The River Lowlands is a location on the Stranger. It is a low-lying region located near the entrance to the Stranger.
Description[]
Features[]
Sign of the River Lowlands
The River Lowlands is connected to the two ship bays on the exterior of the Stranger. It is the lowest area on the ring world, located directly adjacent to the dam. Its main features are the wooden buildings that line the banks of the river.
The Stranger's dark side ship bay is connected to a wooden building in the River Lowlands with a raft elevator. This elevator drops a raft directly into a sidearm of the main river. This leads to another raft elevator on the far side of the River Lowlands. The airlock on the Stranger's sun-facing ship bay opens up directly next to the dam at the beginning of the River Lowlands.
The artifact workshop
The region itself has three main buildings. There is an artifact workshop, indicated by the symbol for an artifact on its front wall. Most of the workshop is covered in Ghost Matter, but it can be entered through a hole in the building's floor. While it has several useable artifacts, care should be taken to retrieve these, as the interior of the workshop also has pockets of Ghost Matter.
Another main building is the slide reel theater, which contains two slide reels that can be watched. The first reveals the origin of inhabitants of the Stranger, and the second shows how they used seals to lock up the Prisoner.
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The slide reel theater -
Theater interior
The last building in the River Lowlands is the simulation connection building. It has a hidden doorway that goes down into the building. This doorway can be opened by removing the two lanterns from the front of the painting with the ringed planet in the sky. The building's lower room contains a green firepit and the corpses of the Stranger's inhabitants. Dozing off, meditating, or dying while holding an Artifact at the green fire in this room connects the Protagonist to the Shrouded Woodlands area of the simulation.
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The simulation connection building -
The building's entrance room -
The Stranger's inhabitants corpses around the fire
Slide Burning Room[]
The River Lowlands contains a Slide Burning Room that is usually hard to find. A map in the Abandoned Temple shows the location of the room. It is located on the left side of the slide reel theater, built into the cliffside and behind some trees. The room has a slide reel that reveals how to access the Forbidden Archive in the Shrouded Woodlands. It also has a passage that connects to the slide reel theater.
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The location of the room
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Interior of the room
Dam[]
The flooded River Lowlands
The Stranger's sails activate around seven minutes into the loop to move the spacecraft away from the impending supernova. Due to the strain this puts on the Stranger, the dam starts breaking down. 13 minutes into the loop, the dam eventually bursts. Because of its proximity to the dam, the River Lowlands is the first area to be hit by the flood wave. As such, the region gets almost completely flooded.
The extinguished artifacts of the inhabitants
The Stranger's inhabitants that are in the simulation connection building get disconnected from the simulation, as the flames of their artifacts are extinguished by the water. It is also no longer possible to access the simulation in this room. If the Protagonist is connected to the simulation here, they get woken up as the water floods the room.
History[]
Inhabitants entering the simulation connection building
The River Lowlands used to contain mainly residential buildings and the slide reel theater where some of the slide reels were stored as well. When the Stranger's inhabitants started constructing a simulation modeled after their home moon, they crafted artifacts in the workshop in the River Lowlands to access the simulation . They also built a building where they could go to sleep and connect to the simulation.
Slide reels being burned
After the Prisoner was locked up, the Slide Burning Room was used to upload a portion of their slide reels into the simulation. Most of the reels were burned there afterwards, with the exception of a few of them, which only had specific slides burned. The River Lowlands were then abandoned as the Stranger's inhabitants went to sleep in the simulation forever.