The setting’s ontology should be learned through consequences before it is explained as doctrine.
The intended progression is:
- Dungeons contain resources. The familiar fantasy premise is useful and apparently complete.
- Dungeons produce resources. Layout, fauna, and treasure show signs of regulation.
- Dungeons respond to extraction. Repeated methods change later expeditions.
- Dungeons adapt. Responses target function, not merely presence.
- Dungeons communicate. Distant sites share patterns and warnings.
- Dungeons remember. History belongs to the world, not only the player account.
- Dungeons are nested. Local cores participate in regional systems.
- The Deep World is alive. Ecological crisis becomes contact with a distributed mind.
- The world may be a dungeon. Religion, geology, and ecology collapse into one argument.
- Industrial civilization may also be becoming one. The machine is not outside the ontology it discovered.
Mode-specific knowledge
DELVE players encounter the truth bodily: altered routes, targeted creatures, remembered parties, recoverable expedition traces, and moments when a dungeon’s behaviour resembles judgement.
HOLD players encounter it through production: unstable supply, anomalous engine behaviour, contracts that carry ecological provenance, political tooltips, and automation systems beginning to preserve their own continuity.
Neither projection should receive an omniscient lore dump. Different evidence becomes social currency between players. The reference wiki records the setting model for development; the game reveals only what its characters and interfaces can honestly know.