USER: FopperyandWhim

  THREAD: Lore-delvers / Deep Cuts

  FopperyandWhim

  Hey everyone. I’m new to the forum and the whole lore delving thing, and I wanted to check in with you guys. I’ve only recently started digging into the Fracture-verse lore and I’m already starting to get obsessed. I’ve been reading a bunch of the threads here, and I thought I’d try my hand at finding some of the secrets instead of just reading about them secondhand. Lore diving sounds really cool, and I want to get involved in all that madness.

  But there’s something that keeps bugging me and I’m hoping you all can answer it. Why haven’t these games been datamined to death? I mean, they’re old. There’s a modding community. People have been cracking the files and poking around since before most of us were out of high school. And yet I’m told that there are a ton of secrets that haven’t been found yet.

  I don’t know if anyone here is reading that fanfic by Z3ke that’s been getting really popular, but it’s what really drove me to asking this question. Stuff like the House of Seasons that he found in his playthrough feels like the kind of thing that dataminers should’ve found years ago. So, why didn’t they?

  Also, any advice or tips or pointers on where a newbie should start when delving for lore would be appreciated.

  RhubarbRhubarb

  Jesus Christ. Are you actually a little shit, or do you just play one on the forums?

  You really came in here and dropped the most tired take imaginable. Do you know how datamining works? Or is it just something you heard about on a YouTube video and decided to come here and talk about it?

  “Why don’t dataminers find everything?” Fucking tired of that bullshit line.

  FopperyandWhim

  What the hell? What’s with all the hostility? I’m not trying to be smug or anything, I’m asking an honest question. If it’s dumb, just say that instead of being a prick about it.

  BobaFetaCheese

  Hey Foppery, sorry about Rhubarb. Normally he’d catch a temp ban for his dickishness, but the mod who usually keeps Lore-Delvers civil is in finals hell and hasn’t logged on in days.

  Let me answer your question because it’s a fair one and it comes up in a lot of Fracture games.

  The short answer is that Severance Systems is an absolute nightmare developer for dataminers. They are horrible bastards, and most of us love them for it.

  BobaFetaCheese

  The longer answer is, well, longer.

  First, it would help to explain what datamining is and what it isn’t. Datamining isn’t some magic button that you can press and reveal every secret in the game. At its core, it’s best at finding “static” content. That means hidden rooms, unused bosses, cut content, and inaccessible weapons. Datamining is great for all that stuff because it’s static. It lives in the data.

  Let’s say that you’re searching through the game files and you stumble across an item ID’d as ancient.dagger.flaming. A dataminer can search through the assets, pull up the model of the weapon, check the stats, look for scripts or quests that reference it, and then post on the forum “here’s a flaming ancient dagger that’s tied to a quest in this region.”

  That’s the classic workflow for a dataminer. You identify the assets, trace its references, and then infer how it’s obtained. For most games, that works easily. Not so much for the Fracture games.

  When Severance Systems first released a game - Fracture: the Fall - they had a problem with dataminers. Within weeks of the release, lore delvers had stripped the game down to its studs and exposed every secret within. That was a problem for two sets of people: the players who wanted to discover everything organically, and the developers who had worked hard on hiding all these secrets for people to stumble across.

  So, when they started working on Tech Reign, the mad lads at Severance decided to throw down the gauntlet to dataminers.

  First, they encrypted the game files. Now, that alone isn’t enough to stop a serious data miner. The encryption that they used wasn’t unbreakable, it was simply difficult enough to keep the less motivated people away.

  Second, they changed how they structured the logic of the game. Instead of a clean and obvious chain like “do x and that leads to secret quest y” they spread the logic around in the code. If a player did x, that led to a physics modifier tweak here, a world-state check there, and a conditional flag flipping green somewhere else. Once all that was done, then the secret quest y was unlocked.

  Individually, none of those small tweaks looked important to dataminers. They were mostly ignored. But when you put them all together, they mattered to the game. Dataminers could find all the individual pieces in a game, but assembling it together into something meaningful was near impossible.

  Thirdly, they hid some of the secrets in the game behind absurdly low-probability conditions. These conditions required extremely specific inventory combinations or the activation of a rare world event or the unlocking of a skill that most players wouldn’t bother with. A few of the early dataminers actually stumbled across real secrets in the game, but they were dismissed as impossible to unlock organically. Then, months later, a player would stumble across them by accident and brag about it on the forum.

