Ardelenia said:

This admittedly long post, written with help from @RubenPieterMark, considers how Lond Daer should be built. First, I shall expound why we believe Lond Daer should barely be a visible ruin, instead appearing as short walls (≤ 2 blocks ie a person) and grassy mounds. TLDR: because of the silt. This excludes any resettlement by the sparse fisherfolk etc. I've included some sources if you’re curious, and also because I'm in a school mindset so I feel the urge to cite things.

Let us start with how long the city has been ruined for. One of our friend Michael Martinez's many well-thought articles asks when Lond Daer was abandoned, and concludes "The city could have been abandoned by 1409 [TA]; or perhaps its last people died out in 1636 [TA]. It does not appear to have existed by 1975 [TA]." Having been founded before "nigh on" 800 SA, some semblance of the city has existed for over 5640 years, and it has been abandoned for at least 1025 years, probably centuries more. I would like to give a bit more of the footnote (written by JRR, not Christopher) from which Eriol drew the last two quotes, and which is also in the linked article, with an additional point of interpretation:

This passage implies that in the last century of the Second Age (Downfall of Númenor ie founding of kingdoms 3319, end of age 3441), Lond Daer was dilapidated and unusable. We can theorize this was in part from the "general destruction of the coasts," as Martinez says, resulting from Númenor sinking. Following that event, the Arnorians seem to have preferred Tharbad over Lond Daer, and it is up to us to guess whether Lond Daer was left empty or repopulated. I'll concede that the cultured and productive Numenoreans could easily have kept the city in good repair for the majority of its inhabited lifespan, but as a now unimportant city, it seems unlikely it could have grown much from its ruined size or significantly rebuilt the ruins. Meaning we have an absolute minimum abandonment of 1025 years, but the relics of its greatness — large stone buildings, sea walls and harbor structures, grand defenses — are 3000 years old.

Look up pictures of 1000 year old ruins, and you will see quite a range: from the tall and detailed towers of Angkor to fragmented and leaning wall sections. Pictures of 3000 year old ruins are more often walls less than a person tall. But we must also remember that these pictures are usually of excavated sites, and must consider in addition to age the climate and position. Lond Daer is at the mouth of a river, as we know, so it is affected by both the river and the ocean. From the latter, we get wind, waves, and storms battering down the buildings, plus erosion from salt air. There could even be corsair raids, though by my earlier reasoning it would not be important enough for this. We have in the past assumed or reasoned that the winds predominantly blow east across the ocean. This, along with the shape of the coast and ground underwater due to Lond Daer's location in an estuary (a river mouth), can also make the storms and tides worse. More significant, however, is the silt washing down the river for the entire 5640 years of the city (and millennia before that). We do know that the Gwathló would flood, and quite recently in 2912 TA “great floods devastate Enedwaith and Minhiriath. Tharbad is ruined and deserted” (LOTR App. B). If these were enough to destroy a city, they must have been pretty bad to an already-abandoned ruin with no one to clean it out afterwards. And we know that even in places with continuous inhabitation, people will let sediment accumulate and just build on top of it. A famous example is the Roman Forum, which is meters below current ground level. Before being excavated, it was used for grazing cows. So rather than focusing on the age, look up pictures of unexcavated ruins and you will see something much closer to my conception of Lond Daer. Some low piles of rubble perhaps marking the rectangle where a building stood, but mostly smooth and grassy mounds.

Spoiler: A few pictures

Excavation comparison (obviously jungle ruin so not quite the same)

This one and the next are from Lixus in Morocco, which is very close to the ocean.

And there is yet more we can deduce from the location of the city. We know it was the timber port of Numenor, and with so much wood going through how could it not have been diverted to build houses for the less wealthy? Especially since, as discussed in Lond Daer Terrain, the surrounding area is low and flat. Stone would not have been simple to quarry — without steep slopes, as far as I can tell, you need a pit quarry, and those are lots of work. Also they flood easily, which I already pointed out was a problem. This means great stone buildings would be expensive, even in the heyday of the city; presumably most of the stone was imported from other Numenorean holdings. After the fall of Numenor I doubt there would be many stone buildings constructed, and those that were would likely cannibalize the stone from ruins (as medieval people so often did). Furthermore, since the surroundings were so thoroughly deforested, there would be a general lack of building materials. So, we can expect ~1500 TA Lond Daer to be full of structures not meant to last, susceptible to rotting and sinking in mud and blowing down and more. Add to this other instances of destruction (@Ivan1pl mentioned at least one fire that swept through the city, and we can perhaps imagine raids by angry remnants of the native population as the city grew weaker) and this city, or really town now, is struggling to survive let alone flourish. To wrap it up and return to the main point, a settlement less strongly built and maintained by humans is more susceptible to nature, and it will disappear even more beneath the soils of the Gwathló.

So far I have employed an aesthetic perspective, but the practical perspective - in short, the time requirements - also demands consideration. Now, I want to be clear, I think the concepts Ivan has been building in freebuild look great. (Or I mean I have some critiques but they aren’t important here or as well at all reasoned out.) However, I ask if they are necessary, if we even need to build the city intact before ruining it. For what would be left of it? Could we not as easily go straight from wool outlines to dirt pile outlines? This leads us to an argument just as important as any historical considerations. Though we have long prided ourselves on fully building then ruining cities, it greatly increases the time and effort needed for such projects. It is questionable whether this process, meant to improve realism and visual appeal, will have any substantial effect or benefit for Lond Daer, when so much of the structures will be unbuilt. Instead we may be wasting a lot of time that could be directed towards the projects that frankly more new players (I shall not speak for old) care about than random ruins: Moria, Mordor, eventually Hobbit locations. These are all far from complete (or begun) in either case, but even so every day spent on Lond Daer will delay them.

Ruben and I welcome and look forward to any counterarguments, but I sincerely hope they will be respectable and have more thought behind them than "because it's what we're used to/traditional" or "because it's cooler/more fun/more interesting/looks nicer to build substantial ruins." Thanks for reading.

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