In Part I of this series, we presented the microscopic approach to Souslin-tree constructions, and argued that all known ⋄-based constructions of Souslin trees with various additional properties may be rendered as applications of our approach. In this paper, we show that constructions following the same approach may be carried out even in the absence of ⋄. In particular, we obtain a new weak sufficient condition for the existence of Souslin trees at the level of a strongly inaccessible cardinal. We (...) also present a new construction of a Souslin tree with an ascent path, thereby increasing the consistency strength of such a tree's nonexistence from a Mahlo cardinal to a weakly compact cardinal. Section 2 of this paper is targeted at newcomers with minimal background. It offers a comprehensive exposition of the subject of constructing Souslin trees and the challenges involved. (shrink)

An ℵ1-Souslin tree is a complicated combinatorial object whose existence cannot be decided on the grounds of ZFC alone. But fifteen years after Tennenbaum and Jech independently devised notions of forcing for introducing such a tree, Shelah proved that already the simplest forcing notion—Cohen forcing—adds an ℵ1-Souslin tree. In this article, we identify a rather large class of notions of forcing that, assuming a GCH-type hypothesis, add a λ+-Souslin tree. This class includes Prikry, Magidor, and Radin forcing.