  See, datamining can tell you when an asset exists. But it doesn’t really tell you that to reach x, all three of a, b, and c need to happen in a very specific order over the course of a limited period of time, followed by the failure of d. The assets in Fracture aren’t the secrets that you’re looking for. Instead, all the secrets are hidden in the interaction layer.

  Here’s an example. In Null Protocol there’s a well known serial killer quest where you’re tracking a suspect across the city. You eventually learn that the killer has rented six different hotel rooms and has hidden clues inside the rooms.

  Unfortunately, those rooms are all procedurally generated in the game engine. In your run, they might all be centered around the waterfront district. In mine, they’re scattered between the Barrows and Downtown. Datamining can tell you that the six rooms exist, but they don’t tell you where to find them in any specific playthrough.

  But there’s another layer to the quest that makes the whole thing maddening: the notes. See, the killer hides notes in the hotel room behind a bunch of paintings. But the game doesn’t actually generate those notes until you reach the correct room and progress specific investigation threads. Until then, the notes don’t actually exist as items.

  I know what you’re going to ask. Why can’t you datamine the clues themselves? That’s because Severance Systems added a fourth layer of defenses.

  Each Fracture game runs on its own proprietary engine. They don’t use Unreal or Unity or any of the other big engines. Instead, Severance built custom engines for each of their titles. AND they hard-coded certain secrets directly into the engine logic.

  That means those secrets AREN’T sitting in some neatly organized asset folders. Instead, they’re buried in millions of lines of engine-level code, tied to runtime conditions.

  And then there's the fifth layer of defense they added. Some of the secrets in the game require very specific world states. They need you to take a quest, fail it in a certain way and anger the NPC that gave you the quest which then unlocks a rival NPC, and then follow their questline instead. Even if you know that a secret exists in the game, reproducing those conditions can be brutal.

  That leads us to the final point. Even if you crack the encryption, even if you untangle all the game logic, even if you outsmart the procedural system and dig the relevant code out of the engine, you could still end up like Dukakis.

  FopperyandWhim

  Who’s Dukakis?

  BobaFetaCheese

  DukakisBenson08. Don’t ask me about the username, I don’t get it either.

  Dood was a dataminer and he was pretty well known at the time. He was so well-known and respected that the guy was pretty much above reproach. When Tech Reign launched, he was one of the first people to start digging through the files. He uncovered so many secrets and put them all on the forum, but his biggest contribution to Fracture was his discovery of “the Jailer Dungeon.”

  A few weeks after the release of Tech Reign, Dukakis managed to find a massive block of dialogue in the game. What made the whole thing odd wasn’t just the size of the text, it was that there weren’t any obvious triggers for it. The thing didn’t have any quest flags or region bindings or NPC references. There was nothing tying it to a specific location, character, or event. It just existed. And the dialogue itself was cryptic as hell.

  People latched onto a few specific lines talking about “they lie beneath the ash and are watched over by those who do not watch.” And “it waits behind a door that only opens once it has already been passed through.”

  The dialogue referenced jailers guarding something they couldn’t fully watch over, thieves slipping past the wards, and horrors that were hidden deep beneath everything. It gestured vaguely at half a dozen deep-lore topics that the community cared way too much about.

  To Dukakis, and the rest of the forum, this was a massive discovery. It was the holy grail of Tech Reign. He posted the dialogue onto the forum, along with a theory he came up with. He claimed that the dialogue was probably dealing with a hidden endgame dungeon that was out there waiting for people.

  The forum went feral. Lore threads exploded overnight. People came up with their own theories and cross-referenced them with other quests. They combed the entire map day and night. Entire subthreads spun off, each of them trying to brute-force potential triggers for this hidden dungeon. Before long, it was accepted wisdom on the forums that Tech Reign had a hidden dungeon somewhere in or beneath Kabbasah - the capital city - and this dialogue was the key.

