(HUGE UPDATE) Broken World, a Dying Earth/Horror Total Conversion (ASCII GRAPHICS)
No one remembers how the Great War started, but everyone knows how it ended. The powers of the time spent generations for their mad conquests, never giving us a reason, never telling us why, until hardly anything was left. Just the scraps. And their monsters. It all slowly fell apart, and the remnants drew new borders and hardly remembered anything about the old ones. We grew more careful with what we had, and we built new cities on top of the ruins. And for a time we almost thought it was going to get better.
But it didn’t.
We’d torn the veil too wide. Showed too much weakness. We had our man-made monsters, but the darkness had its own, and we had forgotten that. Maybe our greatest mistake. It’s not safe to go out at night anymore. Not safe to be alone in the woods. Not safe to look too long at your reflection, in the really bad places.
But we live as we have, mostly. We still wake up, do our jobs, eat, sleep, again and again. We still love and cry and hate, get drunk, sing, listen to the radio. We still wage our little wars. But slower. More carefully. We don’t look behind us when we get that feeling crawling up our spine that something is terribly wrong here, because we’ve already started running, or shut the door and barred the windows. We know it’s wrong. We made it that way. And we can’t put the pieces back together.
Our world is broken.
I think we’re broken too.
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What is Broken World
Broken World is a total conversion mod that takes place in a world much like our own, but after an impossibly long and impossibly terrible conflict which shattered the boundaries between the mundane and the supernatural, leaving the survivors with a medley of high and low technology, and more besides, to make the best of their diminished existence. This is no fantasy world with elves and dragons and such, however. It’s a world of the creeping, hidden unnatural, of ghosts, psychics, mad science, things in the woods which call out in your voice, stories from folklore that are all too real, creatures not of this world walking out from behind a wall that isn’t there. A haunted, crippled world, dotted by islands of desperate normalcy which themselves have specters lurking in the shadowed alleys and old sewers. Humans might not be the real monsters here, but they’re close. War is a cruel, terrifying affair of frantic gunfire and desperate skirmishing. There’s no honor or glory to be found, just young souls sent off to die. Put on the radio and let the music wash away your anxieties, coupled with potent doses of something special to blot the memory of what you saw last night. Or you can delve deeper. Brave the madness to try and make the world a better place, or just grab what you can before it all comes crashing down. Be a private investigator, a mercenary, a politician, a man-made monster, a psychic anomaly, and more, in a broken world.
Would you like to help support the creation, maintenance, and improvement of this mod and others like it? Consider donating to my patreon: https://www.patreon.com/themodsmith
Want to know more about the lore of this world and how to play it? Try this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K1p7RPTBQxlIQS0h1LN-QrvCxeXxfNBUrArtgpTTfKQ/edit?usp=sharing
Want to download this mod, but you don’t have a steam account? Use DFFD, classic DF is free as well: https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=17065
Have an issue? Report it in the bug report channel of the Discord: https://discord.gg/hDY8KT7pXE
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SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS:
1. This mod is for Dwarf Fortress CLASSIC, make sure you have loaded in ASCII glyphs when activating this mod.
2. This mod is an entirely self-contained experience. When selecting it for world generation, DEACTIVATE all other raw files, including the vanilla ones, from the selection. Broken World comes with copies of those raws within it, meaning it needs nothing else from any other folder to function. All you need is the mod to be active. Feel free to experiment if you really want, but if it causes problems I can’t help.
3.Within the folder SteamsteamappscommonDwarf Fortressmods3228063649 there is a file called ‘colors’. If you’d rather not deal with the default ASCII colors, replace the colors.txt in the SteamsteamappscommonDwarf Fortressdatainit folder with this one.
4. Within the folder SteamsteamappscommonDwarf Fortressmods3228063649 there is a file called ‘worldgen data’. Follow the instructions there and take the copied material to the SteamsteamappscommonDwarf Fortressprefs folder. Copy the worldgen data into this file. You do NOT need to override any pre-existing worldgen templates. When you load the Broken World mod, only choose from these world presets in Advanced World Generation unless you really know what you are doing. If something goes wrong and you haven’t used these to gen your world, I won’t be able to help you, because that can cause a lot of problems I can’t fix. You don’t need to delete these if you want to generate a vanilla world, just don’t choose them when generating a non-Broken World world. These parameters may change, requiring an update, but I will announce in the changelog if that is done. If you do not have a prefs folder, got to advanced world gen and SAVE the parameters. That should generate one.
However, some things can be changed safely:
-site amount
-civ amount
-end year
-embark points
Be aware, the above are typically weighted towards the creation of a heavily populated world with lots of factions, settlements, and a long history. Adjust to taste if that’s too much for your computer.
