Military Base
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1. Summary
A clandestine research installation named Project Schwarzwald, founded under a secret German–Brazilian agreement in 1938 (D1 built from 1939, operational in 1940) and run jointly by Brazil and the United States from 1942.
- Names in the sources: Project Schwarzwald; Schwarzwald Research Complex, Amazon Rainforest, Brazil; Amazon Underground Facility
- Organisation: See: Factions › Project Schwarzwald
2. History
The full chronology of the facility, from its foundation to the aftermath of 1999, is kept in the timeline, and each level's own history is on its page.
2.1 Cover Story and Memetic Quarantine
The official cover story for the site's catastrophe referred to a radiation-related accident without revealing the facility's true nature. The deeper reality was memetic quarantine: information had begun to spread from affected personnel to anyone who grasped their disclosures. The site was sealed after attempts to recover or enter its deeper parts produced further casualties. Valuable assets and documents remain because retrieval risks propagating the hazard.
2.2 Institutional Quarantine and the Logic of Secrecy
The installation was catastrophically evacuated in 1999. Its lower regions have remained quarantined, inaccessible to ordinary military operations, and widely feared.
The facility's surviving high-value equipment and infrastructure, including its nuclear power systems, are not casually abandoned because they are unimportant. They remain inside precisely because the authorities judged renewed access and recovery to be too dangerous.
3. Function and Contents
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3.1 The True Center of Sensitive Programs
In the fiction, the public-facing Area 51 is a decoy; the Amazon facility is the true center of sensitive experimental programs, though it is not itself called “Area 51.”
3.2 Levels and Research Programmes
Research moved deeper as the complex grew: D1 for aeronautics, chemical and biological weapons and metallurgy (administrative from 1953); D2 for military engineering and aerospace (1949); D3 for chemical, biological and medical research (1954); D4 for artificial intelligence and robotics (1966); D5 for high-containment biology and neuroscience (1978); D6 for the recovered spacecraft, consciousness and memetic engineering (1986); and D7, an unfinished containment city.
The complex has seven levels, D1 at ground level and D2 to D7 below it, plus an explorable surface with auxiliary complexes. D1 to D6 are explorable; D7 never got beyond its first tunnels, and no route reaches it. Greater depth broadly correlates with research sensitivity, abandonment, and danger, but it is not seven linear chapters.
See: Places › Surface
See: Places › D1
See: Places › D2
See: Places › D3
See: Places › D4
See: Places › D5
See: Places › D6
See: Places › D7
3.3 Brazilian UFO Lore
Documents and side discoveries link the facility to fictionalized investigations of Brazilian UFO lore such as the Varginha case and Operation Saucer (Operação Prato). A preserved alleged Varginha entity is intended as an optional or side discovery in a deeper area. These matters are secondary to the central ontological storyline.
3.4 What the Deeper Areas Hold
Deeper areas reveal increasingly deserted laboratories, failed containment, dead personnel, incoherent or religious writing, and evidence of extreme violence and psychological collapse.
Deep sections hold high-risk samples; damaging certain biological containers can expose the character to a lethal fictional pathogen (an optional environmental consequence / easter egg).
4. Architecture and Style
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5. Security and Access
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5.1 Guards by Depth
Brazilian soldiers guard the surface; D3 relies on surveillance and American response troops; robots maintain and patrol from D4 downward.
Soldiers, American troops and robots operate under distinct security rules; creatures left behind by unethical biological experimentation and other programs present different threats.
See: Factions › Brazilian Armed Forces
5.2 Purpose of Surface Security
Surface security exists not only to protect classified assets but also to prevent dangerous material or information from escaping.
5.3 Practical Obstacles
The player is not barred by arbitrary progression flags: locked doors, security codes, damaged systems, environmental constraints, and enemies create practical obstacles. Skilled or daring players may venture into dangerous regions early, even when poorly equipped.
6. Connections
Its areas form an interconnected space accessible through physically meaningful routes.
7. Concept Image
The site layout map of the whole installation is kept with the surface.
See: Places › Surface
8. Open Questions
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