Deliverable #14 · 2026-08-19

Levels, ramps and mountains — the ground of Lor before the v3 tiles

epic: ground-look-and-levels delivered

Deliverable 12 kept the placeholders; 13 the first painted tiles, sixty-four of them, on flat ground. This is the day after that: the ground has levels now (deep, ground, high — a full cell each), ramps between them whose direction the engine works out from the neighbours, cliff faces under every raised edge, and things that stand on it — cones that stack toward the middle of a range, a volcano to crown one, a rounded boulder. Water and lava move. The ground is drawn unshaded, so a tile is seen at the brightness it was painted. Every tile in these pictures is from the second painted set (28 pointed hexagrams; the other 36 draw a flat colour on purpose, because their meaning is not decided yet), and the next thing that happens is Claude Design’s v3 set — 27 files, one colour per family, no motifs — from the brief written yesterday (land-of-lor/docs/design/briefs/GROUND_TILES_BRIEF_v3.md). So this page is the “before” for that, the same way 12 was for 13. Web build e34e8ba on /play; APK v15.

The Badlands was re-sculpted for this — Kris said nothing there was sacred — so it now shows every one of the new meanings in one place: two stone plateaus with three ramps up, the lake as the deep level with two ramps down set in notches, a five-by-five boulder square, an eleven-by-nine cone range of one flavour with the volcano at its centre, and the desert, snow field, lava pool, pond and stream from before.

The tiles the game draws today

Columns are the ground type, rows the flavour — the atlas’s own layout, the same as deliverable 13’s sheet. Twenty-eight cells carry a painted tile; the rest are the flat colour the engine draws for a hexagram whose meaning is undecided, labelled as such. The meanings that are decided are written under each cell (level, ramp, cone/volcano/boulder).

The atlas as drawn on 19 August 2026 — 28 painted tiles, 36 flat colours

The Badlands

The Badlands, whole, from the game's own camera angle

The Badlands from straight above

The cone range and the volcano

Eleven by nine cells of one mountain flavour, so each ring stacks a step taller than the one outside it; the volcano at the centre crowns it. Impassable, open grass all round.

The cone range from the south, the pond and stream to its left, the lake behind

Plateaus, ramps and the boulder square

The big stone plateau (raised a full cell, its cliff face painted as the earth under the edge with a shadow band under the lip) with a ramp on its west side and one on its south; the five-by-five field of boulders beside the courtyard’s stone floors.

The big plateau, its south ramp, and the boulder square

The boulder square and the courtyard's eight stone floors, up close

The deep lake

The lake is the deep level — a cell down, wadeable, reached only over its two ramps (one on the south shore, one on the west), each set in a notch of deep water. The small plateau with its east ramp is in front of it.

The lake a level down, the small plateau in front

Water and sand

Two bodies at the pond, one wading; the water sits a quarter cell down and moves — the tile drifts and shimmers, foam breaks at the waterline. The desert sits an eighth of a cell down, in its three flavours (sand, dirt, red dirt), with two lone cones in it.

Wading in the pond

The desert, with the snow field beyond

The showcase, for the cliff face

The engine’s built-in test area, its plateau corner: this is the shot the cliff-face and ramp work is judged from at the game’s own distance.

A plateau corner in the showcase area — the ramp and the cliff face

What the pictures already say

The plateaus, ramps and cliff faces read; the lake reads as down from the game’s angle once its rim is seen. Whether the levels are the right height was settled by the occlusion shot in the handoff (a body behind a raised cell on the camera side) — a full cell, not half.
The cone range is the one thing that only reads up close: from the whole-Area camera it is a grey square. That is the camera, not the cones; in play the camera is the close one.
The tiles still repeat visibly on grass and sand at this distance, as 13 noted, and the painted set is the second pass (v1 was painted dark for a lit ground that no longer exists; v2 at seen brightness). The v3 brief asks for one colour per family and no motifs — these pictures are what that gets compared against.
The pictures come from the game’s screenshot harness (LOR_SHOTS_ONLY=ground with the Badlands’ ground file, and a new LOR_SHOTS_LOOK for the close-ups), not from a phone — same renderer, same tiles, no live server in the frame.

Sources & artifacts

← related epic: ground-look-and-levels

Also available as raw markdown.