I genned a world today and to my utter amazement, worldgen ended fairly soon. Only a thousand years. Turns out, every sentient being is dead.
I dug into legends--as it was the only gamemode I could start without third party tools--and discovered that after 400 years the humans (of all races) managed to develop
computers. Elves had already been driven to extinction by the dwarves by this point. Some dispute over tanned hides. Anyway, the humans had invented computers. And the internet (looks like the first version was literally tin cans and string).
About 150 years after that, there was an explosion of online entertainment. Massive Multiplayer games.
Another 150 years and they had virtual reality. Another 50 and they had virtual reality games. On their high-speed internet (now running over super-chilled diamond tubes; some artifact creation out of an unnamed dwarf--apparently the only notable thing he did in his life, and was summarily purged from the game's records). By my estimation they have better net speeds than
Japan does today.
Anyway, around 861 years into world gen, some...super-addictive VRMMO hit the consumer public (about 70% of the population--almost 95% human--played some form of online entertainment) and after about 10 years or so, people started to forget to log out. Even to eat.
They started to starve to death inside two weeks. Some were forcably disconnected by family members and suffered massive seizures (100% mortality rate). There was a last-ditch effort to save the few who remained, but by this point society was collapsing, with 70% of the workforce unable or unwilling to stop playing this game. Somehow the unaffected managed to eek out another 15 years before they succumbed to various deaths in the vast ruins of cities slave to the mindless rotting corpses, too spread out to form communities and reproduce.
Here's the weird part.
That only takes the world up to 885-ish. World gen ran for
another 15 years before it registered completion (and I didn't have a forced end-date). I have no idea why. All the megabeasts were dead (year 150 most were dead, the last Roc lasted until 413). All civilizations were marked as destroyed by 880 and all sentients dead by 887.
It took another hour of digging before I figured out what kept the game going.
The massive server warehouses for the VRMMO were still running. They were sealed from the outside and had backup generators for when the power grid collapsed (although they primarily ran on renewable sources of power; infinite watermills, etc. but that only supplied 68% of the power requirements). But eventually those systems broke down or ran out of fuel. Server hardware broke and couldn't be repaired or replaced.
The legends details for this period were remarkably well hidden, as the game logged no events during these 15 years. Except that wasn't entirely true. There was one entry, buried under layers of other entries, regarding this collection of server warehouses. Inside that was THOUSANDS of minor entries. I couldn't see what the servers were doing inside their own programming, but I could see a few details:
- When an individual server went offline (and how it was damaged)
- When other components of the warehouse were damaged (the power structures, transmisison lines, etc.)
- Most importantly, how many users were connected
This is what surprised me. In 879 there were 36,726 connected users. In 884 there were still 27,943 users: more than the number of living sentients! The last entry right before world gen finished read that there were still 4,194 connected users. The last actual entry listed the last power supply (an infinite waterwheel) breaking its axel and the power supply ceasing. There's no mention of disconnects or otherwise terminated sessions.
I gather that this VRMMO digitized the world's populous and they continued to live in the system as e-ghosts until their server crashed, failed, or lost power. There are no death entries for the e-ghosts though. Only that the game considered them important enough to keep running world-gen, but not important enough to track in any other way, they are simply a number. A population size.
I wonder what they thought was going on.
I'm going to attempt to force-spawn an adventurer and fix the warehouse and see if I can log in to the system and find out.