  For months, people tried everything to unlock the hidden dungeon. They beat the game without dying, and in a short time limit. They burned down landmarks. They hauled obscure and useless items halfway across the map. They dragged NPCs into regions they clearly weren’t meant to be in. Every failure to unlock the dungeon was waved off as them missing a step or maybe the quest was bugged or perhaps it was tied to a patch that Severance Systems hadn’t released yet.

  The dialogue became scripture for people. They quoted it like it was prophecy. The whole thing had to mean something.

  Almost a year passed before someone finally triggered the dialogue. The conditions to unlock it were absolutely absurd. A character needed to be carrying a completely mundane item purchased from a unique NPC just outside Kabbasah. They had to fail an unrelated escort quest, then head into a mid-tier dungeon, clear a few rooms, start a fire in one of the rooms, then backtrack to the entrance and wait around just long enough for an NPC pathing error to occur.

  When it all lined up right, a completely random NPC wandered into the dungeon. He didn’t have a name, a unique model, or anything associated with the quest. The guy was just some generic NPC with absolutely no business being there.

  Dood waltzed into the middle of the dungeon, stopped, pulled out a slip of paper from his pocket, and started reading it in a flat, monotone voice. It was the dialogue. All of it. Line after line. There was no cutscene or dramatic delivery or any acknowledgement that this was anything out of the usual.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  This time, the text wasn’t so ominous. Lines of dialogue that people had treated as dire warnings before this, now sounded like commentary and snide observations. It talked about people “Reading too much into scraps,” and “finding patterns where there are only errors,” and complained about “those who believe knowing means understanding.”

  Then came the kicker. After finishing the last line of the datamined dialogue, the NPC paused, looked up, and said something that wasn’t in the extracted text.

  “This is for those who read ahead and miss the moment entirely.”

  After dropping that line the NPC shrugged, folded the paper and put it back in his pocket, muttered a generic ambient line, and then wandered back out of the dungeon like nothing happened.

  That’s when everyone realized what Severance Systems had done. That’s when they realized the lengths they’d gone just to fuck with the dataminers. Severance Systems had written an entire fake secret, buried it in valid data, made it internally consistent, gated it behind a chain of events so pointless and unlikely that no sane player would ever find it on purpose, and then let the dataminers do the rest. It had occupied everyone FOR AN ENTIRE FUCKING YEAR!

  The reveal thread exploded. Within hours, the thread had hundreds of pages of comments. Screenshots were posted, clips were circulated, and DukakisBenson08’s original thread was linked time and time again. People weren’t exactly being cruel to him. Not really. But they were relentless with their mockery.

  Practically every thread on this forum was filled with memes about reading ahead, jokes about NPC interns forced to wander into unfinished dungeons, and fake patch notes that read fixed an issue where dataminers thought this meant something.

  To Dukakis’ credit, he owned it. He updated his original post with a simple admission of “yea, they got me.”

  That moment didn’t kill the datamining community on this thread…but it definitely changed it.

  Severance Systems encrypted their files, they built secrets directly into their game engines, and they hid things through massive interaction chains that are almost impossible to discover by going through the code. But more than that, it was the weaponization of expectations that did the most damage.

  They knew that dataminers would assume unused dialogue meant missing content. They knew the community would build theories faster than they could test them. And they knew that people put an inordinate amount of authority into extracted data. So they made that data real, and the meaning false.

  The real secret that Dukakis found wasn’t a hidden dungeon, it was the realization that having the data at your fingertips didn’t mean that you knew the truth.

  That’s why, to this day, whenever someone shows up bragging about new datamined content, someone inevitably replies with one word: Dukakis. And everyone gets a little more cautious.

  RhubarbRhubarb

  Did that sufficiently answer your stoopid question? Yes? Good. Now kindly fuck off.

  System Message:

  User RhubarbRhubarb has been temporarily suspended

  TeasyPuffs (MOD)

  Rhubarb, you have been warned about your conduct. You are now banned from the forum for 48 hours.

  BobaFetaCheese

  Hey Teasy. Welcome back. How were your finals?

  ***

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Alright everyone. I’m back in The MIZ. I ran some errands, didn’t die walking through the city, and I’m officially ready to get back to work. Let’s get me home.

  My first stop when I got back to the city was the Tock & Spanner. I dropped off the Solaris Vaultstone that we picked up from the basement in the Valley. The moment I gave it to Riley and described it as some kind of mana battery, her eyes went so wide that I was kinda freaked out for a bit. She had those Gollum eyes, scrabbling for her precious.

