Post Sundering Tech Level

[Lyth]

We actually don't know what knowledge people retained after the sundering. We do know that Amaurotians had various forms of record keeping that persisted even to the current era, so it's not like their accumulated knowledge suddenly disappeared overnight. It's just a question of how much of it would be practical and relevant for survival following the reduction in their magical abilities. You might have compiled the world's most advanced treatise on aquatic lifeforms, but what you're going to pass on to your children is the practical skillset required for survival, like how to cook food and find shelter using non-magical means. The more esoteric and less survival orientated parts of their knowledge would have faded from conscious memory over generations until it became actually relevant for society to learn them again.

[Enkidoh]

That's a very good point because there is some clues already in the storyline that explains this: before the Sundering the Ancients appeared to actually still have a preference for hand-cooked meals rather than simply using Creation magic to conjure food into existence, which explains why they continued to have agriculture like rearing cattle and harvesting fruit and vegetables (it appears heavy labour in these instances was probably delegated to specialist familiars rather than the Ancients themselves getting their hands dirty, their jobs seemed to be more in the 'intellectual'/creative/white-collar industries pretty much exclusively).

Even things like making tea were still done by hand (given Venat's comment during the meeting scene in Poitken Oikos that "there was plenty of hot water available" for it), and a favourite pasttime seemed to be grabbing fruit like apples from trees, so they clearly did know how to forage and make food for themselves "the primitive way" (a headcanon I have is that ready-made food like meals conjured into existence wholesale by Creation Magic is rather... bland and unappatizing, rather like as if it was made by a robot, because after all subtle differences in say cooking temperature or even the type of utensils use can wildly alter the taste and texture of a meal from one day to the next, or even the skill of the cook, and as a people who prided creativity over all else, no wonder they had this preference. ).

The main difference though is they had no biological necessity for eating other than "if they don't eat they weaken and eventually fall unconscious", but their survival did not depend on it (presumedly this was due to aether absorption - as they had enormous, almost infinite, wellsprings of aether in their bodies, it was probably enough to sustain them without requiring regular absorption from food like the Sundered races do.

But I'm rambling again like Hythlodaeus so I'll stop now. :P

EDIT: another thing I remembered is that there was a section of Elpis dedicated to crossbreeding existing plant and animal species to create new species or with new traits via natural selection/forced evolution rather than Creation Magic (the Cthonic Horns), but they were regarded by mainstream Elpis researchers with mild amusement/indifference at best, or as outright pariahs at worst, but it still shows that the Ancients themselves were not ignorant of doing things in a more 'primitive' way (one of the things they were attempting was creating new fruit varieties with different tastes and textures by grafting and hybridization, with unpredictable results).

[Lyth]

If all our electrical power sources suddenly and permanently went out and across the planet, our technology would significantly change, at least for the immediate future. Some areas of knowledge, like knowing how to build an electrical circuit or conventional computer, would be rendered useless because you'd simply have no way to power them. Your priorities would change as well. And when you think about it, how many people actually have basic survival knowledge for those 'desert island' type scenarios where modern conveniences are suddenly removed?

[Dzian]

I'd thinnk it was a more gradualised decline hoenstly..

If you will, you could think it no different from what you'd see during a zombie apocolypse. at first tech would still work and still be functional and they'd still be electricity and all that cool stuff but over time it'd crumble and fail as no one alive knows how to properly maintain it or keep it running. the knowledge gradually gets lost.

the fact that post sundering humans were a fraction of what they were one might say that it would become easy for all the knowledge to be fragmented and lost.

[Cleretic]

It reasonably has to be a gradual decline, actually. Consider: we know from Anamnesis Anyder that not only did some concept crystals survive, but that sundered people could use them. Those things aren't around on the Source anymore, so they ran out at some point.

...and actually. Knowing that they would've had access to concept crystals (and knowing what kinda stuff was in them) gives some interesting context to the fact the First Astral Era was remembered as an 'age of gods'. Maybe those gods weren't the Ascians; maybe it was the creations they still had access to.

[Enkidoh]

The Age of the Gods was before the First Astral Era though (the First Calamity specifically brought an end to it), so whether that was the same as the immediate 'post-Sundering' time or not, or was a period of time after that again, is unclear. It's all very murky.

[Bad_Luck]

Bearing in mind that most technological advances in-game are generally the result of prior civilizations' discoveries over several thousand years or more...but also regularly occurring cataclysmic events. Meh, I dunno. There was definitely a bit of retention, but there was also a lot of time.

[Dzian]

Bearing in mind that most technological advances in-game are generally the result of prior civilizations' discoveries over several thousand years or more...but also regularly occurring cataclysmic events. Meh, I dunno. There was definitely a bit of retention, but there was also a lot of time.

You could expand on this. post sundering the human life span was reduced greatly.. so that would play a big part in the retention of knowledge... how do you pass down a thousand years of knowledge onto someone whos only going to live 100 years and still leave them time to teach the next person and so on...

time would indeed become a major factor.

there's also bee nvarious plot points where a lot of that information has been retained or preserved but what is lost is the knowledge or means to access it.

[Necrotica]

You could expand on this. post sundering the human life span was reduced greatly.. so that would play a big part in the retention of knowledge... how do you pass down a thousand years of knowledge onto someone whos only going to live 100 years and still leave them time to teach the next person and so on...

time would indeed become a major factor.

there's also bee nvarious plot points where a lot of that information has been retained or preserved but what is lost is the knowledge or means to access it.

Now I really hope their memories were completely wiped. That would be a horrific experience if you actually remembered what it was before. Imagine going from living thousands of years to just 100? The shock of that would knock tons of people into depression and just giving up.

[Lyth]

The typical approach to pass down a thousand years' worth of knowledge down to someone who is only going to live one hundred years is using books.

Also, people can't actually know what it's like to live for a hundred years until they actually get there.