What would you WANT to find in ruins?

[-Glue-]

On 7/10/2025 at 2:52 PM, MagpieOAO said:

I'd explore every one I saw if there were lore books scattered throughout, even just a few pages. I've yet to find a bookshelf with a book, if that's where they spawn. 
Perhaps tapestries like the artist sells in tattered condition, telling a bit of story.
Likewise other artisan items perhaps, it's a nice reward in itself sometimes collecting the aged stones. 

I mean. Lore does spawn in ruins. I have found books, scrolls, tapestries, etc. I have also found artisan storage vessels of varying designs, and piles of gears. So there is a lot of stuff you can find, its just a bit rare.

I know you can get a cool sheep skull mask, and I REALLY want to find it. More rare cosmetics like that would be cool. Not sure how many there are, but I have seen a few. I think some more collectable items to put on display and decorate your home with would also be nice. There are a few cool unique treasures in game, but they seem to be exclusive to story locations.

Other than that, I just want to see more ruin variety. Especially in the translocator ruins. Its lame how they are all the same small room. Would be cool if junk items spawned around ruins in caves too, making the area feel more lived in.

[JUNEsummers]

Bony Soil Is actually pretty awesome when it comes to panning
candles, gems, lore books, and early game flax fibers
even if its the little things like cloths and nick knacks then I'm all in

[MagpieOAO]

10 hours ago, JUNEsummers said:

Bony Soil Is actually pretty awesome when it comes to panning
candles, gems, lore books, and early game flax fibers
even if its the little things like cloths and nick knacks then I'm all in

Huh, yaknow that's a great point. Every ruin at least has some bony soil which DOES contain useful things. So every ruin does have good stuff, you just have to pan for it.

[ifoz]

On 7/13/2025 at 4:24 AM, LadyWYT said:

I would just make the really valuable tools and items very rare, and near the breaking point when you find them. An iron blade might be a super lucky find when you're still in the stone age, but if it breaks after 50 uses or so? Well, then it's good for a temporal storm or a couple of caving expeditions, maybe, but it's not something you'll be able to actually rely on. Same with armor--it might hold up for a fight or two, but it's not something you'll be able to rely on until you have the materials needed for repairs. In the case of armor, if the player found a good piece, it could save them some materials later as it's cheaper to repair than craft new, but that's a fairly big if.

I always though it'd be nice if instead of stone tools, ruins had "rusted tools".
They'd be just as bad as stone but make more lore sense.

In a world with an 1800's steel furnace and all Jonas' advancements, why would the underground survivors be using stone tools and not iron/steel? 

[MagpieOAO]

9 hours ago, ifoz said:

I always though it'd be nice if instead of stone tools, ruins had "rusted tools".
They'd be just as bad as stone but make more lore sense.

In a world with an 1800's steel furnace and all Jonas' advancements, why would the underground survivors be using stone tools and not iron/steel? 

I would also hope it would be possible to fix/restore tools and weapons we find. 

We can make sulfuric acid which is a component in removing rust to restore machines back to function IRL, let alone simple tools.
I have a couple of scythes that are fairly ancient but you won't find better equipment for hacking down green brush and weeds. They'd been used as decoration or stored away for decades and after a bit of sharpening they work well enough for that. 

 

[LadyWYT]

13 hours ago, ifoz said:

I always though it'd be nice if instead of stone tools, ruins had "rusted tools".
They'd be just as bad as stone but make more lore sense.

Or they could work like copper tools or the scrap weapons. A little better than stone, but not super good either.

 

4 hours ago, MagpieOAO said:

We can make sulfuric acid which is a component in removing rust to restore machines back to function IRL, let alone simple tools.

Which, I like this idea and it goes great with what @ifoz suggested. Sulfuric acid isn't hard to make in the game, as sulfur and saltpeter are fairly easy to acquire in quantity. However, since they're both minerals, you'll need to do some mining and caving, which is fairly risky, or otherwise spend several gears at the appropriate traders, which is expensive. Of course, you'd also need to find a tool or weapon in good enough condition to restore as well. 

In any case, it seems like a fair trade. On the off-chance one gets lucky and finds a tool/weapon in decent condition, then they can put in a bit of extra work to restore it to a better condition.

[Bruno Willis]

For me, the ruins themselves are the reward. 1: A good looking ruin makes an area so much more interesting. 2: in real life ruins usually exist in places where people wanted to live, so they're usually a sign of a good location. I would like to see more ruins which signal or make a useful location:

• Ruined tunnel passes which generate cutting right through mountain ranges
• Ruined wind-mills which are good and tall and ready to be repaired
• Ruined towers which only generate on tall points like mountains and cliffs
• Ruined docks and dockyards which only generate on the coast (of course)
• Overgrown open cast mines/quarries
• Crumbling bridges over rivers

It seems like the current ruins don't take much of the local terrain into consideration, so these sorts of ruins might require a different level of generation rules, but I think they would add a lot to the world. They would be opportunities in themselves, infrastructure, rather than requiring loot to be useful. 

[ifoz]

36 minutes ago, Bruno Willis said:

Ruined wind-mills which are good and tall and ready to be repaired

I think there already is a ruined windmill in the game, but you'd really only be able to tell that from the file names. It's been a long time since the calamity, so any wooden structures aboveground are just stone foundations by now.

