Lost in sandbox or simply didnt spawn?

[Yeto]

Playinig in sandbox and i drained the pump, but i havent found neither the crystal descent or the belegost forge or its gate. Im starting to get frustrated. Ive explored every crook and crany, and ive only been stopped by blocked passages without the right pickaxe and high level areas(yellow and orange, also another purple area in the high floors with shadow orcs)
Is the failling to spawn areas or access to them a common ocurrence?

[Chaoslink]

To my knowledge, not all of those areas exist in sandbox mode. The means of progression is different in sandbox. Its all about elevation based on the massive staircase rooms far as I understood it. You can get to higher tier areas without passing through the usual spots you’d need to find in campaign mode.

[Yeto]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

To my knowledge, not all of those areas exist in sandbox mode. The means of progression is different in sandbox. Its all about elevation based on the massive staircase rooms far as I understood it. You can get to higher tier areas without passing through the usual spots you’d need to find in campaign mode.

Well then sucks hard all the hours i spent on sandbox, currently going as fast as possible on campaign so i can get the right tools to continue

[Chaoslink]

Yeah, in sandbox, my friend and I had just cleared elven areas and just gotten steel tools before we wandered a bit and found the bridge of khazad dum and ironwood furniture everywhere. You don’t have to pass through the usual story areas in sandbox.

[TimeWinder]

I'm pretty sure they _do_ have to spawn, because each forge gives you the recipe for ingots of its type (even in Sandbox). I'm in the same situation -- I've drained the flooded forge, but cannot actually find it after almost a week of looking. Without Belegost, you don't get Shaenor ingots, and therefore cannot build any pickaxe that can mine adamant, needed for basically every armor or weapon past tier 3 (and for that matter the Khazak forge that can make them). I could tecnically make durin and Nogrod steel now (I've found those forges), except that they all require materials that I cannot mine (and the QuarryMaster recipe never unlocked for me), so I'm effectively blocked by a single recipe (Shaenor ingots).

That said, note that the map is actively deceptive -- it only shows "exits" in a direction if you're at roughly the right depth for them when you're in a tile. And each of the eight "levels" is very three-dimensional and "tall." In my seed, for example, the necessary exit for the During forge was about 1/3 of the way down one of the descents, hidden in a short passage with a corner in it, above head height. The map didn't show the exit there until I was almost standing next to it. Similarly, those minable "pits" in some of the elven areas lead to underground areas, as well as (although I've never actually found anything off them in my seed).

Other recipies seem tied to the hearth level -- many more so than in the campaign game.

TL;DR -- The Belegost forge is almost certainly present, probably in either the second or third deeps, but the paths to it may not be on the map, and if your map looks "complete" (no marked exits), that doesn't mean it actually is. Try anything that has significant verticality (descents, stairs, mining pits, some of the more complex rooms), and look for "off height" exits in hidden places.