Quarantine

Ruin

An abandoned town where yellow blooms grow from the dead. Keep your distance, or cover your face.

At a glance

Kind of world	Ruin
Native Serum stand-in	None: bring spare Serum
Quests	None

Screenshot comingquarantine-square

The town square at endless sunset in a yellow-green haze: boarded windows, doors marked with red crosses, pale yellow blooms in the street, a plague doctor in a beaked mask in the distance

What happens when you arrive

The Box sets you down in the square of a town that shut its doors on itself. It is sunset, and it stays sunset, under a close yellow-green haze that hides everything past about 50 blocks. Every window is boarded, every door is marked with a red cross, the streets are barricaded, and the dead lie where they fell with pale yellow blooms growing out of them. A bell tolls once somewhere. Keep two steps away from every bloom, or cover your face.

The rule: the plague

Source	How you catch it	How to deal with it
Plague Blooms	Within 2 blocks of one, you take 1 damage every 2 seconds and catch the plague. Standing there keeps it fresh.	Wear a Filter Mask (worn or held) and the blooms do nothing. Otherwise, walk around them.
The afflicted	Their touch gives you the plague.	Keep them at sword's length, or cure them (below).
Plague Rats	Each bite has about a 1 in 3 chance to give you the plague.	They come in packs. Run, or fight with your back to a wall.

The plague lasts 5 minutes unless cured. While it lasts you lose two hearts of maximum health, you walk slower, and you cough, loud enough for the doctors to hear. A bar on screen shows whether you are Healthy, Infected or Inoculated, and how long is left.

Screenshot comingquarantine-bloom

Close-up of a pale yellow plague bloom growing from a body in a cobblestone street, faint glow, haze behind

The cure

The cure is made from the town itself: a bloom, a sprig of wormwood, and an empty syringe.

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Plague Cure (Shapeless: any arrangement)

GBINCI

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Empty Syringe (Shapeless: any arrangement)

Hold use with the Plague Cure (like the Injector). It ends the plague, gives your hearts back (empty, to be healed), and leaves you Inoculated for 2 minutes: the plague can't take you again while it lasts. The empty syringe comes back. A healthy traveler can take it too, to walk into the town already protected.

Ingredient	Where to find it
Plague Bloom	Everywhere: in the streets, on the grass, where any of the afflicted falls. About 1 afflicted in 4 drops one. Break it by hand (mind the sickness).
Wormwood	A silvery herb, the one healthy thing still growing here: gardens and window boxes. Plague doctors drop 1 or 2.
Empty Syringe	House chests, the apothecaries' chests (always), and about 1 doctor in 3. Or craft one.

Who walks the town

No vanilla monster and no villager ever walks here. Every few seconds, somewhere out in the haze, one of these steps out near you:

Who	What they do
Plague Doctor	A tall figure in a black waxed coat, wide hat and white beaked mask. Leaves the healthy alone (right-click for advice) and hunts the afflicted with a bone saw, amputation knife or bone mallet, throwing Herb Bags that slow and poison. But the moment you carry the plague, he comes for you, and gives up only once you are cured. Hit one while healthy and he hits back.
Afflicted	The town's sick, still on their feet, blooms growing out of their backs. They shuffle after the living. Where one dies, a plague bloom bursts out of the ground.
Overgrown Afflicted	About 1 in 5. Slower and far tougher. Every 3 seconds it sheds spores that give the plague to anyone within 2.5 blocks without a mask. Where it falls, blooms take the ground around it.
Crawling Afflicted	About 1 in 6. Legless, dragging itself low enough to come at you from under a table, and lunging from a few blocks away. Frail.
Amalgam	About 1 in 12. Three of the afflicted grown together: four arms, three heads. Slow, very hard to bring down, and hits like a cart. Killed, two crawlers drag themselves out of it.
Plague Rat	Small, quick, never alone.

Screenshot comingquarantine-doctor

A plague doctor in beaked mask swinging a bone saw at an Overgrown Afflicted in a barricaded street

Killing makes it worse

Every afflicted you kill in the street leaves a new bloom where it fell. Fight them where you won't need to walk later.