  She immediately started firing questions at me. How did I know that it was a mana battery? Where did I find it? Was it stable? What did I plan to do with it?

  I couldn’t exactly say that a “bunch of extremely opinionated nerds on a forum told me about it, and they want you to put it in a weapon or instrument for me.” So instead, I panicked and made up a story on the spot.

  I told her a crazy, vague tale about seeing something similar to it in old tech manuals and piecing together rumors from when I was on the road. She narrowed her eyes at me like she knew I was full of shit, but then she looked back down at the stone and I saw her decide that whatever lie I was telling was much less important than the item I’d just plopped down on her workbench.

  Once all the initial excitement wore off, she went kinda quiet and just stared at the thing. I asked her if she thought it would work better as part of an instrument, or if I should be thinking something more along the lines of a weapon. She didn’t answer right away. She just gave me a slow nod and then a huge unsettling grin and said “Leave it with me.”

  I was getting ready to haggle with her about the price. I had a whole routine ready. I was gonna talk about being a poor guy who was new to the city, who’d fallen on rough times. I’d drop in some tragic bits from my life. But she cut me off before I could start. She said that working with material that rare would likely boost one of her skills, and that was worth more than money.

  After that I told her I was headed out to get some armor, but she waved that away and said she had some friends in the neighborhood who could outfit me properly. I’m supposed to swing back to her store in about a week, and apparently I’ll have both a weapon and armor waiting for me. So that’s comforting. I guess.

  With nothing else to do I headed off to the Library of Reclaimed Thought, like Mushroom suggested. I checked out the three books he told me to get and I parked myself in the library and read them.

  It was…rough. Those books are dry as shit. I was at a small table with the books spread out in front of me, taking notes, muttering to myself, and at one point I put my head down on the table and stared into the void like I was back in high school, struggling with homework. The books I had to read are full-on technical, footnote-heavy, joyless academic writing. I don’t understand how all of you enjoy reading those things.

  Anyway…I finished up my research, dragged myself out of the library, and headed off to the Roaring Drake. Both Cole and Patch are here. I grabbed us a corner table in the bar, we got some drinks, I’ve got my Tech Slate out, talk-to-text ready, and I’m about to give my presentation like I was instructed.

  Still don’t understand what this is all about…but whatever. I’m sure Mushroom has a reason for making me do all this.

  UnhelpfullyHelpful

  You just left the stone with a strange woman in The MIZ? Aren’t you from New York? Shouldn’t you know better?

  MushroomCleric

  Zeke. Remember to treat it like a presentation to Cole and Patch.

  StoryLeech

  How did Patch react to your new class? That must have been out of the blue. I mean, I know he sent you off to the Deadlands with Cole, but he probably didn’t expect you to get a Rockstar class.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Story - When I walked into the Roaring Drake, Patch took one look at me and just started laughing. Then he pulled me aside and asked me what the hell had happened out in the Deadlands.

  I told him everything. I talked about the Valley, the echoes, and Corva losing his mind and trying to murder everyone. Patch just shook his head and said he always liked Corva, and that whatever went down must’ve been serious if Corva was willing to burn every bridge he had in The MIZ by trying to kill everyone.

  I get the sense that Patch and Cole had already talked about Corva, and that there’s something going on between them just under the surface. Cole said that he talked to a few people he trust at the academy, and I really wonder how that went down. From everything that Cole had told us all about animancy before Corva tried to body hop, animancy isn’t exactly a well-regarded school of magic.

  I’m wondering if Cole got anyone from the academy to believe his story about what happened. I can just imagine that they’re all gonna shove their heads in the sand and completely ignore what happened, all because it doesn’t fit with their world view.

  Honestly, I don’t really care much what Cole and Patch have planned to deal with Corva. Maybe they’ll spread word about what happened and tell everyone that Corva isn’t to be trusted and try and set up a manhunt for him, but I can’t be bothered to care. Sure, the dude killed me and I’m sure a lot of you are gonna tell me to hunt him down and get revenge for Pell or whatever. But frankly, I’m alive and back at The MIZ and have no interest in dealing with that drifting piece of shit. Wherever he ended up, as long as it’s away from me, I’ll be happy.

