The Lees
The world at the bottom of the murk: the Sounding Lead and the Whirlpool, the Rising Column, weight and air on the bottom, the window of light, biomes, a clean camp, its life, niello and the places of the Lees.
The Lees is the world at the bottom of the murk. You go there for niello — a pure store of Murk — for Lees Shells
with pearls, for the life of the bottom and for the Great Dam. Stagnant flux does not vanish: it settles — through the flux,
like silt through water, all the way down: layer upon layer, all the murk the fluxionists have spilled since the Great Stilling
lies there, and the living mire on it is ground, not blight. Everything is turned around here: murk flows, and the only flux is
your own. The Codex entry is 
The Lees; it waits for you to read a Snarl.
The Sounding Lead and the Whirlpool
The door to the Lees is murky water itself. The Sounding Lead is made at the Flux Workbench:
Throw the lead into water like a snowball. The water will do if:
- it is at least three blocks deep, with a surface of at least 3 × 3 clean water sources and no water above it;
- the murk of the chunk is at least half the riverbed; by a Mire Shrine the water need not be murky: a Whirlpool rises in clean water there too and never fades;
- there is no other Whirlpool in that surface, and the world is neither the Lees nor the Stillness.
If the water will not do, the lead floats back up as an item, and the mod tells you why (for clean water, how much murk there is and how much is needed). If it will, the lead sinks for five seconds, the cord runs down knot by knot, and a Whirlpool rises in the middle of the surface. It cannot be scooped with a bucket or broken. The Whirlpool drinks the murk of its chunk: cleanse the chunk below a third of the riverbed and it fades, and the lead floats back. The lead always comes back — after a refusal, a throw that missed the water or a broken surface.
Diving
Step into the Whirlpool: it spins you and pulls you down. Stay in it for 2 seconds — your view spins faster and faster, murk closes in from the edges, the circle of the surface above shrinks and dims, and the "Down to the Lees" screen sets you on the bottom. Step out early and the count starts over.
- The Lees lies right under the water: the same x and z. Over the Ooze Basins the passage looks for the nearest shore of another biome within 160 blocks.
- On the bottom a Rising Column meets you — a column of pale bubbles. The same Whirlpool always leads to the same Column.
- The passage only touches what is natural and only where you may build: it never cuts into someone's house on the bottom — it sets the Column beside it.
- Every dive costs the Whirlpool two murk of its chunk.
- Your first dive is a reading for the Codex and Deep Dissonance 1 ("the weight of the bottom"; the Stillness gives 3).
Rising
Stand in the Rising Column for 3 seconds: bubbles of light burst up from below, the "Up toward the light" screen, and you come out on the shore by your Whirlpool, facing it — even if it has faded. No shore — onto the surface; no water any more — onto the ground above that spot. A Column remembers its own: it lifts only those who came down through it — you cannot walk along the bottom to someone else's Column and come out in their home.
Rules of the bottom
- The riverbed is 4, the smallest in the world: flux here is whatever you make (a Purifier, a lumenash, a skein). Flux does not flow between the chunks of the Lees.
- Bed murk: every chunk holds its own one and a half riverbeds of murk (6) and pulls back toward it; murk flows from chunk to chunk the way flux does above. A cleansed chunk fills again — from its neighbors and from the bed. The Bright Shallows have no bed murk.
- The mire stands: on untouched bottom it does not grow; there are no Snarls in the Lees — this is the bottom itself.
- Weight 0.6: you jump higher and fall slower and softer.
- You cannot sleep or set a spawn point; there is no weather and no clouds. Days pass as in the Overworld: the window of light dims toward night, but the bottom never goes black — night here is lilac.
- Air above the ooze: over the Ooze Basins, less than five blocks above the surface, the air thins as under water — a full breath lasts 15 seconds. Under a vault the air holds, as in a diving bell: in a cave, a room, an alcove three blocks deep, under a roofed bridge. A Bubbleback's bubbles give you a breath too.
- The Murkflow: every 25–40 minutes a wall of murk sweeps along the bottom near a player — it adds murk to every chunk in its path and silts whoever it engulfs. It passes around the Bright Shallows and the chunk of a working Purifier; snatch things from its crest with a Pike Pole.
The window of light
The Lees has no sky: overhead is the underside of the surface, as seen from the bottom of a pond. In the middle is a window to the sky of the world, a circle with a trembling rim and a bright line along it; toward the rim the sky turns bluer and sinks into the depth, in the middle it is warm light. A fine mesh of glints runs over the surface, and narrow slanting rays fall from the window. The window brightens and dims with the days of the Overworld.
