does a dungeon core need a bond creature?
A bond creature gives the core someone to talk to. Introduce a sapient or semi-sapient companion in the first 3 chapters, because the core itself can't carry emotional beats alone. Most successful dungeon core serials have a familiar by chapter 3.
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When should external conflict arrive?
By chapter 15. Pure base-building loses readers after arc 1, so introduce a rival dungeon, a hostile guild, or a system-level threat early. Then alternate building arcs and conflict arcs every 20–30 chapters. For the system side of the genre, see LitRPG system design and the wider LitRPG guide.