Deliverable #1 · 2026-07-29

The base elements of the game

Update, 2026-08-06: thinking has since moved on from the fields/axes framing this entry describes — see the codex for the current three-layer picture (what’s settled, what’s leaning toward a witch/cauldron register, and what’s still genuinely open). Left unedited below as an accurate record of what this deliverable said at the time.

Every object-oriented crafting game needs a periodic table. Ours is 3,000 years old.

One substance, everywhere

The foundational idea in Lor is that there is exactly one kind of stuff in the world: 64 elements, one for each hexagram of the I Ching. Not 64 kinds of stuff with different rules — 64 values of the same underlying thing. The ground you walk on, the sword in your hand, and the dragon trying to eat you are all, at bottom, made of the same 64 substances, arranged differently.

That single decision cascades into almost everything else about how the game works.

Trigrams: the alphabet underneath the elements

Each hexagram is six lines — really, two trigrams stacked, an upper and a lower. There are only 8 trigrams, and they come in four naturally opposing pairs:

Pair	Pole	Pole
Radiance	Earth ☷ — draws in	Heaven ☰ — pushes out
Temper	Water ☵ — placid, stabilises	Fire ☲ — volatile, transforms
Tempo	Wind ☴ — seeps, permeates	Thunder ☳ — pulses, bursts
Boundary	Mountain ☶ — seals, holds	Lake ☱ — exchanges, conducts

This is the whole point of building on the I Ching rather than an arbitrary made-up list: learn 8 trigrams and you can half-guess any of the 64 elements before you’ve touched it. A hexagram’s lower trigram is its body — what it’s like on the inside, how it stores and coheres. Its upper trigram is its interface — what it radiates, conducts, or seals against the world. Fire-over-Mountain (a sealed shell around something volatile — think a pressure vessel that cracks open violently) is a completely different substance from Mountain-over-Fire (a hot, radiating face on inert stone — think lava rock, a natural heater), even though they’re built from the same two trigrams. Order is meaning.

Why opposites, not power levels

The four trigram pairs aren’t decoration — they’re a hard design rule: nothing in Lor is ever just “better,” only different. There’s no integer power stat anywhere in the base design. Every property is a position on one of those four spectrums, and moving toward one pole always means moving away from its opposite. A player who min-maxes for maximum Heat necessarily gives up whatever Water-pole properties would have offered instead. This is what keeps the game from collapsing into a single “best” combination of ingredients — the same reason a chess piece being good at one thing means giving something else up.

These four axes are also fields — shared, spreading, cancelling values laid across the whole world, independent of what’s sitting in any one grid cell. A fire crystal doesn’t just have heat, it raises the Heat field for the area around it; a water crystal lowers the same shared number. Two players building near each other on opposite sides of an axis are, whether they intend to or not, fighting over the same physical number. It’s the mechanism that turns “shared world” into “shared consequences” without any explicit PvP system bolted on.

Elements change

The I Ching is literally The Book of Changes, and that’s not just a name we borrowed — it’s physics. Under sustained pressure from a field (say, a lot of built-up Heat), an element’s lines can “age” and eventually flip, and when a line flips, the matter becomes a different element. Every one of the 64 hexagrams sits one line-flip away from six neighbours, so the whole set forms a connected graph — a map of everything one thing can slowly turn into. That graph is the discovery mechanism: players don’t find new elements in loot chests, they grow them, by holding known matter in the right conditions until it turns into something new. The frontier between a fire-heavy area and a water-heavy one — where the shared field value crosses zero — is where this transmutation happens fastest. Contested land is where new things get made.

What ships day one

Not all 64 elements are unlocked at launch — a working estimate in the design docs is around 20%, with the rest sitting in that transmutation graph waiting to be reached through ordinary play. The very first four are, appropriately, the plainest possible expression of the system: Fire, Water, Earth, and Wind Crystals — four of the eight trigrams, doubled into their own hexagram, handed to every player as a starting kit.

Why this matters more than it sounds

It would have been much easier to invent 64 arbitrary materials with hand-picked stats. The reason we didn’t: an arbitrary list has to be memorised item by item, forever, and every new item added later has no relationship to the ones before it. A system built on 8 trigrams read through two roles is learnable once and then predictive forever — new content doesn’t need new rules, only new combinations of the same eight ideas. That’s the actual bet this whole design is making, and it’s the thing every other system in the game — recipes, creatures, towers, the marketplace — ultimately sits on top of.

Fuller technical detail — the field mechanics, the budget rule that keeps player-made items from breaking the “nothing’s better, only different” rule, and the first four elements we derived by hand to stress-test all of this — lived in the game repo’s design docs at the time. See the codex for where this thinking stands now.

Sources & artifacts

• land-of-lor/docs/README.md
• land-of-lor/docs/GAME_ITEMS.md

← related epic: spell-crafting-interface

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