--- number: 14 title: Levels, ramps and mountains — the ground of Lor before the v3 tiles date: 2026-08-19 summary: The Badlands as it stands the day before Claude Design's third tileset goes in — three levels of ground joined by ramps, stone plateaus with cliff faces, a deep lake, a cone range crowned by a volcano, a boulder square, moving water and lava — in ten screenshots and a contact sheet of the twenty-eight painted tiles the game draws today, kept beside deliverables 12 and 13 so the step is visible. epic: ground-look-and-levels status: delivered due-with: null artifacts: ["https://lor.kris.ai-task-runner.com/play","https://lor-server.cocreations.com.au/download/land-of-lor-v15.apk","land-of-lor/game/world/client/ground/","land-of-lor/game/content/areas/the-badlands.ground.json","land-of-lor/docs/handoff/ground-look-and-levels.md"] cta: [object Object] --- 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](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-contact-sheet.png) ## The Badlands ![The Badlands, whole, from the game's own camera angle](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-the-badlands.png) ![The Badlands from straight above](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-the-badlands-from-above.png) ## 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](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-badlands-cone-range.png) ![The volcano up close](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-badlands-volcano-close.png) ## 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](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-badlands-plateau-and-ramps.png) ![The boulder square and the courtyard's eight stone floors, up close](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-badlands-boulders-and-courtyard.png) ## 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](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-badlands-deep-lake.png) ## 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](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-badlands-wading.png) ![The desert, with the snow field beyond](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-badlands-desert.png) ## 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](/images/game/land-of-lor/2026-08-19-levels-showcase-plateau-corner.png) ## 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.