After a brief, but entirely unrelated sojourn in Belgium (Chocolates, Wine, Acres and Acres of First World War Cemeteries, Reasonable Weather), it's back to it. Life on what I've loosely termed 'Hemlock Beach' seems to be getting a bit busy. There's four of us beavering away on the Brick Racks now, with two of you folks having been sufficiently curious to work through a variety of clues scattered throughout this here blog, and the podcast, and stalked us sufficiently well to have set up Compounds in a spot which is almost impossible for a random new player to settle on by accident.
In the end, I threw up a modest guildhall, partly for the shared chat channel, but mostly, so that our new-found mini-village could all share out the score from The Great Collapsing Compound Caper.
As usual, it was one of those plans born out of idle curiosity, which all got out of hand very quickly. With the Salvage Techniques skill, the player gains the ability to, er, salvage materials whenever they tear something down. As well as your own stuff, this applies to any abandoned structures laying about the world. Under the Departed Persons Property Reclamation Act, this means anyone who has cancelled their account for longer than 14 days or so. Seems fair enough, and I'd gotten into the habit of checking the status of every building I pass on my wide ranging travels.
Then I stumble on this quite elaborate compound, with some fairly advanced looking equipment in it. Checking the status shows that these work items are fair game. I make a landmark on the spot for future reference, and move on my merry way. Several nights later, I mention this to our little gang of brigand-demoltionists and we pop over to pay it a visit, figuring that we might be able to salvage a few useful bits and pieces to make life a little easier in our own building projects; bricks, boards, that kind of thing, and anyway, I was curious to see how the skill worked in practice.
We set to, and started, er, reclaiming a few objects, each leaving a little pile of stuff for us to pick up. And then we reclaimed a few more. And a few more. I think the red mist must have taken over at this point, and it seems that our erstwhile benefactor must have been someone who had gotten pretty damned far into their own personal path to civilisation, as this stuff just kept coming... far more than we could all carry. The old magpie instinct kicked in, and eventually, it took me frantically building chests at a discrete drop-off location, while the others set to ferrying the spoils back and forth. Crazy, and things really did get out of hand when it transpired that the Huge Chests in the compound were also salvageable, and all contained a vast amount of resources of all manner of exotic types. Several hours of this later, and absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the haul, (7500 units of various stuff), we scarpered, that classic Gangster Heist Plot of the 'Far Too Successful Score' doing terrible things to my conscience...
Even now, I'm still in the process of ferrying the stash back to our new HQ. I don't feel too bad about it all mind you, and thanks to the DPPRA, we did technically have the law on our side. Waste not want not, etc. It did seem a bit of a shame to be plundering some other person's hard work so ruthlessly, but then again, by the look of the place, I suspect they'd long since 'won' their own personal Tale In The Desert long, long ago and had moved on, and at any rate, everything, (including their stuff and my own), will be vanished in a month or so, when Telling IV begins.
Much of the haul is things that are well beyond my ability to make for myself, and so 'off limits' at present, but it'll certainly cut a few corners later on, when I do unlock the secrets of that particular resource myself!
I'm quite surprised so little of the buildings and equipment in the game is up for grabs in this way. I guess few people ever leave the game, and now, I know why!