A hot sandy desert with a rich supply of buried bones and ancient altars that utilize them.
The biggest industry here has to do with these bones:
Bone mining -- Britbones are buried in powdersand regions (very stormy here). They're mined.
Bonecraft -- Britbones are broken up into a powder and formed in bonemolds to various shapes.
Skelessembly -- Bones are assembled into Skeletons for Reanimation or other forms that are useful elsewhere (like Bonedominiums for buildings).
Necroliths -- Ancient ruins with magic intact that animate skeletons to do various tasks while Sunpowered. They can be enriched with Sunstones directly or call upon them as a modular power source.
Lesser industries:
Ruby Charging -- Rubies are charged with ambient heat. This heat is useful for cooking, heating up colder areas elsewhere, etc. The desert is really the best place to do this -- volcanoes also work but there's less of them and their heat is already heavily utilized.
Cactdye -- Blue-colored cacti dot the desert, are easy to farm, and are the only source of blue pigments. All other pigments are easily farmed elsewhere but blue is very hard to come by otherwise, and it's in high demand particularly by the Skylands aesthetically (because of the blue sky).
Sandmining -- Sand is useful largely as a source of Glass, but has some uses in various types of Construction as well.
Glassmaking -- due to both the ready supply of sand and the ready supply of charged ruby, it makes the most sense for the Glassmaking industry to also exist here. Glass is useful for Lenses (which charge and manipulate Jewels), windows, glassware for fancy folk, mirrors (have both aesthetic and technological use) and particularly Glassballs which are used for Scrying and break easily.
Powdersand -- An almost continuously stormy region with copious amounts of bones buried under shifting and light sand.
Scrubland -- Cacti and some other assorted plants. Less arid than other regions. It is a lot closer to the mountains so it gets some rainfall. Some scattered rocks and boulders.
Dunes -- orange leaning towards reddish brown sand piled up in dunes. Extremely hot and arid. Eventually terminates in The Seam, which in this case is a storm wall.
Powdersand -- Permanent settlements will be constructed from the Skulls and Shells of gigantic creatures. They're a bit more resilient than molded bone structures and more airtight as well. Dragon skull buildings are particularly common because of their magical thermic effects (keep the interiors cooled). Layered ribcages, shells of giant insects, etc. Things like mines will instead be constructed from Bonedominiums, which are molded bones layered together and sealed.
Dunes -- Given the large glass industry, buildings will typically be constructed of glass, painted blue to make them less transparent. Hardness is provided by thick glass walls, or the glass is doped by Aluminum mined from the Delvelands. There will occasionally be some bone structures as well, it's a very common building material out here.
Scrubland -- Buildings are built from stone, largely native sandstone but a lot of cave stone is imported from the nearby Delvelands. Again, some bone structures as well.
Powdersand -- The shells/skulls are quite large and will have multiple areas within them. They're spaced apart a good bit and have tunnels between them constructed of hollowed molded bone cylinders, lit by Sunstones that have to be replaced occasionally. Some more advanced (and commonly used, more populated) tunnels will instead have Sunstones wired up to some complex that rotates the Sunstones out centrally so the individual ones in the tunnels don't need to be replaced.
The surface is almost perpetually being battered by sandstorms, so it's exclusively used for overland transport to the Bonemines and exterior access to various structures.
Sometimes the tunnels are more elaborate and contain more of the actual content of the town.
Dunes -- Pits are dug into the Dunes for more ground stability and thick transparent glass walls keep sand out. Glass and Bone buildings are then layered down here in a grid pattern. Towns might have more than one of these glass rectangles, in which case there will be aluminum-doped glass arches that connect them.
Kyanite towers are arranged at strategic locations and continuously manned -- the goal is to keep the occasional sandstorm from blowing into the town.
Given the lack of space within a rectangle, buildings will expand upwards. Cities can have towers that are quite tall, in which case kyanite towers will angle out from them rather than being purely outside the town walls.
Scrubland -- These towns are open and in addition to their rectangular buildings (with a good bit of space around them), they'll feature desert trees like acacia and wells where possible. Cobbled roads and paths up clifflike areas will connect buildings together, but things are quite haphazard otherwise.
More vital centers of larger towns will be plateaued upon a stone ziggurat with the other buildings satelliting around them. Their stone structures will be more ornate and more likely to be mountain stone rather than sandstone. The ziggurats and wells *definitely* aren't sandstone.
Sapphirium -- All towns in the Desert contain a Sapphirium because water is hard to come by except in some select regions of the Scrublands (they'll have wells instead). A Sapphirium has tubs filled with water and a large sapphire at the bottom that's occasionally powered for refill. Water definitely isn't free but the prices aren't too bad. People will come with buckets or their own sapphires.
Sapphiriums in larger cities will contain Ruby-heated Baths or Pools, sometimes with diluted relaxation potions as well for general relaxation / social interaction. There may also be Ponds with aquatic animals or plants for aesthetic value or local sourcing, though buying fresh ones here is definitely a luxury.
The largest may also offer Bath building services for the wealthy -- even people in other regions where water is plentiful will prefer the expertise of Bath builders in the desert.
Kyanite Tower -- for the areas that need it, Kyanite towers are bone constructions that hold Kyanite crystals and wired to sunstones that push wind energy out in several directions to deflect incoming storms.
