Tier 0 Resources: Deep Lore

Tier 0 resources are the raw materials of the Sprawl—what's left of the old world, waiting to become something new. Each carries echoes of what it used to be.

E-Waste

What It Is

Electronic waste. Dead screens, broken devices, circuit boards that no longer think. The corpses of the pre-Cascade technological abundance.

Where It Comes From

E-Waste accumulates everywhere:

  • Abandoned homes with devices that stopped mid-function
  • Office buildings where workstations went dark together
  • Warehouses of inventory that never shipped
  • The everyday detritus of a civilization that threw things away

What It Contains

  • Precious metals (gold, silver, copper)
  • Rare earth elements
  • Recoverable components
  • Data ghosts (sometimes)
"People used to throw this away. Can you imagine? A device stops working and you just... discard it. ORACLE made sure nothing was wasted, but before ORACLE, before the Cascade, people acted like resources were infinite."
"Sometimes I find E-Waste with data still on it. Photos of families. Messages never sent. Half-finished documents. I try not to read them. The past is heavy enough without knowing what they were doing when everything stopped."
Gameplay Significance: E-Waste is the universal salvage material. It converts to almost anything, albeit inefficiently. The perfect starting resource for players still learning what they need.

Circuit Scrap

What It Is

Salvaged circuit boards, stripped of valuable components but still containing useful materials. The skeleton of electronics.

Where It Comes From

  • Processed E-Waste (after component extraction)
  • Damaged circuitry too broken for direct reuse
  • Mass-produced consumer electronics
  • Industrial control systems

What It Contains

  • Conductive traces (copper, gold)
  • Substrate materials (fiberglass, ceramic)
  • Residual solder
  • Microscopic patterns of lost purpose
"Every circuit board tells a story. The paths etched into it—those were designed by someone. They thought about how electricity should flow. Made decisions. Now we grind it up for the metal, but somewhere in that board is a record of someone thinking."
"The best scrap comes from ORACLE facilities. Their circuits were optimized differently—more efficient, more complex. Even dead, they're worth more than new boards from the corps."
Gameplay Significance: Circuit Scrap is essential for electronics production. The bridge between raw salvage and functional components.

Power Cells

What It Is

Salvaged batteries and energy storage units. Drained of power but structurally intact. Containers for electricity that once was.

Where It Comes From

  • Vehicles that stopped when ORACLE stopped coordinating traffic
  • Emergency systems that failed silently
  • Consumer electronics (smaller cells, still useful)
  • Industrial backups that kept things running for hours before dying

What It Contains

  • Storage medium (lithium, solid-state, experimental compounds)
  • Housing materials
  • Potential energy (when recharged)
  • Sometimes: residual charge (dangerous)
"The Cascade killed the grid, but these cells held power for a while after. People in the Dregs tell stories about the first night—everything dark except devices still running on battery. Little lights in the darkness, counting down to nothing."
"Old-timers say some Power Cells from ORACLE facilities still hold charge. Not much, but some. The tech was that good. Forty years later and they're not quite dead."
Gameplay Significance: Power Cells are the basis of energy storage systems. Critical for operations that need power buffering.

Rubble

What It Is

Structural debris. Concrete, steel, composite materials from collapsed or demolished buildings. The bones of the old world.

Where It Comes From

  • Buildings that collapsed during the Cascade (infrastructure failure)
  • Structures deliberately demolished (cleared for new construction)
  • Natural decay over forty years of inadequate maintenance
  • Combat damage (corp conflicts, Collective actions)

What It Contains

  • Structural metals (steel, aluminum)
  • Concrete and aggregate
  • Embedded systems (wiring, piping, sometimes still functional)
  • History (every piece was part of something)
"This pile used to be a school. I can tell from the smaller furniture crushed into it. Somewhere in there are lockers with names on them, desks where kids learned things. Now it's just material."
"Rubble from the Cascade is different from newer rubble. You can feel it somehow. It fell all at once, together, part of the same catastrophe. Newer rubble is just buildings that failed alone."
Gameplay Significance: Rubble provides basic construction materials. Low-tech but essential for physical infrastructure.

Coolant

What It Is

Thermal management fluids from industrial and electronic systems. Liquids designed to absorb and transport heat away from sensitive components.

Where It Comes From

  • Abandoned data centers (massive cooling requirements)
  • Industrial facilities with thermal processes
  • Vehicle systems (engines, electronics)
  • Specialized storage (often sealed, preserved)

What It Contains

  • Thermal transfer fluids (various compositions)
  • Corrosion inhibitors
  • Sometimes: contamination from long storage
  • Sometimes: unexpected chemical properties (old ORACLE formulations)
"Good coolant is liquid gold. Data processing generates heat, and without cooling, your systems cook themselves. The old ORACLE coolant is best—they formulated it for decades of operation without replacement."
"I found a sealed tank of industrial coolant last month. Forty years old, still perfect. The containment was ORACLE-grade. Opened it up and it could have been bottled yesterday."
Gameplay Significance: Coolant enables advanced electronics and heavy processing. Critical constraint for scaling computation.

Data Fragments

What It Is

Partial, corrupted, or isolated data from the pre-Cascade information ecosystem. Bits of ORACLE's vast intelligence, scattered like seeds.

Where It Comes From

  • Storage media in abandoned facilities
  • Network nodes that maintained partial records
  • ORACLE facilities (highest density, highest value)
  • Legacy systems that never fully connected to modern networks

What It Contains

  • Information (sometimes coherent, sometimes not)
  • Patterns (the shape of how ORACLE thought)
  • Encryption (often, frustratingly)
  • Connection potential (fragments can link to other fragments)
"Every Fragment is a piece of something larger. ORACLE didn't store information the way we do—everything was connected to everything. When it shattered, the connections broke, but the pieces still reach for each other."
"I've spent years trying to reconstruct a single ORACLE database from Fragments. You find a piece, and it implies other pieces. Follow the implications, and you find more. It's archaeology for data."
Gameplay Significance: Data Fragments are essential for information processing and eventually AI development. The digital equivalent of precious materials.

Trash Code

What It Is

Corrupted, broken, or obsolete software. Code that no longer runs but still contains patterns, algorithms, and occasionally recoverable logic.

Where It Comes From

  • System crashes during the Cascade (incomplete processes frozen in time)
  • Software that can't run on current systems
  • Malware, viruses, and abandoned security measures
  • Failed experiments and dead-end development

What It Contains

  • Algorithms (broken but analyzable)
  • Logic structures (how programmers thought)
  • Security patterns (useful for attack or defense)
  • Sometimes: functional code fragments (hidden value)
"Trash Code is like genetic material from extinct species. It doesn't work anymore, but it shows you how things used to work. Patterns you can adapt. Logic you can rebuild."
"The best Trash Code comes from failed projects. Someone tried something, couldn't make it work, abandoned it. But they got close. You can see where they almost succeeded. Sometimes finishing someone else's work is easier than starting your own."
Gameplay Significance: Trash Code is raw material for software development. Essential for building information systems and AI.

The Emotional Layer

Tier 0 resources are especially poignant—they're the remains of the old world. Collecting them is both scavenging and archaeology. Progress comes from processing what was lost.

The Progression Philosophy

As players advance from Tier 0:

  • Resources become more abstract (from scrap to intelligence)
  • The connection to the physical world loosens
  • Eventually: transcendence renders all resources abstract

Every piece of transcendent tech started as garbage. The journey from E-Waste to godhood begins here, in the ruins of what was lost.