What purpose do the dungeons have?

[immersiveSinner]

I got the first dungeon quest from a treasure hunter trader, and I found the entrance.  What I've learned is that any of the cool ancient blocks you can break are essentially useless, they don't enable you to craft anything new, you dont extract any info or recipes out of them, or cool ancient tools etc etc etc.  The only thing of use I found was the aged torch holders.  But as I was climbing down the shaft, I stopped being able to take them, and every single other block of course is also protected...   So If I can't loot anything, what's the point?  I see some crazy cool rooms down there. with that glowing water everywhere, and some huge contraptions, but you can't use any of it.  All you can do is aimlessly wander around and fight drifters.  What's the point?

[Owktree]

Do you open up any chests or boxes to see what was inside of them?  Or examine any of the machinery closely in case it said something interesting about the objects?

There is actually quite a bit of stuff you can pick up or interact with down there.  Whether or not a particular object would be of value to you might be a matter of opinion depending on what your interests are regarding different items. 

[Jack Mackey]

I think the intention is to be more about exploration and providing lore. There's a boss fight and some really cool stuff at the end (including a unique item you can't find elsewhere, although it's of questionable value). Making it through the whole thing also involves some minor puzzle solving and backtracking like a traditional dungeon crawler. Fair amount of combat, too.

If you're just looking for loot it's honestly not worth it. Much easier to get everything there some other way. But if you like dungeon crawling and are interested in the world it's a great place to work through.

[Owktree]

I concur with that.  

I greatly enjoyed the atmosphere of the place. I thought overall it was well worth the experience.

[immersiveSinner]

Of course I would want the lore.  One of the big failings of games like this is that everything FEELS procedural, literally because it is. So a curated experience like a dungeon would be amazing, but getting into the thing It just felt like it was built with the same type of procedural generation, except all the things were invincible.  So it seemed like I couldn't extract anything from the place to use in my own base and further along my current level of tech, which seems like a waste for a game based around somebody surviving in the wilderness and scavenging everything to make that process easier and become more powerful.

I had to look it up on the wiki and that's where I learned that the boiler in the engineering room was able to be used.  I saw no indication of that and I thought it was just as dead as everything else around because that's the story the game is telling you from the moment you break open the doors until you find all those machines.

I'm sure this is the kind of comment where somebody might say gO pLaY fOrTnItE yOu NeWb ThIs GaMe DoSeN't HoLd YoUr HaNd, but as much as I am enjoying my experience in this game, the tutorialization of things, understand what you can and can't do in terms of game mechanics... all that stuff...  Everything I've learned how to do in this game I've had to look up online because I couldn't figure it out in the game itself using it's own tools.

I also think it would be a really great if, once you're done the dungeon, you were able to start looting the place. It's a bit 4th wall breaking that you can't.