  Okay…uh, starting now, this is me recording for all you guys.

  Like I said before, I’m at the Roaring Drake with Cole and Patch. What you’re about to hear is my best attempt at a presentation on what was going on in The MIZ right before the Fracture, and how Helix Industries fits into that mess.

  I’m gonna try and keep this organized and succinct, but I’ve never actually done a presentation before outside of High School, so if this turns into rambling…well, you’ve all been warned.

  Man 2: Oh. Helix Industries? They’re incredibly fascinating. They focused on bio-engineered technology in the pre-Fracture era. What made you decide to do a presentation on them? They’re endlessly interesting. My mentor actually assigned me several texts on their-

  Hold up. One second.

  StoryLeech

  ??

  What was that last bit about?

  10161066

  Uh…well he said he had speech-to-text active. Ha. You think Z3ke wrote in a bit about Cole being there and winding up for one of his three-hour lectures?

  HollowHeartsClub

  Jesus, Z3ke is really committed to the bit.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Sorry about that. Yes. That was Cole. I cut the recording right as he started hitting his stride. Patch was able to get him focused on me and told him to save all the extra info for after the presentation.

  Oh. I didn’t tell Patch or Cole that I’m writing this for a forum filled with people who know about them as NPCs from a video game. I’m just…not gonna touch that. Instead, I said that I was interested in being a professional historian and doing a bunch of research. Now Cole is threatening me with a ton of books that he says I should read if I really want to delve into becoming a historian. So…thanks for that Mushroom.

  Alright. Back to it. Speech-to-text is back on.

  So. The Fracture. Actually…no. This is about The MIZ before the Fracture. So, right before everything was broke, The MIZ was effectively a city-state. The books I read don’t say much about how the Vash Dynasty lost control of the region, or that whole transition between a monarchy to a representative democracy. The whole thing is conspicuously vague. But what is clear is that a new governing body consolidated power in The MIZ decades before the Fracture and then started expanding throughout the region.

  The MIZ exerted massive control over a large chunk of the surrounding territory. Giant swaths of the Deadlands were treated as either buffer zones or straight-up resource pools. They were strip-mined, the resources shipped off, and then abandoned.

  This period was called, imaginatively enough, the Industrial Expansion. And the whole thing lived up to its name.

  Factories in the region went up in these modular block…things. Entire industrial complexes could be assembled, dismantled, and relocated as needed. Factories ran day and night, new energy systems were rolled out and normalized before anyone could figure out their long-term effects. Automation crept into everything from manufacturing to waste logistics to environmental monitoring.

  Man 2: It’s interesting you mention the modular factory blocks. That’s actually where the name MIZ comes from. Originally, the city was-

  Man 3: Cole. Let him finish. Zeke’s trying to do his presentation. You can explain about stuff later.

  Man 2: Right. Right. Sorry. Go on, Zeke.

  Right. Okay. Um…so yea. The MIZ industrialized. And like every industrial revolution in history, it came at a huge cost. The environmental damage around The MIZ was catastrophic.

  Entire ecosystems collapsed in just a few years. Soil lost its ability to sustain plant life. Air quality dropped to the point where unfiltered exposure could kill someone in certain districts. Water systems turned unstable due to industrial runoff and heavy metals all mixing together downstream.

  Everyone knew that this was bad. The government knew, the corporations knew, and the population knew. But by the time anyone was willing to admit how bad it actually was, they were already staring down total ecological collapse.

  Now, here’s where Helix Industries comes in. They were a company contracted by The MIZ government to solve the unsolvable. Their mandate was both desperate and ambitious: reverse the accelerating environmental collapse without shutting down industry.

  Their solution was a bio-engineered project known internally as Experiment 12-B. Supposedly - and take this with a grain of salt because the book I read mostly dealt with second-hand sources - the designers envisioned a self-sustaining, adaptive organism. Or something like that. It was supposed to not only survive in extreme conditions, but thrive in them. Chemical contamination, radiation, thermal extremes, it was supposed to counter all of that.

  Experiment 12-B was designed to metabolize pollutants, rebuild damaged terrain, and continuously repair and expand itself using whatever materials were available. It could use metal, concrete, organic matter, waste, whatever.

