Level 1: habitable warehouse · Underwanderer Archive

Testimony

“After the fall, concrete. And now and then, lying around, whatever fell before you.”

Level 1 is an immense concrete warehouse, with shelves, pallets and loading-dock markings painted on the floor. The light is amber and sparse, like an industrial hall that nobody has ever switched off.

You get here through a pit in Level 0. Everything that falls down those pits ends up here, and the wanderers have noticed that this makes the level the place where lost objects arrive.

Description

The floor is divided into bays 14 m on a side. Walls of light and dark concrete, concrete floor, corrugated sheet-metal ceiling. The bays come in several types:

Bay type	Frequency
Pillars	34 %
Megapillars	16 %
Corridors	14 %
Rooms	14 %
Irregular mosaic	12 %
Other	10 %

Zones are normal 62 % of the time, open 14 %, dense 8 % and in blackout 16 %. The ceiling is around 4.8 m, rises to 6.0 m in the tall rooms and drops to 4.4 m in the low ones. In the corridors it never goes below 3.6 m.

Light and sound

The light is amber and flickers very little, almost not at all. Underneath it sounds a hum of about 100 Hz, lower and broader than the one in Level 0. The fog is warm gray and you barely notice it until you look far. In Level 1 the background noise never drops.

How to recognize it

Tall shelves, pallets, stacked boxes and loading-dock markings. Almost everything you see belongs to someone who isn’t there. If the ceiling vanishes into the dark and the pillars repeat in rows, you are in Level 1.

Entrances and exits

From Level 0: by a pit or by the stairs. If you fall, there is no way back the same way.
Between 1 and 2: there is a link in both directions with Level 2, by pit and by stairs.
Full map of connections: Level ecosystem.

How to survive

Use the shelves so you don’t cross open bays with nothing covering you. In a blackout, the flashlight (Hand-Crank Flashlight) stops being a luxury. Count your steps and mark the corners, because the pillars fool you.

What people say

Word is that Level 1 works like a market of the fallen, with loose boxes and objects that would turn up in the bays nearest a pit, waiting for someone to pick them up or trade them.

Mentioned in

L-001 · LevelsLevel 0: yellow officesEndless offices of damp carpet and humming fluorescents. Every wanderer wakes here, and nobody leaves by the way they came in.L-003 · LevelsLevel 2: service tunnelsNarrow corridors of wet concrete, pipes and machine rooms under a flickering light. The dripping never stops.L-004 · LevelsLevel 4A fourth level that everyone talks about and nobody describes the same way twice. They say you can only enter through doors and that its rooms change on their own.P-023 · PhenomenaPitsOne-meter holes in the carpet, with no railing and no bottom in sight. Falling leads to Level 1, and climbing back is another story.S-024 · SublevelsMismatched WindowThe window to nowhere in five different cuts. An office doesn’t put in windows like this, and it is the first sign that you have crossed.S-009 · SublevelsAbsurd FurnitureAn empty room with a single wrong piece of furniture: a bookcase in the middle of nowhere, a desk without drawers, two chairs back to back.P-009 · PhenomenaHow It All Fits TogetherThree levels joined by pits, stairs and doors to nowhere, and sublevels that have no door and are reached by mistake.O-018 · ObjectsScrap PilesMetal isn't everywhere. It gathers in heaps of six pieces, in corners of warehouses and service areas, and without it you can't put up a single wall.S-017 · SublevelsPit FieldAbout twenty-five small holes in the floor, each with a crude platform at the bottom, and a single walkable path.S-014 · SublevelsLooping CorridorsFour identical stretches close a ring around a block. If you go straight, you end up where you were.