Crystal Archives

The Crystal Archives are a vast despository of knowledge located in Nubylon, Azrune. They are housed in a building that colloquially shares its name, although its correct name is the Madescar Library. The Archives' collosal data reading array was destroyed during the calamity of The Collapse, rendering the data unreachable. For decades it sat uselessly until its power was shut down due to scarcity, losing several important backups. Eventually the world situation stabilised and it was only after backup parts were discovered as stolen by scavengers that the severity of the situation was realised. The Archives were compartmentalised for security and redundancy: many essential government files and records were mostly intact. But the great encyclopedia of Azrune's comprehensive world and scientific knowledge was a mess of fragments.

Having lost the immense algorithms and the mechanical devices with which the Archives were encoded, Azrunite scholars have for centuries been piecing together the data by painstaking manual methods. It is an oft-quoted estimate that only ten percent or so of the records have been deciphered to date.