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.

Then you stop doing it by hand

Hold right-click with a Garbage Vacuum and the piles in front of you leave the ground and fly into the nozzle, about five a second. It takes whole blocks, not what is inside them, so you still sort them afterwards.

Take a mound from the bottom and the rest comes down on top of you. That is the fast way to clear one.

It runs on power, and a bigger block costs more. Each one is rated for the waste it was built for: copper handles household rubbish, iron adds the demolition yard, diamond the tailings out past it, and only a netherite one will touch the Nether. Point one at something out of its league and it tells you what the pile is instead of doing nothing.

It charges on a Charging Station with a generator touching it. Set the vacuum down on the station, pick it back up when it is full. There is no screen and nothing can reach in and take it off the dock.

And then you stop doing it at all

Place a Hauler Depot, put a Scrap Hauler in its slot, press Deploy. It walks out to the nearest pile, takes the block off the top of it, brings it back and drops it in the hold. Then it goes again.

It works a square of chunks around the Depot and you set how many from the Depot's screen. The smallest is the three by three the Depot sits in the middle of.

It runs on sun out in the field and charges off the Depot while it is docked. Nothing in this world can destroy it, which means the way it goes wrong is getting stuck rather than dying, and Recall brings it back from wherever that is.

The hold is twenty-seven slots, and it pushes what is in it into any bins and barrels touching the Depot. Park a Depot against your sorting wall and the wall fills itself.

There is only ever one of it. It is the item sitting in the Depot or the machine out in the field, never both at once.

The recipes went in the bin too

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.

Sorting is the job

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.

Things are standing in the dump

Somebody built here before it was a dump, and some of it is still up. None of it is decoration: every one of these is the only source of something.

Down the manhole

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.

Turtles and frogs live down there, in rooms of sand and mud off the corridors.

The aquarium closed a long time ago

Out in the demolition yard there is a public aquarium with the water let out of it. Seven rooms: a forecourt, a lobby, a gallery of tank bays, a centrepiece tank, a guardian tank, a filtration hall half under water, and the back of house. Leachate has pooled in the floors and the glass is cracked where the tanks leaked.

It is the only prismarine, coral, sponge and sea lantern in the world, and there is a heart of the sea still on its stand in the middle.

One tank still holds water, and there is a guardian in it. That is not decoration. Every prismarine block is made from what a guardian drops, so the tank is the only reason the whole family is renewable rather than a fixed stock. Bucket it dry and you have ended that.

Put a dead coral in a Hydroponics Bay and it comes back alive. The bay does not use up what you put in it, so one of each colour is all you will ever need.

The chimneys over the yard

Brick chimneys stand over the demolition yard, thirty to forty-eight blocks of them, and some are still smoking. There is no door and no ladder, because a chimney is a flue and not a room.

A husk spawner sits at the foot of each one and its range reaches out past the brick, so passing a chimney is an encounter rather than a view.

Out past the yard

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 cooling tower

There is a cooling tower out here, with its shell torn open at the top. It stands on legs over an open basin and narrows to a throat about three quarters of the way up, the way one does when it is built out of straight rods.

You can walk in under the legs. There is a spawner down in the basin.

A few thousand tires

Somebody tipped tires across the sprawl in circular heaps, and some of them are burning. A tire fire does not go out in rain and does not go out with time. It does not eat the tires either, and there is nothing on bare dump ground for it to spread to. Water still puts it out.

Break a tire by hand and you get the tire. Break it with a Scrap Knife and you get the rubber. Carry it home and take it apart at the workbench instead and you get more, plus the steel belts out of the middle.

Nothing regrows a tire. A dump you strip is a dump you leave.

The Nether is solid

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.

Ground you can stand on

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.

Machines

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.

Things worth finding

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.