Curing the afflicted

The Cure Dart Gun is a brass air gun with a barrel wide enough to take a whole Plague Cure. Right-click fires one of your cures (off hand first) like an arrow. A dart into one of the afflicted cures them on the spot: the bloom withers and a Recovered Townsperson stands up, three of them from an Amalgam, and no bloom grows. A dart into an infected friend cures and inoculates them. Pick the dart back up as an Empty Syringe to refill it.

IIIICILOPOP

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Cure Dart Gun (Crafting Table)

Cured townsfolk thank you aloud, keep away from the afflicted (who still hunt them), and about 1 in 3 press a small gift on you: wormwood, bread, gold nuggets, a clean syringe, herb bags, now and then an emerald or a Doctor's Tonic.

What to bring home

Find	Where	Why it's worth it
Filter Mask	About 1 house chest in 3.	The key to the whole town. It works in The Ashlands too.
Plague Cure	Craft it.	Carry two.
Herb Bag	Doctors drop up to 2; craft 2 from two Wormwood and a Leather.	Thrown like a snowball, it bursts into a slowing, poisoning cloud.
Doctor's Tonic	About 1 doctor in 3.	Heals at once, and a little more over time.
Cure Dart Gun	Craft it.	Cures from range.
Town blocks	The houses.	Plague Cross Planks, Boarded Windows and Quicklime.

L

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Herb Bag (Shapeless: any arrangement)

House chests hold a little bread, often bones, sometimes a syringe or dried wormwood, and about one in three a Filter Mask. The apothecaries' chests always hold syringes and wormwood, with glass bottles and paper, and now and then a finished cure nobody got to use.

Serum and getting home

• The arrival Box's cache holds 2 Serum Ampoules.
• Nothing here stands in for a Serum ingredient. The cache is your way home.
• Nothing ever spawns in the town square around the Box, so it is a safe place to catch your breath.

Tips

• Bring a Filter Mask (craft one from Leather, Hush Glass and a Phase Salt Crystal) and the blooms stop mattering.
• No mask? Head for an apothecary first, and make a cure before you need one.
• Being infected turns every doctor in the town against you. Cure yourself quickly, and they lose interest.
• Shoot Overgrown Afflicted and Amalgams from range, and cure them with darts rather than killing them: no new blooms.
• The haze is thick. Listen for coughs, squeaks and the bell.

Birds

Birds you can photograph for your bird log here. Open one to turn it round, watch it move and hear its call.

• Doctor Bird: rare, dangerous
• Wormwood Finch: common

Everything this world adds

20 blocks and items (click to open)

Wormwood

Plague Cross Planks

Boarded Window

Quicklime

Plague Bloom

Empty Syringe

Plague Cure

PDPlague Doctor Spawn Egg

ASAfflicted Spawn Egg

PRPlague Rat Spawn Egg

Cure Dart Gun

Bone Saw

Amputation Knife

Bone Mallet

Herb Bag

Doctor's Tonic

OAOvergrown Afflicted Spawn Egg

CACrawling Afflicted Spawn Egg

ASAmalgam Spawn Egg

RTRecovered Townsperson Spawn Egg

The traveler's tape

Every arrival Box has a chest by its door holding a cassette: the last traveler reading their journal of this world aloud. This is what they say. It gives a lot away.

Read the journal (spoilers)

The weathered Box set me down in the square of a town that shut its doors on itself: every window boarded, every door marked with a red cross, and nobody left to ask why. The yellow blooms grow out of the dead, and two steps from one is close enough to catch the sickness; a filter mask over your face keeps the rot out of your lungs. Not everything here is dead. The afflicted still shuffle through the streets with blooms growing out of their backs, and rats run in the walls, and a touch from one or a bite from the other gives it to you all the same. Once it takes you, you feel it: your heart weakens, your legs drag, and it is a long while before it lets go. The doctors in their beaked masks walk the town still. They leave you be while you are clean, but the moment you carry the plague they see it, and they come for you. The cure is in the town itself: a bloom, a sprig of the wormwood the gardens still grow, and one of the syringes the apothecaries kept. Inject it, and you are clean for a while. When you have what you came for, go back to the Box in the square with the Serum still in you and shut the door behind you.