# Lore

This page has three layers: 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).

## The settled core

Everything boils down to 64 elements, one per I Ching hexagram — six lines, yin or yang, read as
two trigrams stacked (lower = inner nature, upper = face to the world). Learn the 8 trigrams,
half-guess any of the 64.

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.
A recipe/spell/blueprint is how a thing gets born; a formula is how it keeps living once it
exists. Same two-part shape for a tower, a tree, a dragon, and a player.

### The items, defined

Base items (found/mined directly): Fire Crystal (hexagram 30, The Clinging), Water Crystal
(hexagram 29, The Abysmal), Earth Crystal (hexagram 2, The Receptive), Wind Crystal (hexagram 57,
The Gentle) — the starting four, each a doubled trigram. Up to 8 material "types" total are
envisioned; Crystals is confirmed, Foundation and Decoration are candidates, the full list is still
open.

Complex items (built by recipe): Clothes/Armour, Weapons, Life/Creature (needs a keyed Life
ingredient and a keyed Mind ingredient, exact and specific, or nothing happens), Tower (needs a
Mountain-bearing base + a Fire-Power Kind), Spawn Point (a specialised Factory), Factory (general
converter), Conduit (channels a resource from a source to elsewhere, e.g. a volcano to a distant
tower), Walls, Furniture/decorations, Trees/Gardens (grown from Seed on fertile ground), Fruit/Food
(restores health).

Drafted recipes: Simple Life (open Body Shape + open Colour/Texture + keyed Life + keyed Mind =
64x64 discoverable creatures), Horse (Simple Life with Body Shape keyed), Pegasus (Horse + a Wings
slot — the showcase guessability case), Seed -> Tree.

Nothing's free: conservation of matter, an actual accounting rule I'm holding to. Not everything is
available at launch; the rest shows up through discovery.

### 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 every element gets
a memorable in-game name ("Eye of Fire Newt" is Wind over Fire; Rah named Wind over Mountain
"leather"). This settles the old "too esoteric" worry: the structure stays, the names carry it.

Also settled: each element carries a small bundle of properties, and the slot it's dropped into
decides which property fires. Every element has a numeric value and a colour (so exactly 64 colours
in the game). The first ingredient decides what kind of thing you're making — 64 kinds of spell,
one per possible opener. Rarity is a per-element property and the main balancing lever.

Naming all 64 and setting their properties is now its own tracked epic: element-table.

### Ownership and trade

No in-game currency — no money, ever. Your inventory is your collection of elements; wearables are
a separate track. Anything anyone can make, you can make — gated by rare ingredients, not vendors —
with a player-to-player barter marketplace as the release valve for rarity. Everything from the
cauldron lands in one of three places: in the world, following you, or worn.

## The current leaning: the witch model

The title stays "Lor: The Ten Thousand Things" — what's shifting is the register. Direction of
travel: a cauldron (possibly itself a base item in the periodic table) instead of a crafting menu;
a spell book instead of a recipe list; ingredient names like "eye of newt" and "spider's hair"
instead of abstract element names; broomsticks and wands floated as related items. 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.

> Kris: "Whats important is that creation and exploration is fun, and that those wizard battles
> are just awesome." — little-witches.md, thought-spec voice note

## 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.

> Kris: "The cauldron or the ground — I genuinely haven't settled how spells get made yet. Two
> real candidates, both on the table." — conversation with Kris, 2026-07-30

A spatial pattern (ingredients laid out on a grid, on the ground or a bench, checked as a whole) or
a sequence (ingredients dropped into a cauldron one after another in order, resolving once the
sequence is right).

### How the thinking has evolved

The earliest version had the ground itself as the crafting surface — lay elements out in a
pattern, the pattern is the recipe. Clean on paper, but it started feeling strange in practice:
arranging dirt with abstract material names on it doesn't obviously read as fun, and a periodic
table of unfamiliar names is a bigger leap than a new player should have to make. The cauldron
keeps the same structure — a specific arrangement of ingredients decides the result — and just
moves it onto a warmer surface. What you actually touch has changed; what creation fundamentally
is hasn't.

Genuinely open: does the ground still matter once there's a cauldron, is order the only thing that
counts or does position too, and are wands/other methods real alternatives or just brainstorming.