Lore

This page has three layers, on purpose: the settled core (hasn't moved, session after session), the current leaning (where the thinking is actually headed, not landed yet), and the open front (the one piece that's genuinely undecided). Being accurate about which is which is the point of this page.

The settled core

Everything in this world — the ground, ingredients, items, creatures, all of it — boils down to 64 elements, one per I Ching hexagram. Six lines, yin or yang, read as two trigrams stacked: a lower one (the element's inner nature) and an upper one (its face to the world). Learn the 8 trigrams and you can half-guess any of the 64 — enough structure that you're never totally lost, not so much that there's nothing left to discover.

Trigram	Nature
☰ Heaven	creative, strong, active
☷ Earth	receptive, yielding
☲ Fire	radiant, volatile
☵ Water	flowing, deep
☳ Thunder	sudden, initiating
☴ Wind	gentle, penetrating
☱ Lake	open, exchanging
☶ Mountain	still, sealing

Elements combine into items — the things you actually use. I've been calling the combining part a recipe, a formula, a spell, a blueprint, depending on the doc and the day; all four are still live. Roughly: a recipe (or spell, or blueprint — a blueprint's just a recipe's knowledge made tradeable, not permission to use it) is how a thing gets born. A formula is how it keeps living once it exists. Birth, then ongoing behaviour — same two-part shape for a tower, a tree, a dragon, and a player. One rule set for everything.

The items, defined

This part's never actually made it onto the site before, even though it's been worked out in real detail. Two tiers: base items, a small set you find or mine directly, and complex items, built from those by recipe.

Base items (found/mined directly)	Notes
Fire Crystal The Clinging #30 Fire over Fire , Water Crystal The Abysmal #29 Water over Water , Earth Crystal The Receptive #2 Earth over Earth , Wind Crystal The Gentle #57 Wind over Wind	The starting four — each is one of the 8 trigrams, doubled into its own hexagram. Hover or tap a crystal's name for its hexagram.
(up to 8 material "types" total)	Crystals is the confirmed one; Foundation and Decoration are candidates for the rest. Which exact 8 exist is still an open list, not a closed one.

Complex items (built by recipe)	What it does
Clothes / Armour	Worn by a creature; a lower-trigram-Mountain piece leans toward armour rather than plain clothing.
Weapons	—
Life / Creature	Includes the player. Built from a body, a colour/texture, and — critically — a Life ingredient and a Mind ingredient, each of which must be the one specific correct element or nothing happens.
Tower	Shoots at enemies; needs a valid base ingredient (something with Mountain in it) and a Fire-Power Kind determining what it shoots.
Spawn Point	Spawns creatures — a specialised kind of Factory.
Factory	Converts one thing into another; the general case a Spawn Point is a special case of.
Conduit	Channels power or resources from one place to another — e.g. piping a volcano's fire to a distant tower instead of feeding it crystals by hand.
Walls	For building homes; also usable in battle.
Furniture, decorations (e.g. a fountain)	For a fun home, no mechanical role required.
Trees / Gardens	Grown from a Seed, planted on a fertile ground type.
Fruit / Food	Restores health.

A few actual recipes exist already, and they're the clearest way to feel what this is meant to be like:

• Simple Life — an open Body Shape, an open Colour/Texture, plus two keyed slots that must hold one exact, specific ingredient each: Life, and Mind. Get the two keyed ingredients right and the open slots can be anything — which is what turns "creating life" into a 64×64 space of discoverable creatures rather than one fixed recipe.
• Horse — the Simple Life pattern, with the Body Shape slot keyed to one specific ingredient instead of left open.
• Pegasus — the Horse pattern, plus one more slot: Wings. This is the showcase case for the whole design: once you know the Horse pattern, guessing the Pegasus pattern is one small, sensible leap, not a fact you have to be told.
• Seed → Tree — planted on a fertile ground type; the Seed's own type determines what grows.

Underneath all of it: nothing's free. Make something, it costs real ingredients in real amounts. Break something down, you get back roughly what it cost to make. That's conservation of matter — not a slogan, an actual accounting rule I'm holding to. And the world doesn't launch with everything unlocked: you start with a small slice of what's possible, and the rest shows up once somebody actually figures out how to combine things in new ways.