Biomes
| Biome | What is there |
|---|---|
| Silt Flats | dunes of Bedsilt, half-buried things of the world: broken columns, fish ribs, jars, a cauldron, an anchor chain with a weight |
| Mire Thicket | a forest of Mirebound Logs, growths, threads, mire vents |
| Ooze Basins | seas of Mire Ooze; the air thins above them |
| Bright Shallows | a rare clean grove of lumenash with Glowbloom: no bed murk, lucent skeins |
| The Still Bed | rimed silt, cold slate-blue light, frozen plumes of murk and hanging flakes — the Stillness lies just beneath |
The ground of the world is 
Layerstone, the soil is 
Bedsilt: your feet sink a little below its
top. There is no lava. The skeins of the Lees are murky; in the Bright Shallows they are lucent.
A clean camp
A clean camp is a place where you can live and work on the bottom. A single Purifier in the middle of the mire will not cope:
every chunk pulls back toward its bed murk, and the neighbors fill a cleansed one. A camp of 3 × 3 chunks is held together:
three or four 
Purifier with grates, and lumenash trees. Where the murk drops below a third of the riverbed,
the mire recedes into silt and stone, and 
Glowbloom breaks through the revived silt — the glowing grass of the
bottom, the sign of a camp. Glowbloom planted up above does not spread — only on the bottom.
Life of the bottom
The life of the bottom tells you where it is clean and where it is dangerous (the entry 
Life of the Lees):
- Murk Fry swim in shoals through the depth, glow with murk and gather where there is more of it. They scatter from light in your hand and from lanterns, and they leave a clean camp.
- The Silt Ray lies in the Bedsilt: a mound of silt, two warm eyes and the tip of a barb show. Come closer than three blocks (sneaking — one and a half) and it leaps in an arc and stings: Silting and Slowness for a few seconds. On stone it cannot hide.
- The Bubbleback is big and peaceful: it eats Mire Threads and breathes out bubbles — whoever stands in them can breathe even above the basins. It follows Clearwort held in hand. The Sunken hunt Bubblebacks.
- The Silt Delver, a big crayfish of the bottom, plows the silt with its claws and every few minutes turns up a find: a concentrate, a bone, an Antimony Flake, a Lees Shell, now and then Niello or a Flux Pebble, on the Still Bed Still Grains. It never digs the same spot twice — follow it. It never attacks first, but touch it and it pinches.
All of them are in the Bestiary.
What to gather
Niello is murk pressed by the depth into black stone with a violet sheen. Its veins lie in the Layerstone,
larger deeper down; it needs an iron pickaxe. In the Crucible a piece of niello is eight shares of Murk with no grime and no other
currents: a Murk Flask is brewed and a Murk Fumer fed with it without muddying the workshop.- The
Niello Inlay is niello in a speculum setting for the Conduit. The murk of a dry lens, a weak cast and a rough
draw goes into the inlay, not into the chunk — up to sixteen. Rinse a full one: drop the Conduit into a stream for five seconds.
- Bedsilt dropped into running water for five seconds washes into Silt, with a 1 in 16 chance of a current shard per block.
- The
Lees Shell grows a pearl out of murk — only on bare silt where the murk is at least a third of the riverbed.
Take it with silk touch and the pearl stays: a shell with a ripe pearl is the best calm stone for a Confluence altar (+8). - The Ray Barb drops from a ray slain by a player in half the fights. Two barbs and Silt give the Sting
weaving: a hit silts, and a hit on a silted foe silts deeper.
Places
- The Sunken Hamlet — stilt huts of the Sunken around a pool of Mire Ooze, a Mire Idol on a platform, nets of thread. Sodden, a Keener and a Mirebearer guard it; the barrels hold niello, shells and now and then a Sunken Lament.
- The Sunken Barge — a Reckoner measuring barge dug stern-first into the silt of the Silt Flats, listing to one side. Its cabin holds a log and a barrel of Records, its hold the Reckoners' crates and jars.
- The Great Dam closes a channel of ooze from shore to shore. The guardian sleeps on the crest; inside lie galleries, water chambers with sluice puzzles and hidden rooms; the vault under the crest is cast on every side and cannot be dug into. Each chamber pit has two wheels: one lets some spans in, the other lets them out; the gate rises when the water stands at the lit mark, and the lectern of the chamber names the wheels' measures. The dry bed under the dam lies in the thin air of the basin: breathe in the alcoves under its body.
The guardian
Weirkeeper's
Mire
12
8What next
- The Quickstream — the main channel of the flux: races in the air and isles over quickwater.
- Worlds — the Lees and its biomes in the reference.
- Bestiary — the life of the bottom and the Sunken.