Deliverable #19 · 2026-07-18
The Periodic Table of 64 — every element read off its six lines
Interactive. Filter the sixty-four by face (the upper trigram) and by body (the lower). Backdated: added to the log on 2026-09-13 for a thing made on 2026-07-18. The original is docs/historic/lor-periodic-table.html; what is embedded is a verbatim copy.
What it was
The first time all sixty-four were laid out and looked at together. The rule of the page is in its first line: nothing here is hand-set. The upper trigram is the face — how an element meets the world, what it radiates, absorbs, seals or conducts — and the lower trigram is the body — what it stores and how it holds together. The names, descriptions and uses were written as interpretive readings of that structure, and two experimental stats were computed from it: permeability, read off the face, and reactivity, a count of the strained lines from zero (Balance-stone, 63) to six (Volatile Flux, 64).
What carried through
The table itself. Today’s game is built on a sixty-four-row element table — a name, a colour, a description and a use for every hexagram, keyed by its King Wen number, authored in the card editor and compiled into the game — and that table is this page’s descendant. The lower trigram as the body became the lower trigram as the ground: every hexagram is also a kind of ground a cell can be made of, and the lower trigram decides whether it is flat, liquid or mountain. Balance-stone and Volatile Flux still sit at the two ends of the list.
What did not
The computed stats. Permeability and reactivity depended on the field physics that was set aside a day later, so the table the game uses carries authored properties instead. The descriptions were the part worth keeping, and most of them were.
Sources & artifacts
Also available as raw markdown.