The element table

Newest addition to the settled pile, from two voice notes filed this week: the hexagram is the machinery, the name is the flavour. An element's identity is its six lines — but nobody playing has to read it that way, because every element gets a memorable in-game name. "Eye of Fire Newt" is Wind over Fire. When Rah and I needed a name for Wind over Mountain, she said "leather" — better than anything the structure alone suggested, and better than the AI's attempt ("Weatherstone"). This settles the old worry, still visible in the leaning section below, that 64 abstract element names is too esoteric a leap: the structure stays, the names carry it.

What else the notes settled: each element carries a small bundle of properties, and the slot it's dropped into decides which property fires — the same rare earth-shaping element is a terrain-mover in one slot and a vibrating flashing pink in a colour slot. Every element has a numeric value and a colour, so there are exactly 64 colours in the game. The first ingredient decides what kind of thing you're making — life, terrain, destruction, a tower — which means 64 kinds of spell, one per possible opener. And rarity is a per-element property, the main balancing lever: a volcano recipe is impressive because its key ingredient is genuinely hard to get, by quest or by trade.

Naming all 64 and setting their properties is now its own tracked piece of work — see the element table epic.

Ownership and trade

Also settled, from a design conversation with Rah: no in-game currency. No money, ever. Your inventory is your collection of elements; armour and clothes are a separate wearable track. Anything anyone can make, you can make — nothing is gated behind a vendor, only behind rare ingredients — and the release valve for rarity is a player-to-player barter marketplace: I want this, here's what I'm offering. Everything that comes out of the cauldron lands in one of three places — in the world (a table, a tower), following you (a pet creature), or on you (something worn).

The current leaning: the witch model

The title isn't changing — still Lor: The Ten Thousand Things. What's shifting is the register everything's told in. I used to lean on abstract, physicsy naming here — crystals, elemental axes, hexagram jargon — and it started to feel too esoteric. Too big a leap for someone meeting this cold. So I'm moving toward a witch / folk-magic register instead. Concretely:

• A cauldron, not a crafting menu — the actual object you make things in. There's already a hexagram that reads as "the vessel things transform inside," so turning that into a literal cauldron isn't inventing something new, it's just naming what was already there.
• A spell book instead of a recipe list — same idea, described more warmly.
• Ingredient names like "eye of newt" and "spider's hair," instead of "Fire Crystal" or a hexagram number. Simple reason: they're memorable, and specific beats abstract. Still discoverable too — maybe you get newt-eye from killing newts. Or maybe you have to make a newt first. Haven't decided.
• Broomsticks for flying, floated alongside the cauldron. Maybe a wand too, as a whole separate way to cast. Both still just ideas.

None of this is landed — it's a direction, not a decision. There may be other ways to make spells that don't involve a cauldron at all.

The open front: how ingredients actually combine

This is the one piece that's genuinely open — not because nobody's thought about it, but because two real candidates are both still on the table:

• A spatial pattern — ingredients laid out on a grid, on the ground or a casting bench, checked as a whole once you're done arranging.
• A sequence — ingredients dropped into a cauldron one after another, in order, and the spell resolves once the sequence is right.

How the thinking has evolved

The earliest version had the ground itself as the crafting surface — lay elements out on the terrain, and the pattern is the recipe, the same way a sentence is words in order. Clean idea on paper. The world's floor doubles as your canvas, no separate crafting screen. But it started feeling a little strange in practice. Kneeling down to arrange dirt with abstract material names on it doesn't obviously read as fun. And a periodic table's worth of unfamiliar names, sitting on the ground, is a bigger leap than a new player should have to make in their first five minutes.

The cauldron keeps the same structure — a specific arrangement of ingredients decides what you get, still basically a small programming language underneath — and just moves it onto a warmer surface. A named object with a shape and a story, instead of a grid scratched into the dirt. The depth hasn't changed. What you actually touch has. And both ideas are still fully compatible with the settled core above — this is a question about the *interface* to creation, not what creation actually is.

Genuinely open, not a placeholder: does the ground still matter once there's a cauldron? Is order the only thing that counts, or does position too? Are wands a real alternative or just brainstorming? I'll fix this page once any of that actually lands.

This page grows drill-down entries per element once they're actually named and settled. See the epic board for what's next.