--- number: 10 title: The ground has types — 64 kinds of ground, a river through the Village, and mountains in the Badlands date: 2026-08-17 summary: Every cell of every Area becomes one of the 64 hexagrams — grass, sand, snow, stone, water and lava sunk below the ground, and mountains standing up out of it — visible in the browser and on the phone, with soft edges between neighbouring types. epic: ground-types status: delivered due-with: ground-types/008 artifacts: ["https://lor.kris.ai-task-runner.com/play","https://lor-server.cocreations.com.au/download/land-of-lor-v10.apk","land-of-lor/game/content/areas/","land-of-lor/docs/handoff/ground-types.md"] cta: [object Object] --- Promised 2026-08-17, the day Kris's ground-types spec landed and the epic was planned. Until now the floor of every Area has been one flat green plane. This deliverable is the world getting ground under it: each cell is a hexagram, the lower trigram says what the ground is, the upper one gives it a flavour, and the game draws it. ## Acceptance criteria - The live game (`/play` and the Android build) shows the Village of Lor with grass in several flavours and a river of Water running through the middle, and the Badlands with every one of the eight ground types on show in patches — including a mountain cluster with a taller peak, a volcano, and a pool of lava. - Water and lava sit visibly lower than the ground around them, and a character walking onto them sinks part-way in. - Where two ground types meet, the picture blends from one to the other — no hard block edges, corners included — while each cell is still exactly one type. - Mountains and deep water cannot be walked into; water and lava can (creatures have no nature yet). - Every player's home has its own scatter of grass flavours. - The area map editor, opened from the world editor, paints any Area's ground and saves it as a reviewable file that `load-world` applies — the same three-step path as the world map. ## Delivered 2026-08-17, the same day it was promised — planned in the morning, built and live by night, in eight tasks (`epics/ground-types/`). - **Play it:** — the web build at `b8dbdb1`, on the live server. Start in your home (grass in a scatter of flavours), walk out of the front door into the Village of Lor and cross the river; the Badlands, two doors on, has every ground type in patches, a mountain range with a peak core and a volcano at its centre, a lava pool, a deep-water lake, sand, snow, and stone floors around its doors. - **On the phone:** — the same build, signed. (Older builds now say "update needed": the protocol moved to 4 because a client that can't see a mountain would walk into an invisible wall.) - **The ground itself, as files:** `land-of-lor/game/content/areas/.ground.json` — one hexagram number per cell, a row per line, applied by `load-world` like the world map; written by `npm run paint-ground` and edited in the new **area editor** (*Edit the ground →* in the world editor). - **How it was built and checked:** `land-of-lor/docs/handoff/ground-types.md`, with screenshots beside it (`handoff/ground-types/`). ### Against the acceptance criteria - Village grass flavours + river; Badlands patches with a peak-cored range, a volcano and a lava pool — **yes**, live: `npm run verify-ground` (15/15 against the droplet) reads the ground a real client receives in the Village and, walking through two doors, the Badlands, and finds the river, all eight types and the volcano. - Water and lava sit lower and a character sinks part-way in — **yes**, on the mesh rules (`ground_mesh.gd`, tested) and in the shots (`badlands-wade-textured.png`). - Blends between types, corners included, each cell still one type — **yes**: stage 1 by vertex colours, stage 2 by the four-cell shader; the cells on the wire are single hexagrams. - Mountains and deep water cannot be walked into; water and lava can — **yes**, one shared `is_walkable` on server and client, covered by the director's tests (a step into a mountain is `BLOCKED`, into water lands); the live Badlands carries the impassable cells. - Every player's home has its own scatter — **yes**, live (the verifier's own home; the migration painted 18 Areas on the droplet). - The area editor paints any Area's ground and saves a reviewable file — **yes**, driven end to end in headless Chrome (`handoff/ground-types/area-editor.png`). Not yet seen by a human on a phone: the v10 APK is up, the renderer override is in, the same build passed on the web — but the on-device look and frame time on the Badlands are Kris's to check.