City Descriptions (DARKLAND.DSC)

Long text descriptions of all 92 cities, displayed on the city approach screen. Order matches DARKLAND.CTY.

Extension: DARKLAND.DSC
Location: Game root
Byte order: Little-endian (16-bit)
Size: 7,361 B — 1-byte (incorrect) count + 92 × 80-byte null-padded strings
Compression: None
Magic: None — header byte = 0x5E (94), but actual count is 92; game ignores the header
Status: Partial
Source: Wendigo — darkland.dsc.xml

Partial. The stored header count (0x5E = 94) does not match the actual number of city descriptions (92). The game appears to ignore this byte and always reads 92 entries. Do not use the header byte as a record count.

Canonical source: darkland.dsc.xml (Wendigo’s Darklands repo)

File Layout

Offset 0x00:  byte         num_cities = 0x5E (94)  — NOTE: stored value is wrong, see below
Offset 0x01:  string[92]   city_descriptions        — fixed 80 bytes each

Stored count anomaly: The header byte contains 0x5E (94) but the actual number of described cities is 0x5C (92), matching DARKLAND.CTY. The game appears to ignore the header value and always reads 92 descriptions.

Description entries

Each entry is a fixed 80-byte null-padded string. Entries are sequential with no per-entry length field or offset table.

City order here matches the order in DARKLAND.CTY. The full name from DARKLAND.CTY is the best unique identifier when cross-referencing the two files.

Confidence

Medium-high. Documented in darkland.dsc.xml. The stored-count anomaly is confirmed by the source community notes.