Recompile

There is no ore, no trees and no water. The ground is coarse dirt, and everything standing on it was thrown away by somebody who lived here first.

You start by pulling things out of the mounds with your hands. A block gives up one item at a time and crumbles after a few pulls.

Buried in the mounds are whole objects. A prybar opens one and you get a washing machine, a printer, a filing cabinet.

Take it apart at the Teardown Workbench and you get two things: what it was made of, and an idea of how it was made. Four ideas about a mattress and you can make a mattress again.

The materials are the easy part. What you are actually recovering is how the thing was made.

A bin takes the first thing you put in it and nothing else after that. Stand a few side by side and everything you sort goes where it belongs.

Later you throw the garbage at a machine and walk away, and it is sorted when you come back.

Grass does not grow here. A Grass Spreader puts it down, and it goes back to coarse dirt at the edges unless something holds the line: plants, then wet farmland, then trees.

Trees hold it permanently. Getting a tree means a Tree Nursery, because no sapling can be found anywhere in this world.

Once there is grass, leave bait on it and walk away. Nothing comes while you are standing there. What turns up depends on the bait and on what is growing around it.

A square of pale concrete with a rusted plate in it. The plate comes up with a prybar, and there is a ladder under it.

Brick corridors with a channel of leachate down the middle. Mushrooms in the damp, silt in the corners, mossy brick at the waterline. The rooms are lit. The corridors are not.

Every channel runs downhill to the same room. Leachate deep enough to go over your head, no lamp, and a drowned spawner on the walkway. There is an echo shard in the silt at the bottom of every sewer, and nowhere else in the world.

Of course turtles live down there.

Keep going past the demolition yard and the ground turns sallow. Somebody buried the things nobody would take: mill tailings in flat-topped heaps, steel drums with the radiation symbol stencilled on them, and the household objects that were quietly radioactive the whole time.

A radium dial clock. A smoke detector. Thoriated welding rods. Uranium glass.

Nothing out here grows back. You strip a dump and move to the next one.

The overworld is a dump you clear. The Nether is a dump you mine.

Every column is full, floor to ceiling. No caverns, no lava sea, nothing to fall off. Fortresses and bastions are down there, buried in it, and the only way in is obsidian you made yourself out of the slag your own furnace rakes off.

The machines are multiblocks. You place a core, stack parts on it, and it forms where it stands.

A trommel sorts. A separator divides. A pulverizer grinds. A kiln presses powder back into something solid. A cupola melts scrap down into iron, and rakes off slag while it does.

You can pull a Van Gogh out of a bin bag. Six real paintings are down there, and the one you find is the one that goes on your wall. A puzzle cube in nine pieces, never together. A toy car, a gold coin, a wrapped present, an avocado.

Amber turns up with something caught in it. Read four of the same creature and you have its spawn egg.

Worth knowing

• Alpha, and still being worked on. The numbers are not balanced yet.
• Start a new world when you update. New regions do not appear in one you have already been to.
• The End is closed. The Nether is not.
• Works with AE2, Powah, Simple Magnets and Ender IO. Each of them needs something this world does not hand out, and each has a way in here. None of them are required.
• JEI and Jade plugins, and an in-game guidebook with 3D multiblock pages.

Links

• Source and issues: https://github.com/Flatts3000/recompile
• The modpack built on it: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/trashlands

Art sourced from elsewhere is public domain or CC0. Mod content is MIT.