I'd love more cave stuff though, really make caves fit the lore of humanity having to evacuate the surface and live underground. Not really ruins, but just things like piles of old crates or ruined torch holders on cave walls. Maybe make it so these things are more likely to occur in caves that already have ruins, so some would still be untouched.
That way if you found a cave with these signs of old life, you knew it was probably worth looking into further.

[Bruno Willis]

21 minutes ago, ifoz said:

I'd love more cave stuff though, really make caves fit the lore of humanity having to evacuate the surface and live underground.

I'm immediately imagining underground garden chambers with broken skylights - 1 block wide shafts - that a player could fall down, onto rows of high fertility soil, gravel and rot. Honestly, that might already exist - I feel like I've seen maybe a 10th of the ruins in the game so far. 

I'd also love to see large fragments of sewer systems used for underground shelter, like the London underground was during the blitz. 

[Broccoli Clock]

ngl, I had one of the biggest downers I've had playing this game when I used glue to "fix" an item and it remained broken but could now be picked up. Maybe it's just me but I expect a repair to actually repair it.

Don't get me wrong, I love the ambience of ruins, especially the underground ones, I also really like the environmental story telling, and I can totally see why a few broken and dusty bookshelves would look cottage core when placed in your base, but I've yet to find an aged bookshelf that isn't f**ked. They may be out there, I've never seen them.

[ifoz]

15 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

I'm immediately imagining underground garden chambers with broken skylights - 1 block wide shafts - that a player could fall down, onto rows of high fertility soil, gravel and rot. Honestly, that might already exist - I feel like I've seen maybe a 10th of the ruins in the game so far. 

There is one story location sort of like this, I'd love to see more overgrown normal underground ruins though.

 

 

14 hours ago, Broccoli Clock said:

but I've yet to find an aged bookshelf that isn't f**ked. They may be out there, I've never seen them.

They are not out there, unless you like mould and cobwebs. 
There are some great decorative pristine bookshelves filled with clutter, but they're unobtainable in survival.

In that same vein, some clutter furniture can be texture flipped in creative mode. This allows you to change it to a nice, normal wood type instead of being mouldy.
Again impossible in survival, very sadly.

Edited September 13, 2025 by ifoz

[Zane Mordien]

On 9/13/2025 at 12:28 AM, ifoz said:

It's been a long time since the calamity, so any wooden structures aboveground are just stone foundations by now.

I know this is the logic behind the current vanilla ruins, but I still don't understand it, because there are humans around. Surely they tried to found new settlements and they failed. You should be able to find modern ruins as well, maybe not just as many since there are fewer humans now than before the calamity. If the traders can be EVERYWHERE and make some sort of "lore" sense, then there can be ruins of recent human settlements. 

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Zane Mordien said:

I know this is the logic behind the current vanilla ruins, but I still don't understand it, because there are humans around. Surely they tried to found new settlements and they failed. You should be able to find modern ruins as well, maybe not just as many since there are fewer humans now than before the calamity. If the traders can be EVERYWHERE and make some sort of "lore" sense, then there can be ruins of recent human settlements. 

Well...thing is, human survivors did try to found new settlements...or at least, expand the ones that they had. The short answer is they got quickly overwhelmed by monsters. The long answer: 

Spoiler

If you talk to the Nadiya villagers, they mention trying to expand their village, and getting overrun as soon as they tried to build outside the walls. Additionally, Tobias actively discouraged them from trying to expand their settlement, as it would almost certainly lead to infighting and ultimately weaken the village. There may be other reasons as well, in that it might attract unwanted attention from less friendly settlements, or bring about the return of ways best left forgotten to history.

In regards to modern ruins...technically, there are, but the reason you don't really see them is human survivors are just that few and far between. Likewise, it seems to have been quite a while since the original calamity, so it's not out of the question that some of the ruins you find while exploring are actually post-calamity ruins...it's just been that long between the calamity and the player's return to the world. I'd also wager that most surviving settlements likely figured out early on that expansion is very dangerous, and thus opt to stick in one well-fortified area rather than try to spread out to new lands. 

[ifoz]

3 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

I know this is the logic behind the current vanilla ruins, but I still don't understand it, because there are humans around. Surely they tried to found new settlements and they failed. You should be able to find modern ruins as well, maybe not just as many since there are fewer humans now than before the calamity. If the traders can be EVERYWHERE and make some sort of "lore" sense, then there can be ruins of recent human settlements. 

I don't know how many ruined settlements there would be, but I would enjoy rarely seeing ruined trader outposts and structures. That could be fun, I think.

[Tom Cantine]

In a word, knowledge.

Yes, the lore books and scrolls and tapestries and things that tell us about the past, but I think there could also be things like recipes or schematics, knowledge of HOW to do something that previously you couldn't do. We already have a glider schematic in the game; it seems to me that there could be other lost technologies from before the catastrophe to recover.

Spoiler

I excavated one ruin that told a story of people desperately trying to survive, hiding in a chamber in the rock from whatever was happening outside. An inner bedroom had been hastily walled up with cobble that didn't really match the ashlar blocks of the rest of the walls, and there was bony soil where people had apparently died. There was no food in any of the vessels or chest, but there were SEEDS. These people had hope that one day they'd reemerge and start over, and so they kept seeds until the very end. It was a very poignant thing to find.

But the point of that is that they were trying to preserve what they could to rebuild society some day. And so I think it makes a lot of sense for them to have kept books, scrolls, patterns -- information to help the survivors recover knowhow that would otherwise be lost.