  Reading about it was honestly unreal. The fact that people were even attempting something like this was…impressive.

  Anyway, in theory, once the experiment was deployed, the organism would operate indefinitely. It was meant to heal the land faster than industry could poison it. It was sold to The MIZ government as a living counterweight to industrial devastation.

  But there were…problems. The biggest one was in decision-making. No artificial intelligence at the time could handle all the, I don’t know, “thought processes?” that came with the reversal of total environmental collapse. The variables were too complex and chaotic. So, Helix Industries turned to the one organism that could handle that kind of thought process. They turned to humans.

  Fragments of human brain tissue were integrated into Experiment 12-B’s core system to provide pattern recognition, predictive modeling, and adaptive decision making beyond anything that machines could do at the time.

  Official records say that they recruited volunteers. People were told that they were participating in medical research, and they were promised that their families would be compensated, cared for, and protected. Obviously, those promises were a lie.

  As the project continued, the ethical issues grew worse. Helix Industries needed more and more “volunteers” for their project, and they started working directly with The MIZ government. They sourced “volunteers” from political dissidents, prisoners, and people labeled as undesirable. Their bodies were broken down and recycled into the organism to fuel its growth.

  I gotta say, the whole thing was completely fucked up. Thanks, Mushroom, for making me read up on all of that. Frankly, everyone that was involved in that project deserves to burn in hell.

  Anyway, by this point, Experiment 12-B was a massive and expensive undertaking for Helix. They were right on the verge of creating something that could have reversed the poisoning of The MIZ, and possibly even restored parts of the Deadlands and turned it into a lush paradise. But then the Fracture happened.

  Reality broke. Everything collapsed. The MIZ was torn apart. Corporations fled. Labs were sealed or abandoned. Records were destroyed. Personnel vanished. An apocalypse hit the Deadlands and broke the world.

  Helix Industries was just one of the many companies that folded in the chaos. Their facilities beneath the city, in the area that is now called the Under-MIZ, were locked down and left to rot. Experiment 12-B was never deployed.

  Whether the experiment would have worked or not, no one knows. By that point, the entire world was on fire and fixing the environment was pretty far down on the priority list.

  And that’s it. That’s everything I got. Now why Mushroom…oh holy shit.

  Okay. Just turned off the text-to-speech. I gotta say, Mushroom…you’re a genius. Once I finished delivering my speech to Cole and Patch, a notification popped up in my vision.

  History - Rank 1

  I just asked Cole about it, because it’s obvious that he has the skill. From what he explained, History is something like a passive knowledge skill. It doesn’t dump encyclopedic lore straight into my brain. At least…not at the early levels. It’s more that I get better context when I’m looking at old ruins and tech and records. Patterns supposedly stand out more and, when something is important, my brain sort of nudges me instead of letting it blur into background noise.

  MushroomCleric

  Called it. I was pretty sure that would work. The way that you’ve been poking into old ruins and whatnot, it all lined up perfectly with a History unlock. I figured as long as someone guided you to it, you’d make sure your OC would unlock it.

  It’s a good skill for this fic. There’s like, twenty people here who’ve been praying that this turned into an Indiana Jones style Deadlands archaeology arc, and given your history of searching through…history (kind of trapped myself in that sentence structure) I figured it would be a good way to get people emotionally invested in the story.

  You’re welcome.

  CrushDaddyXx (PRIMARY)

  Okay Zeke. Now that you’ve got all the boring lore-dumps out of the way, it’s time to tell you exactly what comes next for your character.

  You talked about Helix going under before they could unleash their experiment. But that’s where you’re wrong. IT’S STILL DOWN THERE!!!!

  It’s not called Experiment 12-B. Everyone who’s played Frontiers knows that it’s now called the Reclaimer. And for your next arc, you’re going to hunt it and you’re going to kill it.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Yeaaaaaa…go fuck yourself.

  System Message

  User Z3ke has been temporarily suspended.

  GravemindLegacy (MOD)

  Z3ke, you’ve been warned about your behavior before. You are now banned from the forum for 48 hours.

  StoryLeech

  HAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

  InnerMarrow

  ROFL

  SoftLocked

  Dood got banned from his own thread.